STICKY: PINN - An enhanced version of NOOBS.

[procount]

@I621148 please check your inbox for a couple of PMs.

[procount]

PINN has been updated to v2.1.3

V2.1.3

• Translations - Includes updated translations from the community.

Many updates to the translated text have been included for existing languages and some new languages which have been pending on NOOBS for some time.
These are not complete as there are still some gaps for translations that need completing, so feel free to submit any additions or corrections to the NOOBS or PINN githubs.

I rely totally on the community support for these translations and there is no way for me to validate them. Therefore I accept no responsibility whatsoever for any incorrect translations. If you find any, please submit a correction.

As a result of including the Korean fonts particularly, the size of the ZIP file has increased by about 5MB.

[treeHouse]

Thanks for making PINN.

For the latest PINN 2.13, Arch does not show up in os install list. I've use the default setup, and later appended "alt-image-source=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/proco ... st_v3.json" to the "recovery.cmdline", but still no go.

I'm using a rpi3, 32g SD card, and am using ethernet (for initial setup).

Any clues what might be amiss, or what I am doing wrong?

Thank you.

[procount]

I'm not quite sure what is going wrong for you.
I've just downloaded PINN 2.1.3 onto a 16GB card and used it to install Arch1 onto a Pi Zero and Arch2 onto a PI2 and a Pi3 using Ethernet and/or Wifi.
If you have used the default setup by extracting from pinn-lite.zip onto the SD card, then the alt-image-source should already be present and there should be no need to add it.
If you are seeing OpenElec and RetroPie in the list then you should also see Arch.
Did you get any error messages, like "Unable to download file"?
Typically the list of OSes is longer than the window, so you must scroll to the bottom to see Arch.
Otherwise I am at a loss. Try downloading pinn-lite.zip and try installing it again .

[procount]

PINN has been updated to v2.1.4

V2.1.4

• IP address - Shown in window title
• CEC key mapping- Replaced 0 button with PLAY button for greater applicability
• BOOT - Added BOOT button to boot selection dialog for use with limited TV remotes
• Tarball names - Allow local tarballs to have a different name to the partition label
• SD Card - Recommend 8GB card minimum
• SD Card - Update SD card requirements
• Network - Do not continue polling for connectivity during installation
• Update - Bump kernel and firmware versions

This update includes the latest changes to NOOBS, but mainly includes some changes to allow CEC to work better.
A new BOOT button on the boot selection dialog allows a wider range of TV remotes to be used with just the mouse simulation, and the 0 key has been replaced with the PLAY button for easier selection.
For ssh and vnc use, the IP address is now shown on the title bar making it easier to connect.

[cjan]

1st step, format full SD-card to fat32?

[treeHouse]

Hey,
I re downloaded PINN and arch showed up just fine. I think I might have extracted NOOBs on accident (have a copy of that also), and was thinking that it was PINN. Who knows, but its working fine now.
Thanks.

[procount]

Anyone who downloaded pinn 2.1.4 with a build date of Feb 3 may want to redownload it for a Feb 4 build date. (Too small a change to even warrant a version update!)

[procount]

PINN has been updated to v2.2

V2.2

• PiZero W - Updated Firmware & Kernel for PiZero W

This update includes the latest changes in NOOBS to update the firmware and kernel for the new PiZero W.

If you have an existing PINN SD Card and wish to use it on a PiZeroW, allow PINN to update itself in your existing Pi before moving it across.

Void Linux has now been added to the list of OSes that can be installed.

[procount]

PINN has been updated to v2.3

V2.3

• PiZero W - More Firmware/Kernel updates for PiZero W
• Wifi chan 13 - Allows a wider range of wifi channels

I'm not sure what went wrong with p2.2.
I thought I'd followed all the new NOOBS changes to support the PiZeroW, but as I didn't have one yet it was a bit difficult to test. I finally got my hands on one at the Pi Birthday Party and then realised that p2.2 wasn't quite working on the PiZeroW as all I got was a rainbow screen.
Meanwhile NOOBS had updated the firmware again, so I merged in the changes and this time it works fine.

After some collaboration and discussion we managed to add support for country specific wifi channels in NOOBS, so this has now also been added to PINN.

