STICKY: PINN - An enhanced version of NOOBS.

[procount]

Do you only have a serial console cable or do you also have a network connection? By the protocols you mentioned in your previous post it sounded like you had a network cable as well.

Do you have control over when you boot the pi?

If you interrupt the pinn program to do your backups, presumably you want it to continue booting your os afterwards?

So if I understand correctly, you want a longer timeout, an ability to stop the timeout from the serial console and do some operations, then resume booting into the last OS?

[maihoaomv]

yes i have both serial console and hard wired network.

yes i have control over it.

yes i want to boot back into the operating system once i've completed the backup, then transfer the backup over smb or rsync to my laptop or to another server. a direct serial to usb console connection from the rpi to the pc will do just fine as long as i can control it from the laptop. that may be the simplest way of doing it anyway.

i have it hanging on the wall in the upstairs bedroom closet. i was trying to eliminate the hassle of having to take it down off the wall, remove the sd card, carry it to the laptop, make the backup, then put it all back together because inevitability the cabling all falls apart when i remove the rpi from the wall attachment.

m

[peterlite]

What would save me the most time? Loading the OS from a local disk would save download time when I am experimenting with different operating systems. I want to save the current image first. Saving the image to the local disk would help.

The standard disk image includes the full disk even if it is using only 8 GB of the 32 GB. Saving the image of the allocated space would be a big improvement and would help me copy the project to a small cheap card for a Zero.

Starting every boot with an image save option during testing would let me make a little change, save, change, save, change. There could be a utility in Raspbian to reboot to the PINN image save option.

When imaging is automated, we will all save our work before a change.

[darkbibble]

can PINN install os's to separate partitions on a hdd and popup a boot menu at startup?

[procount]

At the moment it still works largely like NOOBS so it will only install to the SDcard, but I will take a look.

@PeterLite - already on my list

[darkbibble]

for the hdd stuff you would need to add;
some sort of partition editor
a way to install to specific partions
dynamic boot menu

it would be really cool if you could add all that then I can utilise my pi-drive properly

[procount]

PINN has been updated to v1.9.2

V1.9.2

• Password - Change or reset your password for each OS.
• DSI/HDMI - Auto-switching of DSI/HDMI screen with HDMI taking priority

BugFixes

• NoobsConfig - Config filenames now now have all spaces converted to underscores
• Multiple Os - Multiple installed OSes can now be selected again.
• DHCP - ClientID is now used instead of DUID to request an IP address

Please see the documentation on github describing the full features.
pinn-lite.zip on sourceforge will always be the latest version.

[plugh]

huh...
Your Arch OS support looks a lot like this

I'm curious - README_PINN says

Arch linux distros use extended file attributes that are not stored in a standard TAR archive. Therefore they use BSDTAR to create their distro archives which are not compatible with PINN. PINN adds BSDTAR support to install these files, allowing ARCH linux to be installed.

Is this a recent-ish change? What I posted worked fine with NOOBS' busybox last time I checked...

[procount]

Hah! Snap! Interesting...
I hadn't seen your previous post. I could have saved myself some work.

I started from this discussion on github, trying to solve a "perceived" problem with Arch. So I concentrated on getting bsdtar to work. I think it is inevitable that the noobs support files ended up being similar as there is only 1 real way to do it.

So if Arch can be installed using the standard tar utility, I wonder what all the fuss over bsdtar was about?
Have Arch changed to using standard tar files?
Or if you just use the standard noobs/noobs-lite program, are you missing out on the extended attributes that bsdtar provide and Arch claim are so important for correct operation?

I don't use Arch, so it is of no real interest to me. But maybe if you are inclined, it would be interesting to do a comparison of the same Arch installation installed via NOOBS and PINN to see if there is any difference?

[plugh]

wow. You even did the same 'boot.tar.xz // cp boot files' hack (er, I did cp rather than mv so a virgin copy of the boot files would be preserved)

I'm not a heavy Arch user either, I just found it handy at times to have a small cmdline / root os on a card. I believe I did that back in the noobs 1.4 days, that's why I asked if Arch had made some change in their dist since then. And fwiw, *IIRC* the tar in noobs back then was busybox's embedded tar, not just a uclib build of tar - perhaps that matters...

My plate is pretty full right now, so not sure when I could get around to comparing installations. Perhaps some other brave soul??

