@@permagnusandersson6052 I'm writing down all the stores/vendors that have overpriced to not ever buy from them again. I understand the supply/demand balance for pricing, but it's just an abuse to do that, and more with something that was supposed to be affordable. Hope you get a decently priced one soon 🤙I need 8 :( waiting for a decrease in price
Just grabbed a raspberry pi 4 2gb model for $95 after a huge sale (initially $180). The base price for this model should be $65 CAD. They have raised the price 3x. Oh well they are sold out everywhere.
Actually, Microsoft has started doing this on new devices from different vendors. Vendor can put a URL in bios to connect to and download a Boot.vim file directly from Microsoft.
@@1pcfred Any modern computer contains code and certificates from MS in the UEFI boot loader as MS is currently the only company who has set up a signing authority for secure boot. It's not that they want to be the only one with that ability, it's that no one else is willing to invest the money to set up an independent signing authority.
I love the QOL updates that are coming to this space, especially in recent years. I remember being TERRIFIED of overwriting something when I first got into Linux, and then the same feeling years later with Pi operating systems. Seems like those scary new user feelings of "am I formatting the right drive" or "is this the right text config" where forums tell a new user to pop open the terminal are slowly coming to a close :)
This is something I didn't touch on in the video, but I'm right there with you. I think that's one huge distinguishing factor between Pi and other SBCs-I still have that dreadful feeling of "oh my gosh I might brick this thing by not following step 7 of 24 correctly to get it running" Versus with my Pi's, it's been at least 5 years since I bricked one. Red Shirt Jeff found his own way to cope with the stability, though...
@@JeffGeerling Yes that's 100% true, the Pi team has removed a ton of those feelings, and it's an amazing spot to be in! I've considered other boards in the past, especially with the shortages now, but the user experience just brings me back. I can't say I've ever bricked a Pi, so maybe that's further testament to the platform as a whole. Red Shirt Jeff would be very proud of all of the linux installs I've bricked over the years however ;)
@@duke_ferdinand3758 Hhmmm maybe we need a Red Shirt Jeff and a Red Shirt Duke video comparison? Topics for the video could include ... who has bricked more devices .... who has bricked the most Pis and a bonus would be who has done more physical damage to devices ????? 🙂
The Mouse that Roared! Wonderful capabilities being added to such a fabulous and cost effective platform. Very interesting to see where their development road map leads them.
just flashed the beta bootloader on my Pi400 with rpi-eeprom-update (pointing it to the beta bootloader file on the Pi) and it worked great. even without having any SD card inserted or DOK, the imager loaded, and once inserted a SD card, it recognized it immediately. great stuff from Raspberry
Heh, though if you're running Windows, and you haven't spent a bunch of time severing those connections already, it might as well be on their internal network :P
@@JeffGeerling true, but not from factory... The raspberry mecanism is open source and os agnostic... I don't picture it on a PC bios, specially since the last time it was "improved" with secure boot, it botched any os that weren't Microsoft's for years...
@@retrocomputing you meant the visual studio secret code microsoft injected into raspbian that sends telemetry to their servers? well, it doesn't come integrated in the firmware and you can avoid it by installing plain debian for example, something that can't happen if that code came in the "bios" of the board from factory
This sounds like one step closer to emmc on the Pi so you don't need the sd card. Plug in to the network and with no OS, the Pi does the network install and allows you to choose from a list and pulls down an OS, installs it to emmc and uses that as the boot device. If you manage to screw up the image, holding down a key on boot enables network install to get a different image.
Really looking forward to the PXE boot especially with clusters of Pi4s and CM4s. Way back in the day I made multiscopic displays with synchronized rendering over clusters with Linux and PXE.
I think the biggest thing being glossed over with this new feature is the underlying assumption that people who don't have a separate computer to help create a boot image for their RPi will somehow have an ethernet cable and available port on a router.
Most routers come with an Ethernet port (despite Starlink's new one not including it), and most include an Ethernet cable in the box. There are always exceptions, but every router I've bought in the past 20 years was that way. Even the cheapo ones ISPs send have it.
