Installing Operating System

In some unique situations, you may want to install your own operating system on your hardware of choice. This is fine as long as you follow these recommendations and give TetherX remote SSH access in order to load the software after the OS is installed.

For detailed hardware specifications and requirements, see Hardware Specifications.

x86 (Intel / AMD)

Follow the instructions on the Ubuntu website to install Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Server.

Partition Requirements

When installing the OS please ensure that:

• / (root) - ext4: Minimum 8 GB - more if you require running additional non-TetherX packages / services
• swap: Typically 2 GB is plenty (traditionally 2× RAM, but often overkill)
• /data - ext4: The largest partition - this is where your footage is stored

ARM (Raspberry Pi)

Use the Raspberry Pi Imager to install the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) Lite - based on Debian "Bookworm" or newer.

Configuration Steps

1. Select "Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) Lite"
2. Click the settings cog
3. Enable SSH
4. Set username to tetherx
5. Set a secure password
6. Write to SD card

Supported models: Raspberry Pi 4 (2GB+ RAM), Raspberry Pi 5

Additional Storage

The way storage is used when recording footage:

• /data/{site-name}/{tetherbox-serial}/{partition-id}

When you have any additional storage such as NAS, USB, MicroSD, etc, they are mounted as additional partition IDs. The software is clever enough to check what is the least used storage device and write the next minute of footage there.

This way if you have 4-5 different storage devices and you have a 5 minute event, each storage device will get a minute each from the event. This way if one happens to die, you still have the majority of the footage to recover the event.

Bypassing Internal Storage

If you want to bypass this whole logic (say you have a single RAID NAS), you can just mount it at:

• /data/{site-name}/{tetherbox-serial}/internal