NOOBS v1.3 Beta testers feedback

[liz]

An announcement's appearing on the front page shortly - keep your eyes open!

[liz]

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4863

[rdb]

If you've found a reproducible bug please file it under our GitHub issue tracker here: https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs/issues?state=open

This forum thread is intended for discussion and feedback rather than explicit issue reporting.

[AndrewS]

Gah!! This looks excellent. Off to buy a larger SD card for a four- or five-OS installation

You can easily fit all 7 OSes currently installable by NOOBS on a 16GB SD card

- Is there a way to determine how much space each OS gets or would it just be total space divided by number of OS-s?

Each OS' partitions has a 'nominal size' (see e.g. http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/arch/partitions.json ), and any extra space gets evenly divided between any partitions which are marked "want_maximised: true".

- Is there a way to disable the auto-boot delay to wait indefinitely for user interaction? (I might reboot and walk away..)

Only way right now would be to edit noobs.conf on /dev/mmcblk0p3 and set default_partition_to_boot=800 before rebooting.

- Choices would always have had to be made I'm sure, but is there a specific reason to include Openelec in the image and have Raspbmc in the downloads section, for example better NOOBS integration at this point?

Huh? http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads now includes OpenELEC too And NOOBS 1.3 beta includes RaspBMC.

[AndrewS]

Thanks for your reply, also on the other points. I know both are available from the downloads page and from NOOBS, it's just: I went by the screenshot which as I interpret it has Openelec to install from image and Raspbmc from network.

Ahhh, that must have been an early screenshot, when the version of OpenELEC was the same on the SD card and on the network-install, but the version of RaspBMC was newer on the network-install than the version on the SD card (or RaspBMC had been deleted from the 'os' folder on the SD card). Clever huh?

[Hadgee]

HI,

I am a semi noob. previous experience with Raspian(very little) and mainly Raspbmc. I installed four OS's
Raspbian
OpenELEC
Risc OS
Pidora

It was really painless with all working flawlessly. I was up and running watching a movie and live TV within minutes with OpenELEC. Also with Raspbien I was soon accessing PI Store from the Desktop and downloading 'OPEN ARENA'. It wasn't long before I was playing it against far superior BOTS . It just goes to show how great this selection of OS's are and how quickly we can get the Rasberry Pi into use.

I will be looking into Risc OS and Pidora at some point. The switch on boot up works great between OS's and I think that I will keep a copy on my 16gb for the foreseeable future.

Great Job!

[ArjenWols]

Are there any thoughts of making a configuration backup in the Cloud?
For example on Box.com?
A selected distribution can then be updated whith your personal configuration after installation from NOOBS.
Then you won't have to backup your entire image.

[More Pi Please]

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE add an option to disable the NOOBS splash screen

If there is already a way please let me know!

Thank you!

[AndrewS]

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE add an option to disable the NOOBS splash screen

Do you mean the "Press SHIFT" splash screen? What's wrong with it?

I guess you could 'remove' it by not using NOOBS but simply using the Win32ImageWriter-style .img install of whichever OS you're using?

[beta-tester]

hi, you need beta testers? i have the perfect username for that...

i installed the "lite"/network version to my 16GB SD card (using RPi Type B rev2 512MB, HDMI@1920x1080, keyboard-mouse combi, SD card formated with "SDFormatterv4").

on initial boot up, i changed the language to "English US" and the keyboard to "de",
i selected "Raspbian [RECOMMEND]" and "OpenELEC" to install.
but, after installation the boot menu stays complete empty. (no idea, what to do - noting there to select - only language and keyboard settings are the only interactive elements)

so i made a new virgin NOOBS installation.
this time i selected only Raspbian first... with this installation it boots straight up to Raspbian.
by holding [Shift] at boot time, i post installed the additional OS "OpenELEC"... after the folowing boot up, i got again an empty boot menu.
than i noticed, if i hit [ESC] on the keyboard, NOOBS 1.3 boots up "OpenELEC"
(i think the first installation tryout with the empty boot menu was having the same behavior)

an other issue is, the installation status shows very long 100% (for ~2 minutes per OS) - do not show 100%, that suggests, that installation is finished and the system hangs... show 99% instead or something else, that still something is going on.

i don't know if that is also available on NOOBS, but BerrryBoot has an option to boot an OS after a defined time period automatically, if no handmade selection is make on time on the boot menu. if NOOBS don't have, i would extremely miss that option.

bye ... beta-tester

PS.: question, is there a possibility to install multiple Raspbian versions parallel - so i can have different (isolated) setups for different purpose/manner?