Apologies if you've had to contend with multiple self-updates over the weekend. It should be more stable now. Enjoy your Pi Zero Ws with PINN!

[321]

First I heard of PINN, it looks interesting.
Whilst I see its primarily aimed at being an OS installer

PINN is designed to make it easy to select and install operating systems for the Raspberry Pi without having to worry about manually imaging your SD card.

How involved would it be to reverse the options to backup an OS image to web/usb/sd card?
I see you have this facility https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/m ... an-sd-card
but lets say I use PINN to download and install an OS from web/usb/sd card, and then configure my perfect setup, could the reverse (backup) be done so I dont have to handle the pi plugging in additional sd cards /ejecting SD cards to make copies of the OS partitions?

In terms of automation, whilst I can give each pi running PINN a unique URL to download the OS I want to install, from the perspective of time spent copying over a network onto the SD card, am I correct to believe that once PINN has started an OS, its out of the question, or is it like the Intel Management Engine and still runs in the background at a hardware level or like a VM management interface spinning up and down different VM's/OS's?

Ideally I'd like to have an automated way to spin up and down different OS 's and backup to SD/USB/Web an OS for post mortem. I dont know if this is too much feature creep for PINN and/or if something else exists which would let me do what I'm looking to do, but I see from this link https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/m ... os-version
that it basically involves duplicating an OS before making changes to it, which is one way, but doesnt really allow for quick easy post mortem analysis, as I'd have to still shutdown and extract the SD card.

Whilst I do have alternatives like using unetboot and having the OS's on an external device, mono cultures always die out so a bit of diversity would be useful if one is to apply whats observed in nature to the electronic world.

[mikerr]

Ideally I'd like to have an automated way to spin up and down different OS 's and backup to SD/USB/Web an OS for post mortem. I dont know if this is too much feature creep for PINN and/or if something else exists which would let me do what I'm looking to do, but I see from this link https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/m ... os-version
that it basically involves duplicating an OS before making changes to it, which is one way, but doesnt really allow for quick easy post mortem analysis, as I'd have to still shutdown and extract the SD card.

You might like to take a look as "OS spaces" as supplied by WD:
http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidriv ... n-edition/
http://www.gadgetoid.com/2017/02/16/wdl ... node-zero/

[procount]

How involved would it be to reverse the options to backup an OS image to web/usb/sd card?

NOOBS and PINN both have instructions on how to create a custom OS for installation. (I see you found them already)
So you could use the shell in PINN to backup your OS to another USB device by following those instructions, thus avoiding the plug/unplug issue. Add some additional support files and you could then restore it via PINN.
Note that if you are using a multi-boot setup then PINN will (currently) wipe the SD card before installing all OSes at the same time.

In terms of automation....

PINN is a minimal OS in its own right that is used to install other OSes and act as a boot selector in the case of a multi-boot scenario. Once another OS is chosen, the Pi is rebooted directly into that OS, so PINN is not active in the background. To activate PINN you must reboot the Pi again. Think of it more like U-Boot rather than a hypervisor. So if you can automate a reboot then this may be a possible enhancement (by adding automation controls via ssh, for example) But I'd need some more details on what you would like to automate.

Ideally I'd like to have an automated way to spin up and down different OS 's and backup to SD/USB/Web an OS for post mortem.

As I said above, it could be a possible future enhancement. You can already install multiple OSes on the same SD card (or possibly multiple instances of the same OS with a bit of tweaking) and use PINN to select which one you want to use at any time if one goes corrupt, for example. But if you want to copy an OS off of the SD card to somewhere else for "quick easy post mortem analysis", then it may still take a while no matter how you copy it due to the typical size of an image. Maybe you could do it in-situ by mounting the inactive OS?

I hope I have understood your use case.
Slowly but surely I am trying to use PINN to plug some of the shortcomings of NOOBS and make it more useful for more advanced use cases like yours. If you have any more suggestions like these or would like to elaborate on any of them, I encourage you to open an issue on the PINN github so I can keep track of them.

[321]

Just testing it out now so will provide feedback via github sometime in the future, once i've been through it.

But if you want to copy an OS off of the SD card to somewhere else for "quick easy post mortem analysis", then it may still take a while no matter how you copy it due to the typical size of an image. Maybe you could do it in-situ by mounting the inactive OS?