@@JeffGeerling i think that was about access to pi for people who don't have computers for example, many people don't have wifi and would want to use pi to tinker around (including me). But atleast there's still the older way of using another computer, and usb tethering is helpful too
There’s nothing glossed over. It’s another option. It’s not like you can’t flash an SD card anymore or buy an SD card already flashed. But more than that, with the exception of Starlink as Jeff mentioned, every router that I have seen in the last ~30 years has had at least one LAN Ethernet port. And every single one of those included an Ethernet cable. So who do you think would want to use this but is going “darn I can’t because it doesn’t work over Wifi”? It’s right up there with complaining that someone who doesn’t own a car has no use for a spare tire.
They could make the community explode even more by letting people offer complete turn key installs. Buy Pi, plug it into power and network, select Pi w/Pi Hole image. Boot into OS, a few config options and done!
Network boot on MacOS can be done with blank storage on Macs with replaceable system storage. The utility doesn't live on system storage, I'm not 100%, but I think it's part of the UEFI. It was added at a later date on some Macs and is independent of system storage
I mean pxe boot is usually a feature of the nic, and so it has to be enabled in uefi, but like on my machines running chelsio offload nics, I can enable it’s pxe boot functionality directly from its uefi plugin. Either way though, I’m missing which part of this Windows can’t do? I work at msft and network imaging is literally how we install or setup EVERYTHING. They even have it worked out so machines shipped from OEMs boot into a tool to load the current image the first time after unboxing rather than shopping with an OS installed. Plus it’s always been possible to use other bootloaders to my knowledge. Either way tho, this seems more like hardware/firmware than an OS feature to begin with.
For Mac's I believe they have a "mini shell" built into the BIOS that lets you do basic things like format and secure erase disks, plus install the OS. It is possible that this "mini shell" is stored on a partition on the disk though and maybe takes up so little space (like under 100MB) that it's not noticed when you format or look at the disk space free after formatting as most people probably assume it's consumed by the file system (as you do lose a percentage of your total available disk space on average to the file system, regardless of file system: FAT, EXT, NTFS, etc).
@@amnesia5490 confusing names: NetBoot vs Network Booting. As I understand it: NetBoot is PXE, and you’re right it depends on the on NIC. It pulls typically (always?) from a server on the local network. And you can determine which server it pulls from and configure what it’s going to pull. In my understanding, this doesn’t install the OS locally although from what you said it seems that might not always be the case. 🤷 Network Booting is pulling the OS from across the Internet and installing it locally after which it runs entirely from the local storage on that machine. As implemented on Raspberry Pi and macOS, the server it pulls from is specified in the motherboard firmware and it can only pull from that server. It is absolutely not user configurable. So it’s a another way to get a standard image from the computer manufacturer installed on the local storage. It doesn’t permit you to specify any other image including an image that you have created.
@@HR-wd6cw a Mac can start the process from a completely blank unformatted brand new disk so it’s not relying on something storied locally on a disk. It’s firmware based.
1:10 : This is exactly the same as the Pi. [Option] + [R] will boot to recovery from the hard drive, but [Option] + [Alt] + [R] will boot from the internet. Yes, technically this is only possible because a tiny bootloader is embedded in storage soldered on to the mac, but we are not talking about the SSD. We are talking about the firmware, just like on the Pi. If you have an older mac where the hard drive is removable you can replace the drive with a drive from Newegg, boot while holding [Option] + [Alt] + [R] and re-install Mac OS entirely from the internet.
@@Quickcat21MK Smartphones have locked bootloaders, don't support Linux in any convenient way if you manage to unlock it, and are quite lacking in I/O ports (and lack any GPIO pins,) all for maybe 3x the price of an equivalent Raspberry Pi.
This is great! It reminds me of the day of iOS 8.0 when I discovered PXE boot. I was able to boot any network computer right from my phone and able to reset admin passwords on windows xp and 7
This is a seriously cool feature. I can see this will make bouncing between OS images way faster with the custom image loader. Looking forward to testing.
This is a great guide. I read about this on the raspberry pi newsletter(I think, maybe it was an article) and this really goes into detail. Great guide!
A network install looks cool. I just did the uSD card shuffle to get 64-bit OS onto my 8GB Pi4 which boots from a NVME-USB drive. Took about 45 minutes to get it going. A network install right to an SSD would have been very useful.