[rdb]

@ArjenWols: There's nothing to stop you storing your personal root filesystem configuration in the cloud. You could simply create a tarball containing your modified rootfs and then push that to the cloud storage provider of your choice from within the installed OS. If you wanted to re-install the OS using your modified rootfs as a base then you could simply replace the rootfs tarball contained in the /os directory with your modified version.

If you simply wanted to store your dotfiles or other configuration settings then you could use git to store this.

@More Pi Please: Why do you want to disable the splash screen? What is the issue you have with it? At present the splash screen is shown while we allow a brief pause in the boot sequence to check for the user pressing SHIFT. If we removed the splash screen then you wouldn't be able to launch the recovery menu without signifying this via either a cmdline option or toggling a GPIO pin. Is this the feature that you need?

@beta-tester: Once the selected OSes are installed they should be highlighted in green in the OS list with [INSTALLED] displayed next to their names. Does this not occur in your case? Are you sure that the OSes have installed correctly? Once the OSes are installed it should boot straight into the boot selection window (which is different to the main NOOBS menu). Is this not displayed?

NOOBS will automatically reboot the last boot option selected by the user unless it receives user input so that should provide the automatic booting functionality that you require.

[AndrewS]

The reason that @beta-tester got a blank boot-selection window is because of a bug I've already reported to @rdb

There's currently (incorrect) code in the NOOBS beta which means that if you change the language using the dropdown-box, the /settings partition (/dev/mmcblk0p3) gets unmounted, which means after the OSes have finished installing, when it tries to write the list-of-installed-OSes to /settings/noobs.conf it fails, and so therefore when the boot-selection window tries to read /settings/noobs.conf it doesn't actually think you've got any OSes installed
Until this bug gets fixed I guess that means you can't change language before installing more than one OS at once (the boot-selection window only gets displayed when you have more than one OS installed).

[AndrewS]

PS.: question, is there a possibility to install multiple Raspbian versions parallel - so i can have different (isolated) setups for different purpose/manner?

Yup, simply add more 'flavour' entries to /os/Raspbian/flavours.json on your card, e.g. I just added

Code: Select all

{ "name": "Raspbian parallel test" },

between the existing "Raspbian - Boot to Scratch" and "Raspbian" options, and it worked just fine (so it seems the description is optional).
Remember that you can't install two parallel Rsspbians and then later add a third - trying to do so reformats and re-installs all 3 OSes at the same time.

(tiny bug here @rdb - when installing multiple flavours of the same OS, the progress-bar doesn't tell you which flavour it's currently installing - doesn't really matter but it might give you a better sense of installation progress)

[W. H. Heydt]

I downloaded the large version (I may play around with it at a jam this weekend). Peazip wants a password to unzip it. Oops?

[beta-tester]

The reason that @beta-tester got a blank boot-selection window is because of a bug I've already reported to @rdb

i hope the dev notices that and fix it as soon as possible.

There's currently (incorrect) code in the NOOBS beta which means that if you change the language (...)
Until this bug gets fixed I guess that means you can't change language before installing more than one OS at once (the boot-selection window only gets displayed when you have more than one OS installed).

come on, you kidding me, a product for the whole world was not tested for different languages - that's a very big "faux pas" that this could pass the QM (quality manager/management)
(shame to the devs )
(or is it a kind of hidden UK patriotism? - when u are not from UK, it's your own fault )

[gordon77]

Does NOOBS help at all with getting the latest updates ?
Things appear to be tweaked on a daily basis it seems, eg USB, RPi camera etc but these updates don't appear in the latest updates to Raspbian etc ? You seem to have to do update, upgrade, rpi-update etc to get the latest.

Surely it could be made much simpler to get the latest versions ?