When you say mount it in-situ, do you mean using the running OS to copy the inactive OS/partitions back assuming two or more OS's exist on an sd card or usb mem stick? That is an option if they are all the same OS's, but more work if using non linux OS's like RiscOS and others ported to the pi.

The automation angle is just to copy over an OS/Partitions onto the SD card, then copy it back using a reverse method. I can control the webserver PINN see's so thats not a problem with loading different os's if PINN is configured to read from a static web server which happens to change and provide different OS's all packaged the same way.

I'm still looking for a way to send commands programatically over SSH which would help automate the changes i would expect to do over SSH.

You might like to take a look as "OS spaces" as supplied by WD:
http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidriv ... n-edition/
http://www.gadgetoid.com/2017/02/16/wdl ... node-zero/

I'll check that out, although the project spaces from a quick read seem to be really geared for a single pi, and I'm looking for a multi pi setup which I can use with my clusterhat.com automatically.

[procount]

I guess I don't quite have a full understanding of your use case yet.
Have a play with it and then tell me what's missing. Or describe your whole use case and I'll see where PINN can help.
Yes, I was alluding to "OS Spaces" when I was talking about 'multiple instances of an OS'

[321]

I must be doing something wrong as I cant get this to work.
So following these instructions https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/m ... ME_PINN.md
but I note there is also another readme (which takes precedence?). https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/master/README.md

So using https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/m ... N.md#setup
I've created a FAT32 partition on a 8GB sd card and followed the instructions literally, by which I mean copied everything from the pinn-master.zip onto the sd card, stuck it into a pi and just got the red led, no rainbow screen or anything else to indicate it was booting up.

So last night when looking at it again, I noticed there was a sdcontent folder, so cleared the sd card and just copied the contents of sdcontent into the root of the sdcard, stuck it into a pi but still only the red led showed and nothing else.

I must be missing some other instructions, on how to get this to work, although I did wonder if there were enough files in sdcontent as well as the root section of the zip.

Does this need to be combined with noobs for example?

Is 8GB sd cards a restriction for pinn as I have smaller SD cards 2GB sd cards I can use, and I can also run some OS's which take up just a few hundred mb so would easily fit on these <8GB sd cards?

edit. I think its clear there is some prior knowledge which needs to be combined with pinn, so I'm wondering should I be merging pinn into a copy of noobs at this stage.
For someone new to pinn they might not be aware of something which might be obvious to someone else.

[bensimmo]

The way I read it
Starting at the PINN page
https://github.com/procount/pinn

I click on read all of the read more
https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/master/README.md

After a long long changelog

There is a little click 'here' for the documentation.
https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/m ... ME_PINN.md


You get to Setup and it tells you the out line.
It does say below are instructions on how to format the SD card, it should be a recommended if things are not working, but there is no live direct link to it, so go a hunting and eventually you find it.
But it is basically the NOOBs instructions and does link to the RaspberryPi website, though you have to do some searching there to find noobs instructions https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentati ... n/noobs.md as an alternative read.

Either way, it format the card as described.
Copy the contents of the 7zip file across to the newsletter formatted card.

Stick in Pi and boot.

Which Pi are you using?
If it's the new Pi ZeroW then make sure it is the newest PINN version.

[procount]

@321 - SDcontent folder?

Are you sure you are unzipping the correct file from sourceforge?

Github contains the source files and the documentation for PINN. Sourceforge contains the distributable files.

You should download this file ->https://sourceforge.net/projects/pinn/f ... p/download

At the end of the README.md file and the top of the README_PINN.md file it states:

The latest version of PINN-lite can be downloaded from sourceforge.

Unzip it and copy it to the SD card which should previously have been formatted as FAT32 with the SDformatter tool with the FORMAT SIZE ADJUSTMENT ON Option.

Maybe I'll need to revisit that page and improve it. It's difficult to get it to the right level to cater for all types of visitors.
Ahh, I see the problem.
Where it says:

Download and extract the files from the PINN zip file.

I am referring to the pinn-lite.zip file mentioned just above the 1st screenshot.

[procount]

I have updated the initial README.md with a Quick Start section.
Hopefully this will make it clearer how to get going.

[321]

Just downloading the pinn-lite.zip now.