This is good to deploy a new version of a system. I have a few raspis running the same code in a building, and today I have to login in every raspi to update their system and custom code, solve dependency problems and what not. With netboot I can walk with a pendrive and deploy a new system (already tested) in a single process. Of course I could pre-flash a bunch of SD and replace those in production, but now we have one more option.
Thanks for this video! I was completely unaware of this feature. Way cool! BTW, This appears to now (May, 2022) be out of beta and is now available under "Misc utilities" / "Bootloader". After flashing the EEPROM, remove the SD card and reboot the Pi. An Ethernet connection and an attached keyboard are required. Once the RPi-imager has been downloaded you can reinsert the SD card and proceed as normal. Heads up: after writing the OS to the SD card and verifying, your Pi will automatically reboot into the OS. This startled me the first time.
The RPi Foundation should be focusing their efforts into either pushing Broadcom to release the bootloader's source code or developing their own open source clone bootloader rather than putting up with Broadcom's gag order and developing these features behind closed doors.
@@joshuahigginbotham6745 Signing an NDA doesn't prevent the RPi Foundation from developing a clean room alternative and this exact situation has already been tested in court when IBM tried to sue everyone that sold IBM PC clones and argued the BIOS was their IP. They lost.
Aye yooo, I didn't realize how sick this actually is. This is super cool, useful and can reduce initial clutter. Thanks for making this, will definitely update the bootloader post beta. I find myself flashing SD's more often than I thought.
I walked into a Micro Center in Maryland and, behold, two pi 4s were sitting there, all alone. Sure, they were 2GB, but getting them allowed me to use one of them as my RetroPie set up and the 8GB one as my desktop. But, yeah, it was just random luck that they had those.
The local MC manager told me they get shipments every now and then... they're just sold out within minutes every time. You did, indeed, get lucky! Hopefully it won't take luck though as we get further into the year. This shortage has been painful!
Nice! This makes me even more excited for the future of Pi. Come on Pi5!!! Although to be fair, when I deploy a Pi I deploy it headless. So while I don't have to swap a drive from PC to Pi I do now have to connect a monitor to the Pi which is a bigger inconvenience. Hum...I need a way to simply connect the Pi to something like my iPad to make it more convenient.
Same sort of thing here. I have the additional problem that none of my monitors have HDMI, so I either have to plug it into the TV in the living room, or find my adapter for VGA. You know, if I'm setting up my rPis as "headless", perhaps I should name a couple of them "Mami" and "Tomoe"? Yeah, bad joke.
Why is deployment a problem at all? Micro SD cards are really cheap. Just prepare any OS and prepare SSH or VNC. Then clone that. The clone will work the same but they get another ip address. You can keep some spares and just use the one you like
@@alexruedi1995 It's not a problem. They are just making it even easier by not needing another machine....ever. For me though I don't use SD cards. They usually crap out in about a year with all the reading and writing my deployments do.
@@JustinEmlay Yeah my sd cards do not live long neither.. Just tried to help..if you setup vnc you can see the screen on your ipad. not sure how or why it is advantage to not have to use another machine. My "other" machine is much faster, even at writing to sd cards, always running and the tool to use (whenever i need a display). Always use your advantages. In your case maybe some script that mounts your ssd and copies from sd card. Anyway, those two commands will be faster on my main computer and the installation includes this. So even in best case, it will take me longer
I tried this out today and it worked first try. I did try to install twister OS from a thumbdrive without being connected to the network but it was a no go. It needs the network to download and boot into rpi imager. Wouldn't it be sweet if you could install rpi imager onto my the eeprom and that way you would not need network at all. Just boot into imager and install from a thumbdrive.
This Feature is similar what Debian Linux had in the past with the Netboot Image where you just had the installer on your drive and the rest was downloaded from the internet while installing.
Hey Jeff, just so you know, the subtitles no longer matches the video in the part about imager sourcecode. Subtitles: "the source code that actually builds the Raspberry Pi Imager buildroot image that makes this all work _isn't_ public-yet. Tim Gover, one of the Pi engineers said they intend to put the buildroot script on GitHub, they just need some time to do it." Video: "the source code that actually builds the Raspberry Pi Imager buildroot image that makes this all work is up on GitHub in the Imager project's embedded directory." No idea if this is something youtube does automatically, or if you have to add it manually, but I just thought I'd mention it since hard-of-hearing peeps might get a bit confused.