[meltwater]

Excellent work, looking forward to trying this over the weekend.

- Remote access/headless, including direct link config
I will have to try it, but hoping it might be possible to use though network. including a direct link network cable...would add the ability to setup and use out of the box with just a laptop and network cable.

Unfortunately, NOOBs did have the side-effect that cmdline.txt was no longer visible on the SDcard from windows so it broke my quick hackaround for direct networking (very useful for workshops). Ultimately, it would be great if directlinks are auto detected as they are on other systems so you plug in a cable and a 169.254.x.x range address is picked. I've not tried it but I guess Bonjour would help with this.

Always time for that later anyway, and if I ever reach the end of my other RaspberryPi projects I would take a look. As it would provide a superfast minimal setup out of the box.

-Online backup
This is probably the next killer app. Even if it isn't part of NOOBs it would be helpful anyway (will have a look and see if I can find anything - suggestions welcome). Although the multiboot option could make a distro which performs backup a neat addition!

[rdb]

Unfortunately, NOOBs did have the side-effect that cmdline.txt was no longer visible on the SDcard

The cmdline.txt file has been renamed recovery.cmdline in NOOBS to differentiate between the cmdline.txt file used by NOOBS and that used by the installed OS. You should still be able to edit recovery.cmdline to force a static IP (although you will need to test this as we are using the buildroot kernel rather than the standard linux image).

Online backup - This is probably the next killer app.

As ever, pull requests are welcomed but it's not on our roadmap at present.

[rdb]

Does NOOBS help at all with getting the latest updates ?

Yes. If you are connected to the internet via an Ethernet connection then only the latest versions of each OS will ever be displayed in the OS list. If you have a version on disk that is the same as the online version then that will be shown in preference, otherwise the later online version will be displayed.

This should make installing up to date versions of the OS very easy, although obviously this will rewrite your existing install so you will still need to use apt-get to do in-place upgrades of packages and firmware.

Bear in mind that rpi-update is for bleeding-edge testers so is not suitable for mainstream NOOBS users.

[meltwater]

Unfortunately, NOOBs did have the side-effect that cmdline.txt was no longer visible on the SDcard

The cmdline.txt file has been renamed recovery.cmdline in NOOBS to differentiate between the cmdline.txt file used by NOOBS and that used by the installed OS. You should still be able to edit recovery.cmdline to force a static IP (although you will need to test this as we are using the buildroot kernel rather than the standard linux image).

Online backup - This is probably the next killer app.

As ever, pull requests are welcomed but it's not on our roadmap at present.

No problem, just rushing into the candy-shop with greedy eyes...

When I tried it previously with recovery.cmdline forcing the IP didn't seem to achieve much (although that was after an OS install). I was still able to mount the card and change the distro's cmdline.txt, but wasn't as easy.

[rdb]

The reason that @beta-tester got a blank boot-selection window is because of a bug I've already reported to @rdb

I'm in the process of pushing a fix now and will update the download links.

[DeeJay]

Does NOOBS help at all with getting the latest updates ?

Bear in mind that raspi-config is for bleeding-edge testers so is not suitable for mainstream NOOBS users.

Was rpi-update intended here? raspi-config is surely an everyday tool now?

[rdb]

Was rpi-update intended here? raspi-config is surely an everyday tool now?

Yes! Corrected in post. raspi-config is very much a tool intended for all users.

[jamesh]

The reason that @beta-tester got a blank boot-selection window is because of a bug I've already reported to @rdb

i hope the dev notices that and fix it as soon as possible.

There's currently (incorrect) code in the NOOBS beta which means that if you change the language (...)
Until this bug gets fixed I guess that means you can't change language before installing more than one OS at once (the boot-selection window only gets displayed when you have more than one OS installed).

come on, you kidding me, a product for the whole world was not tested for different languages - that's a very big "faux pas" that this could pass the QM (quality manager/management)
(shame to the devs )
(or is it a kind of hidden UK patriotism? - when u are not from UK, it's your own fault )

Was there something about the word Beta you didn't understand?

[beta-tester]

Was there something about the word Beta you didn't understand?

well, you are right - shame on ME!

does/can NOOBIE updates/upgrades itself automatically?