BTW, I hope you included / fixed this which I found really annoying... (i.e. 'exit' from rescueshell *should* proceed to nooobs)

[darkbibble]

I really need a boot manager,

I have my pi-drive partitioned and have rsync'd my os's to their partitions. just need something to put on my sd to boot them

[procount]

@plugh - Yeah, I was really pleased with that little hack! Little did I know.... Great minds and all that.

All I can say is, when Arch was provided on the foundation website, it was packaged using standard tar for NOOBS. I believe the versions downloadable from their website are packaged using bsdtar, so you may be missing the extended attributes if you install them with plain NOOBS. I have no idea of the impact of that. I will have to leave it up to other Brave Souls to test or explain. I was just satisfying a request to solve a problem.

I had missed your shell fix. Looks good. I will implement in the next version.

@darkbibble - If you have installed your OSes using NOOBS or PINN, then rsync'd the rfs onto your pidrive, then you are almost there! You already have the bootmanager and the boot files on your SD card. Now edit the cmdline.txt file of the boot partition and change the `root=/dev/mmcblk0p?` to `root=/dev/sda?`. Just adapt the partition number according to which partition you copied it to. You also have to make similar adaptions to the fstab of the root file system. Follow the examples in the partition_setup.sh files of the OS you installed.

[darkbibble]

my raspbian and my retropie installs were rsync'd from their origional NON-noobs installs on separate cards using a usb micro-sd adaptor, and have a blank 2gb sd ready for the boot software

[procount]

It's still do-able with some manual intervention.
1. Install pinn-lite.zip to your 2GB sdcard
2. Boot it on your Pi.
3. ctrl-alt-f2 to get to the console.
4. Create 2 partitions in the extended partition (mmcblk0p6 and p7), one each for the boot partition of Raspbian and Retropie with parted
5. Format them as FAT
6. copy your existing boot partitions onto them.
7. Adjust the cmdline.txt for the root parameter
8. in /settings, create installed_os.json as follows:

Code: Select all

[
 {
  "bootable" : true,
  "description" : "A community-created port of Debian jessie for the Raspberry P                                                                                                                            i",
  "folder" : "/mnt/os/Raspbian",
  "icon" : "/mnt/os/Raspbian/Raspbian.png",
  "name" : "Raspbian",
  "partitions" : [
"/dev/mmcblk0p6"
  ],
  "password" : "raspberry",
  "release_date" : "2016-03-18",
  "username" : "pi"
 },
 {
  "bootable" : true,
  "description" : "Retropie for RPi2/3,
  "folder" : "/mnt/os/retropie2",
  "name" : "Retropie2",
  "partitions" : [
"/dev/mmcblk0p7"
  ],
  "password" : "raspberry",
  "release_date" : "2016-04-14",
  "username" : "pi"
 }

8. sync to make sure everything is flushed to disk.
9. Reboot.
10. Enjoy!
(You may have to adjust this procedure a bit as it is all untested)

[plugh]

I had missed your shell fix. Looks good. I will implement in the next version.

Cool...

If nothing else, it makes test / debug of OS json & scripts easy...
i.e. boot safemode, edit os files, 'exit' rescueshell to noobs, test install - repeat as needed

Thanks

[procount]

I added ssh for a similar reason, or there's always ctrl-alt-f2.

[darkbibble]

ctrl+alt+F2 takes me to a recovery login prompt, I tried username "pi" and password "raspberry" but it did nothing and timed out and I had to pull the power as couldn't do anything,

[procount]

@darkbibble- sorry I should have stated. Use root & raspberry. It's in the pinn docs (and in noobs now I think)

[procount]

@maihoaomv - Your request sounds very similar to this one -> viewtopic.php?f=91&t=147651#p972045

[procount]

PINN has been updated to v1.9.3

V1.9.3

• Clone SD Card - Copy the SD card to another card in a USB reader (BETA)
• Rescue shell - Exiting the rescue shell now enters the PINN recovery program instead of another shell. (Thanks to Plugh)
• VNCSHARE - Sets up PINN to use VNC at the same time as an attached screen
• OPENELEC - restored the link to the Openelec distro (this will not update and therefore may not be the latest)

BugFixes

• https - Fixed the ability to use https protocol (which was preventing Arch from installing sometimes).
• wifi config - A user supplied wpa_supplicant.conf file is now ALWAYS copied to /settings and then renamed to wpa_supplicant.conf.bak so that it does not continually overwrite any manual changes made through the GUI.