Ventiy is a game changer for installing images to bios/uefi computers :D would be cool though if you could download any image within ventoy, though its basically just as fast to just download it and copy onto the drive :D
Finally! A great reason to have procrastinated for so I long, after getting my Pi 3B... Now that I have the time-and most of the accessories-but, I’d be screwed, if I were to go looking for one, today... The product page connected to my order is no longer even there... = Hooray for procrastination!!!
Jeff, I would love to have a working walk through for net booting. Everything I tryed so far was not working well for me. So you have my 10 fingers up for this ;-) Thanks for you fantastic work. T'care out there 🤗
I saw something like this like 10 years ago on a Dual Socket 2011 board from Supermicro - it was around €600 for the board alone if I remember right. You could simply load any ISO into memory by supplying an UNC, HTTP or FTP address. The ISO stayed resident until total power failure or unloaded from BIOS. And the BIOS was available over the Network too. I always wondered why such a useful option never made it into more mundane boards. Also there are Ready-to-Run Containers (look for iPXE PXE ISO) for normal servers which add this function for any PXE client. It even has a nice interface to select different Images. One can debate if this is different from booting an ISO without an PXE wrapper but from a client/enduser perspective it is definitely the same.
TTBOMK, Apple internet recovery does not rely on the soldered down SSD. It was already available on my MBA2011 even without a functional SSD installed. So it’s doing it from eeprom as well.
True, but what I mean is the install target (at least on most of the newer M1 macs) is the internal soldered-in storage. On the Pi, it's pretty agnostic as to what you install to (NVMe, USB device, eMMC, microSD).
Nice, looking forward to you doing one on netbooting, the last one I was was over the top, and required me to replace my ISP's router - not an option here (it does 4G backup & voip)
Haven't checked, but if they haven't done this, they should have on the PiZeroV2. But as I say, haven't checked, so perhaps it was rolled in? If so, we could start weeing it rolled into V2 of Pi4, and if anyone gets around to rolling out more Pi3's, a V2 of that as well. On the other hand, it sounds like to even configure the option, you're going to need another computer to burn a MicroSD, so a first step is probably to add the function to the list of boot options out of the box.
The downside to network restore and network install is that your device is hackable from the get go when the powers on. A pc is safeish until it logs onto the os. as the network isnt enabled.
I used to do network install with FreeBSD 20 years ago. I would boot from the floppy, then select the network install, I could then select a local network source or install over the internet. It's nice this is now available for the RPI.
You booted off a floppy. That means you had boot media. The floppy was boot media. It means you were running FreeBSD before you installed FreeBSD. What's going on here is the BIOS has a boot image in it. You cannot get a no OS found system error. Being as an OS is embedded into the firmware.
@@1pcfred the OS is absolutely not embedded in the firmware. There’s enough code in the firmware to connect to a sever across the internet and start the download and install process. No more than that. Don’t know the details of how the Raspberry Pi does it, but on Apple computers the firmware connects to their servers, downloads what might be best called a shim program that can format a disk and then start to pull down the actual disk image. The one user selectable option is whether you get the OS version that originally shipped with that model or the most recent compatible OS version.
@@1pcfred 1) it’s not in the CPU. It’s in the chipset. It originally was a separate chip but for quite some me time it’s been integrated into the chipset. 2) Yes it’s part of the firmware but it’s not a boot image. It’s the OS of the Management Engine. It runs before the computer boots and it does not and cannot boot the computer. 3) Yes you can still get an “OS not found” system error. The Management Engine does not boot the computer. Just open up your computer and disconnect your boot drive me you’ll see. Without a boot drive , you can get into the BIOS/UEFI, but that’s it. If you let start up proceed normally you will get a message telling you there’s no OS. 4 I agree it’s completely invisible to the user, in part, because… it doesn’t boot the computer.
@@williamp6800 no one knows what it does. I've heard it is right in the CPU. The Chinese government won't use Intel hardware, that's for sure. That alone should tell you something too.
