Manual installation on Debian 10 (buster)

[hax0rbana-adam]

Problem

Debian 10 (buster) on a Raspberry Pi 3 B hangs when following the manual install instructions. This is due to memory exhaustion and even after hours, the compilation neither errors out nor completes. This happens when trying to install the packages in requirement.txt

Solution

Just before installing the dependencies, add some temporary swap space so the numpy wheel can compile.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=4096 count=$((1024*256))
sudo chown root:root /swapfile
sudo chmod 0600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

This will allow numpy to be compiled and installed. The workaround above creates 1GB of swap space. Less may be sufficient, but I did not repeat the process to attempt to find the limits. Based on watching top, I expect 512MB should work, but I want to limit the document I add to things I have actually tested and verified.

Action needed

Just an update to the documentation. I'll likely submit a pull request for this unless someone beats me to it.

[hax0rbana-adam]

While updating this, it should also be made more clear that SeedSigner requires a 32-bit operating system (I have experimentally confirmed this). The way it's written now makes it look like the instructions were written in mid-2021 and that's why it's suggesting a that particular image and doing the version check (e.g. to make sure you're not running Stretch).

Explicitly indicating that no version of Raspberry Pi OS more recent than Buster and only the 32-bit version will work would help avoid people like me testing the latest images in order to update the documentation (and have all the stable bugfixes).

[hax0rbana-adam]

I have a branch which will address all of the issues I listed above, but I'm holding back a MR until I determine the cause of another issue that I ran into (screenshot below).

If I can confirm that this is not related to the installation, but rather a bug in the python code on the default branch (which seems likely), I'll submit my MR and hopefully get this ticket closed out.

If anyone wants a preview of the changes I've done so far, they're over here:

https://github.com/hax0rbana-adam/seedsigner/tree/432-manual-install-instructions

[hax0rbana-adam]

I've opened a ticket #434 (and a MR) for the SeedWordsBackupTestPrompt exception.

As such, I now have confidence that the installation instructions are up to date and have submitted a MR to close this issue.