Andy Taylor, MW0MWZ and coder of Pi-Star, last put out a request for people to take over parts of the project as he had made it quite complicated and wasn’t going to be able to do it alone. The Debian operating system Buster has gone end of life from the Debian Security team (LTS support is third party for two more years but I didn’t see many updates), but there is no word about a new version based on Debian Bullseye. Basically, Pi-Star is a packaging of Jonathan Naylor’s programs, G4KLX, that actually provide the functionality of the digital Pi-Star hotspot, with Andy adding web interfaces, dashboard, and a github updating system for the components. So you can always manually setup Jonathan’s software on any operating system, but Chip Cuccio, W0CHP, has scratched his own itch and created a customized version of Pi-Star along with an image based on Debian Bullseye.
Once you write the disk image to an SD card you can drop an empty file named ssh onto it, your wpa_supplicant.conf file, and a backup from your current running Pi-Star hotspot. When it boots up it will enable SSH, wifi and apply your backup with most all of your settings. I then like to install mosh, enable mosh ports for the firewall, and disable the password for admin access. And you’ll need to update your password from the default raspberry.
I’ll place some screenshots below so you can see the screens and some of the extra functionality. Some neat items I like is where you can drop all your Brandmeister talk groups which it saves into a file that can be added back later with a single click. And you can add and drop multiple talk groups with Brandmeister at once. There is also the Live Caller big display showing the current transmitting station that is pretty nice. It’s a very interesting project that is worth a look and it’s open and free software. And best of all it’s a current version of Debian getting the full support of the Debian team.