3:00 Show how to type in a torrent magnet link to an ISO (or img) file _(or a local directory such as the usb or cdrw or ftp for the actual dot-torrent file)_ so the pi grabs the full linux iso you have personally chosen _(i.e. the magnet link or dot-torrent file, e.g. via rtorrent or rutorrent or Libtorrent2 even if it needs qemu to work on arm)_ so then it installs the linux-iso after that. Also, what with the eeprom limitation, how can this (iso or img) all be forced into RAM _(like in a 4GB/8GB version)_ moments before install, like a LiveCD? Cheers. BTW "Wubi exe" in ubuntu (an xubuntu etc) 14-04LTS used to do the torrent method. Worked great in case servers were not available, years on. As an aside, other than installing over the GPIO, installing over the ethernet protocol in the HDMI would be based-pilled. That or squarewave audio data (like a modem scream) via the headphone/mic jack. Or by 'videoing' thousands or millions of version40 (3KB) QR codes via the camera. You know... like how Johnny5 Short-Circuit reads a book à la _"more input"._ My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining... Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love. Also, I'd say Matthew6.
Nice intro about Windows. Just to clarify though, so the Raspberry Pi can now set itself up, including the OS download from boot. Sounds like they did an excellent job of reproducing the Mac Internet Recovery partition. Honestly though, enough shade. All OSes copy each other. MacOS has got bits in it from NeXT OpenStep by design, and although they won't admit it, I see allot borrowed from Linux, Windows, and BeOS also. Mac, Windows, and Linux Display Environments and Window Managers have been borrowing heavily from each other for many years now. It is nice to see that start to go deeper and bring us quality of life improvements that hit before you even start the OS.
I didn't intend this to be something negative towards Microsoft, really-it's pretty much an impossible situation due to the way their OS is structured (officially supported on dozens of different manufacturer's systems). But I think it is important to highlight some of the benefits of the more vertical integration Pi has (while still being very OS agnostic; you can easily install any other OS compatible with the Pi through their own installer).
Is the PI Imager literally needed? Or is there no difference compared to switching to "beta" in /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update and run rpi-eeprom-update -a?
This is insanely cool. One must wonder why this isn't being done on EVERY computer. What manufacturer wouldn't be drooling over the idea of a system restore method that calls home?
Oh God! That's amazing... now I'm just waiting to get my hands on some new pi's to work with. In the meantime, I want to thank you for sharing with us and i hope to have some more time to start with ansible (yes, i bought that book too 😉
Apple internet recovery is actually on the eeprom/efi firmware as well not the ssd. Plenty of models with removable ssd support it. Even the old 2011 MacBook with SATA hdd
It'd be cool if we could ssh (or possibly telnet because of eeprom space constraints) in and network install that way, that way we don't need to bother with a monitor and keyboard at all.
Would be nice, though I'm not sure if they have the space available for that (I've heard there's only a few dozen KB left in the EEPROM at this point... might be enough but they don't want to fill it).
Well on a pc the issue is that you would either have it somehow universal, or only on MS PCs because i am not sure if i wanted an MS thing so deep on a pc
I need this to be an API I can hit with a "pictl" binary or something of the like. Being able to automate all of this with ansible would be awesome. That + ansible config for k3s, is cloud like infrastructure provisioning!
Dear Jeff, thanks for your effort with each video, they are great! I wanted to start again with Raspberries, but then I saw that prices have increased a lot (pi4, 8gb went from 80€ -> 140€ in Europe). Do you know where this came from / can you do a video about it? Cheers
I had this problem when I bought my Pi4 back in 2020. My system76 laptop broke (my fault) and living abroad, I couldn't get it fixed. So, I went without a computer for several months. I learned about the pi, did some more shopping around, and finally decided to get one. I assumed that everything would work just fine after I got it set up, as it was faster than the laptop that I bought back in 2013 (and I didn't realize the difference between ARM and x86-64). I didn't have a computer to set it up, so I had to rely on the store to do it for me, and I felt a little uncomfortable about that.
Actually, cool story. On intel macs, internet recovery has no requirement for anything to be on the drive. It uses code in the EFI BootROM that downloads the kernel directly from the internet, which then downloads the base install system directly from the internet. This works even if there is no internal storage installed (or working). Apple Silicon Macs are a whole different story.
I would love to see your video on NetBooting a RPi. I replaced my wifes windows laptop with a RPi 4 8gb and she barely noticed any changes as the software she used for work also comes on the RPi ubuntu image I used.
