Part I — The seed
00 · The seed: what the image is
The seed already carries the whole tree inside. It only needs soil.
A file that becomes a mucua
The image is a file with a name like baobaxia-pc-20261023.img.xz. Inside it there is a whole disk, already arranged: the system (Debian), the pieces Baobáxia needs, and Baobáxia itself, waiting to be installed.
It is not "live", the kind of USB stick that is only for trying things out and forgets everything when switched off. Wherever the image is written — a USB stick, an SSD, a hard disk — that is where the mucua lives, for real: what is kept on it stays there after switching off.
There are two kinds of image:
| Image | For | Write it to |
|---|---|---|
PC (baobaxia-pc-…) | an ordinary computer, mini-PC, old laptop — boots on both old (BIOS) and new (UEFI) machines | USB stick, SSD, hard disk |
Raspberry (baobaxia-raspi-…) | Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 | SD card or USB SSD |
Almost everything in this book applies to both. What is PC-only — the boot menu with its options, the installer — is said in the chapter.
One seed, many trees
The same image can be written to as many machines as you like, and each one becomes a different mucua, with its own identity. That happens because Baobáxia does not come pre-installed: it installs itself on the first boot, and that is when the mucua gets its secret name (a UUID), its keys and the password of whoever administers the site.
What comes inside
- the system and everything it needs to work without internet;
- the network ready for three ways of working: through the cable, joining a Wi-Fi that already exists, or creating its own Wi-Fi network (chapter 02);
- the address baobaxia.local, which works on the local network without configuring anything;
- when whoever made the image wanted it:
- the certificate for an address such as
local.baobaxia.net, so the site opens with a padlock (https://); - the chat (XMPP), with the same accounts as the site;
- the chat app for Android, served by the mucua itself.
The size
The PC image is 3.5 GB once decompressed (the .xz file is much smaller). It fits on a 4 GB USB stick or card. On the first boot, the system grows to fill the whole disk: on a 64 GB stick, the mucua gets all 64 GB.
A USB stick is fine for trying out and for a short gathering. For a mucua that will keep an archive for years, an SSD is much better: it is faster and copes better with files coming and going. Chapter 03 shows how to move the mucua from the stick to the disk inside the computer.
Who makes the image
This book starts with the image already made, in your hands. Whoever generates it (with the fazer-imagem.sh script, from the Baobáxia package) is whoever looks after the code; the step by step is in imagem/LEIA-ME.md in the bbx-make-deb repository.
Careful: if the image carries the certificate, it also carries its secret key. Pass the image from hand to hand among those who will set up the mucuas, but do not publish the file on the internet.