I know what you mean about catering for different people, the hard part is knowing what other people know as well as what they are looking for.

Edit. Getting somewhere now with the pinn-lite.zip, will report back soon.

Edit1. 1st error
Error downloading or extracting tarball.
wget: unable to resolve host ......

Cause net access was disabled so it couldn't download. clicking ok takes you to window with a list of nothing and the boot button.

Only option is to power cycle and try again. When the list doesn't show anything perhaps having the boot button change text and function to reboot or shutdown?
Edit2
Further to the problem in edit1. If you are wondering how I got the edit1 error, the network access was disabled after an OS had been selected. This could have been caused by the user or an Intrusion Detection/Protection System.

Now when internet access is not available at the 1st window which lists the OS's a msg pops up which informs the user net access is needed. Whilst this main window automatically detects when net access is restored, the msg window saying net access is not available is not automatically removed. Cosmetic level, ie not that important in the scheme of things.

Having got net access and the list of OS's, when clicking the Advanced button, the existing buttons dissappear, from a user perspective especially the caution one's, they might not find it intuitive to click the Advanced button again to restore the original buttons, so maybe the text on the Advanced button could change to something like Back to make it more obvious.

One point about the error msg seen in edit1, whilst its displaying in part, system generated errors, from a novice user perspective these msg's are too technical, so if they could be translated into something more useful for users, that would be more useful. I know from knocking out windows apps, throwing windows errorcodes and the brief windows description as seen here https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... s.85).aspx is not that useful for users in most cases,so where possible I would provide my own msg to the user, where I couldnt code a solution. So I dont know if something similar could be done for the most likely errors that might occur. Cosmetic level.

One thing I have noticed having installed raspbian via pinn, the ext4 Settings partition shows in the Eject button (far right of the taskbar on raspbian desktop) as Ncards(SETTINGS), would this partition benefit from being relabled to something like PINN-SETTINGS (theres a 16byte limit for labels which might be a factor with unicode/double byte character sets). Cosmetic level.

Edit3
https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/m ... ME_PINN.md
Where it says

The latest version of PINN-lite can be downloaded from sourceforge.

at the top, there is nothing to suggest what PINN-lite is, and thats what people need to download if they dont want to compile it using github.

https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/master/README.md
Is similar to the above point, in that theres nothing to suggest what PINN-lite is, so some people might interpret PINN-lite as being like raspbian-lite, in thats its a headless os, when in fact PINN-lite is not really a headless OS.

Where would be the best place to find a brief or concise list or table of the different command settings that can be used to configure PINN? The reason I ask about this, is right now, the raspbian OS has downloaded and the msg box saying something to that effect with an OK button is on screen. For an automated installation, it would be useful to have the msg box with the OK button not appear but for PINN to automatically reboot and load the OS.

A nice to have feature if it doesnt exist at the moment, which you might have already done with https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/m ... xt.example is to have the options to set the options that enable/disable things like VNC & SSH. I'll have to go back through my notes to see what is set in the config.txt file, I know I have put various options in config.txt eg memory split for graphics and to have the pi's ticking over at 200/300mhz and then ramping up to 1Ghz when needed, with different cpu scheduling options set, but some options (from memory) can be set in config.txt and some need changing at the command line, when the appropriate package has been downloaded.

I dont know if its possible to get PINN to also copy across a script file which can be run on first boot to save me having to copy across my scripts and run then. Some of my scripts involve downloading code and then compiling as they are not in the main repositories whilst other scripts are just downloading packages before making config changes.

I'll have a look at the PINN source code to see what can be done and what can be tweaked to automate the installation and setup of an OS. At the moment most of my attention is focused on raspbian, but I hope to include other OS's in time once I've got my basic systems fully automated, so whilst the automation will be raspbian orientated, other OS's may work differently so that point will need input from others to avoid limiting the automation to just raspbian or debian linux distro's, as I know that RiscOs is slightly different when thinking about the BBC basic days.

[321]

I'll stick this here as an updatable/ongoing list.
Feature request. A way to remotely edit the config.txt file of the OS in question.
When tweaking the config.txt files, if a settings change causes raspbian to not boot up, whilst you can recover using the edit button, having a way to remotely edit this file would be useful.

