Paulo Fylippe Sell Shows How Easy It Is to Build a Custom Raspberry Pi OS with Buildroot
If you're getting a little bored with Raspberry Pi OS, why not try rolling your own Linux image instead?
Paulo Fylippe Sell has penned a guide to building your own operating system image for the Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer — not using the company's recently-released customization tool, but creating something from scratch using Buildroot.
"Earlier this year, I got my hands on a Raspberry Pi 5 with the goal of expanding my knowledge of embedded systems, device drivers, the Linux kernel, and related technologies," Sell explains. "My objective is to explore several features of the Raspberry Pi 5, systematically enabling and configuring its functionalities until I achieve a fully functional image capable of managing all the board's main peripherals. Since I was already working on a project that uses Buildroot to generate a Linux system from scratch, I decided to integrate it into my learning process."
Buildroot is, as the name implies, a tool for building a working Linux operating system — primarily targeting embedded systems, and frequently used for single-board computers. First released in 2005 by Peter Korsgaard, it automates what would normally be a highly manual process; vendors of embedded systems will frequently provide a Buildroot configuration to customers for further configuration.
The latest version of Buildroot includes, handily, a configuration for the Raspberry Pi 5 — also compatible with the Raspberry Pi 500, which takes the same core hardware and builds it into a keyboard in homage to the home computers of the 1980s and early 1990s. It's this default configuration that Sell used to build a bootable image for the popular single-board computer — with minimal customization, beyond setting a password on the root user account.
While Buildroot is definitely an option for anyone looking to dig deep into a minimalist or heavily-customized Linux distribution for their Raspberry Pi, it's not the only option out there. Late last month Raspberry Pi launched rpi-image-gen, an official tool designed to make it easy to tweak Raspberry Pi OS images — based on Debian Linux — for particular projects.
"You could, for example, utilize a Bluetooth audio layer to pull in device support," Raspberry Pi's Matt Lear explained at the time, "or use a particular layer to add in a minimal Wayland desktop which runs in a kiosk mode, to install a default set of containers, to seed a default environment for distribution to third-party developers, and so on. There is no limit to the possibilities."
Sell's guide is now available on Dev.to.
