Building a Gigabyte Brix SUSE Distro

Table of Contents

• Enable SSH
  • Firewall
• Configuring GRUB for Headless Boot
• Apache
  • Installing Apache
  • Configuring Apache

1. Download the latest copy of SUSE tumbleweed

2. Burn this ISO image to thumb drive

dd if=<location_of_iso> of=/dev/rdisk<thumbdrive_disk_number> bs=1m

1. Put this in the front USB slot of the Brix

2. Power off and power on (a hard reboot is important)

3. Press the delete key repeatedly to get to Brix BIOS

4. Change boot order in boot section to specify USB drive as 1st boot

5. Save and Exit (reboot on thumb drive)

6. Run installer

Enable SSH

(if it’s not installed)

sudo zypper refresh
sudo zypper install --no-confirm openssh

sudo systemctl start sshd
sudo systemctl enable sshd

Firewall

Allow SSH

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=ssh
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Allow Web

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=https
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=http
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Configuring GRUB for Headless Boot

Edit /etc/default/grub

Change GRUB_TERMINAL="gfxterm" to GRUB_TERMINAL="console"

Run

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Apache

Installing Apache

zypper in apache2

Configuring Apache

• Document root can be found in /etc/apache2/default-server.conf and by default is /srv/www/htdocs

• Add your websites as separate folders to this location e.g., mkdir -p /srv/www/htdocs/mywebsite

By default, Apache denies access to all files. Don’t edit the http.conf file directly; rather, create a default virtual host file in the vhosts.d directory that sends all traffic to the default location (/srv/www/htdocs/mywebsite). If in the future you add multiple sites, then this is the file to edit and add new sites here.

The way I did it was to cd to /etc/apache2/vhosts.d and

cp vhost.template _default_vhost.conf

(vhost.conf files are loaded automatically in name order, so the _default_vhost.conf file name virtually guarantees it will be the first one)

I then edited the _default_vhost.conf and changed the placeholders for the domain and the document root for my domain and my document root of /srv/www/htdocs/mywebsite.

Be sure to scan the whole file for any other paths where you could insert /srv/www/htdocs/mywebsite as there are a couple.

Then restart Apache with

systemctl restart apache2

This worked for me.