[procount]

Thanks for your comprehensive feedback. I shall copy/paste some of your comments into the github issues so they can be tracked more easily there.
It might be better to consider putting future suggestions there, and leaving this thread for questions.
I shall address your comments in the GitHub issues once I have transferred them, but I will answer some briefly here.
Some of them are common to NOOBS as well, so I may not be able to address them where it leads to incompatibility.

Having got net access and the list of OS's, when clicking the Advanced button, the existing buttons dissappear, from a user perspective especially the caution one's, they might not find it intuitive to click the Advanced button again to restore the original buttons, so maybe the text on the Advanced button could change to something like Back to make it more obvious.

The button does change colour which is supposed to indicate it is toggled (pressed-in). In a future version, this button's functionality is changing and this will be addressed.

One point about the error msg seen in edit1, whilst its displaying in part, system generated errors, from a novice user perspective these msg's are too technical, so if they could be translated into something more useful for users, that would be more useful.

Yes, always an issue. This will also affect NOOBS, so suggestions for replacement text are always welcome.

One thing I have noticed having installed raspbian via pinn, the ext4 Settings partition shows in the Eject button (far right of the taskbar on raspbian desktop) as Ncards(SETTINGS),

NOOBS issue.

Edit3
https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/m ... ME_PINN.md
Where it says

The latest version of PINN-lite can be downloaded from sourceforge.

at the top, there is nothing to suggest what PINN-lite is, and thats what people need to download if they dont want to compile it using github.

Hopefully my recent update to README_SUM.md has addressed this? If so, I will copy the QuickStart info across.

https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/master/README.md
Is similar to the above point, in that theres nothing to suggest what PINN-lite is, so some people might interpret PINN-lite as being like raspbian-lite, in thats its a headless os, when in fact PINN-lite is not really a headless OS.

Point taken, but as this is a derivative of NOOBS, PINN-LITE is more closely aligned to NOOBS-LITE.

Where would be the best place to find a brief or concise list or table of the different command settings that can be used to configure PINN? The reason I ask about this, is right now, the raspbian OS has downloaded and the msg box saying something to that effect with an OK button is on screen. For an automated installation, it would be useful to have the msg box with the OK button not appear but for PINN to automatically reboot and load the OS.

All the command line options for recovery.cmdline are in https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/m ... ME_PINN.md But maybe a section grouping them altogether would be good. Please see the 'silentinstall' option for an automated install which removes the confirmation dialogs. I intend to improve on the 'silentinstall' option to remove some of the existing limitations and make it more flexible.

A nice to have feature if it doesnt exist at the moment, which you might have already done with https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/m ... xt.example is to have the options to set the options that enable/disable things like VNC & SSH.
...
I dont know if its possible to get PINN to also copy across a script file which can be run on first boot to save me having to copy across my scripts and run then. Some of my scripts involve downloading code and then compiling as they are not in the main repositories whilst other scripts are just downloading packages before making config changes.

Do you mean enabling VNC/SSH etc for Raspbian?
PINN is not just for installing Raspbian but for other OSes as well, so it should not be cluttered with Raspbian specific options.
Please see noobsconfig which is fully supported by PINN and does this sort of additional configuration.
Also look at https://pihw.wordpress.com/guides/pi-kitchen/ which additionally has "run once on boot" type scripts.
I think they will address many of your needs.

Feature request. A way to remotely edit the config.txt file of the OS in question.
When tweaking the config.txt files, if a settings change causes raspbian to not boot up, whilst you can recover using the edit button, having a way to remotely edit this file would be useful.

PINN already supports VNC and SSH if you enable them. You can use these tools to remotely tweak your setup or administer it. NOOBSCONFIG/PiKitchen can be used to alter the config.txt of an OS when it is being installed.

(It would be better to add additional posts to add new comments, rather than editing old ones, because I don't get notified of edits, just new posts, so they may get missed.)

[321]

It might be better to consider putting future suggestions there, and leaving this thread for questions.

Will do, I guess I cant put off using github any longer.

[321]

I have to ask, did a bot or a non-british person write this website?
https://pihw.wordpress.com/guides/pi-kitchen/

[procount]

Meltwater is British. He uses PiKitchen to spin up SDcards mainly for the workshops he runs.