Notes
The ability to `Clone an SD Card` has been ported from Simon Long's PiClone program in Raspbian.
The major differences are that it does the clone whilst the OS is offline so it can provide a more coherent backup, and it uses rsync instead of cp due to some NOOBS limitations. Due to the use of such features, I have marked this feature as 'BETA' and I provide no warranty for it! Please check any backups that you make using this facility before relying on them.


Please see the documentation on github describing the full features.
pinn-lite.zip on sourceforge will always be the latest version.

[mikerr]

PINN has been updated to v1.9.3

V1.9.3

• Clone SD Card - Copy the SD card to another card in a USB reader (BETA)
  
  The ability to `Clone an SD Card` has been ported from Simon Long's PiClone program in Raspbian.
  The major differences are that it does the clone whilst the OS is offline so it can provide a more coherent backup, and it uses rsync instead of cp due to some NOOBS limitations. Due to the use of such features, I have marked this feature as 'BETA' and I provide no warranty for it! Please check any backups that you make using this facility before relying on them.

That's very nice to have available in the NOOBs " instant pre-boot" environment.
I might keep an SD card around jut for that.

Note it's not limited to the internal SD card as source or destination
- you can duplicate sd cards using this by using two USB sd card readers....

[manuelfr51]

Hi, im having troubles installing the os prom usb stick

Already formated as fat32 (previously tried as ntfs), 32gb usb stick, copy the os folder with raspbian (from n00bs full), and retropie2 (from pinn files), stick my usb and sd on pi, power up...an just the internet options shown,disconnect the ethernet...no options, copy the same os folder to the sd...and the installation from sd shows up

If I connect the stick before inserting the sd I only get 2-4 seconds to put the sd on my pi or it will not read it...but still the usb os not show...

brad new pi3
USB ports working
stick perfectly working

[procount]

I suggest you try the following and report what happens:
1. Boot the Pi with PINN, but do not have your USB memory stick attached.
2. Press Ctrl-Alt-F2 to open the recovery shell. Use the Username=root, password=raspberry.
3. type 'lsusb' to see the list of USB devices attached. Note the highest numbered device.
4. Insert your USB stick then wait a second or two.
5. type 'lsusb'. You should have an extra USB device listed. It will have the highest device number, but may not be the last device in the list. Record and report its ID.
6. type 'ls /dev/sd*'. You should get a list of maybe: '/dev/sda /dev/sda1'. record and report this list.
7. type 'fdisk -l /dev/sda'. Record and report the output.
8. type 'mount /dev/sda1 /mnt2'
9. type 'cd /mnt2'
10. type 'ls'. Do you see a folder listing that includes 'os'

[procount]

PINN has been updated to v1.9.4

This update was actually done on 16/7/2016, but it seems I forgot to post the changes, so here they are for completeness:

V1.9.4

• Network Drivers - A number of additional wifi and ethernet drivers have been added.

Bugfixes

• Dialog Box - The initialisation dialog box is removed under network errors

The full list of additional wifi and ethernet drivers added can be found by following the github documentation link below.
This is very useful for owners of Pi's that don't have the standard ethernet port, or a Broadcom based wifi dongle (built-in like in the RPi3 or other external dongle), as they can now use a wider range of 3rd party addon USB network adaptors with this NOOBS-like program to install their OS of choice.

Please note that the 8192cu wifi driver does not work in this release, but this is fixed in the latest v1.9.5.1 version.

Please see the documentation on github describing the full features.
pinn-lite.zip on sourceforge will always be the latest version.

[procount]

PINN has been updated to v1.9.5.1

Apologies for the long delay in releasing this next version, due to the issues involved in getting the 8192cu wifi driver working. This driver is used with many popular cheap wifi dongles like the Edimax EW-7811n, or those based on the 8188cus chipset. I only tested with 1 generic dongle type, but dongles that use this driver should now work.

This version also provides a self-update facility whereby it will check if a newer version of PINN has been released and provide the options to download and update it, ignore it this time, or skip this version altogether.

(NOTE: For the few people who downloaded v1.9.5, please download the latest version which allows the self-update facility to work)

V1.9.5.1

• Self-Update - Notification and download of new releases

Bugfixes

• Network Drivers - Fixed the popular RTL8188cus wifi driver.
• RPI3 ACT_LED - Now displays correctly on SD card access

Please see the documentation on github describing the full features.
pinn-lite.zip on sourceforge will always be the latest version.