@@JeffGeerling Actually, her HDD on her windows machine started to Die, Linux even gave hardware errors so I used a live CD to recover what I could and replaced it. most of her stuff is saved on the NAS and so it was just configure the share to an NFS share and add it to the fstab :P It was great ^^
I wonder if they will add a SelfHosted option for this? Just setup a few key files on your own web server Hijack a specific Pi foundation DNS entry Away you go.
Not trying to defend anyone here, but Microsoft had a PXE Server boot solution with the option for network install already. Also, this technology is very useful when cloning multiple machines (+20) at once.
True, though PXE boot/install is a bit different than a solution that works anywhere with an Internet connection (and doesn't require you to run your own image server somewhere).
I wonder if you can edit the web location the bootloader reaches out to to retrieve the image. It'd be really interesting to build a service that either lets you upload your own images so that you can deploy them anywhere OR a service that users can license to access managed images from anywhere. Imagine third party emulation cabinets that run raspberry pis that you could buy and not need to setup beyond a few steps on first boot (to retrieve and install the latest image).
I was thinking about this myself. Spin up a server in a VM somewhere in my network, that hosts the Pi distros that I cycle through for various uses; or even personalized images for when I swap out a Pi or an SD card, and just pull it off my server. Kind of like netboot, but like.... permanent. Not quite sure how to describe what I have in mind here.
@@tomshotdogs6645 if the images are hosted on your own network, how is what you’re taking about different from Netboot? What isn’t permanent about Netboot or more permanent about this idea?
well windows in recovery mode does have an option to download and install from cloud , this what I did today , if you only have one pc and you can not create a bootable media , this a super option , all you need is a LAN connection
raspberry pi 400 works pretty well with braille. it's one of the easier ones to setup. i created a RPi400 + Orbit20 reader (ie: 20-cells of braille) setup with no mouse or screen, working fine over USB from boot. I can't figure out how to get an Orbit40 (40 cells of braille) to work due to a serial port conflict; but over bluetooth I can type a few commands before I can see any responses in braille... and can manage to get to a bash terminal in braille that way. the Orbit Readers are vastly cheaper than other braille terminals. they are so cheap that hobbyists that can see just fine can consider learning them.
to get it working with braille, install brltty, and then install something that can do braille without a GUI. then when you are in the GUI, you can setup Orca... which is needed to follow you around between windows and read everything to you, which is routed to braille.
WTF I bought a Pi4 in October 2020 for 80€. Now I wanted to buy one for home office but it's hard to find one and if I have to pay 250€. I knew that graphic cards are insanely expensive and electronic stuff became expensive but this is ridiculous.
One thing that came in mind: Maybe the Raspberry Foundation could "ruggedize" RasPiOS a little if they move the user directory to a seperate partition from the main OS in the future? Then if things go wrong, you could re-install the OS with your userdata intact. And as long as you don't use any non-default repos or compile stuff straight from Github, reinstalling all software is just one "sudo apt install [list of programs]" away from going back to a working state.
My standard procedure for an OS install is to allocate two OS partitions of, say, 50-60GB each, and leave the rest for /home. I install my distro of choice into one OS partition, and leave the other one unused in case I want to try something else in future: this way, they can both share the /home partition, so I have all my user files still available if/when I switch, without having to copy a whole lot of stuff across.
I've got netboot setup already - but this is pretty cool! If you could select an NFS share to write the image to and then have the Pi boot to that NFS share, that would be REALLY cool. (i.e. set up netboot from the beginning.) All I'd need would be for the NFS share to be available with enough space for the image to be written to that directory.
One upside to there being no available pi’s anywhere is that when you do find one in the future this should be on its eeprom!
Prices have skyrocketed in my country. Have seen it for $350. Dwfuq. :(
@@bitstream_ same here.. 284€ as the only offer I can find
insanity
@@permagnusandersson6052 I'm writing down all the stores/vendors that have overpriced to not ever buy from them again. I understand the supply/demand balance for pricing, but it's just an abuse to do that, and more with something that was supposed to be affordable. Hope you get a decently priced one soon 🤙I need 8 :( waiting for a decrease in price
Just grabbed a raspberry pi 4 2gb model for $95 after a huge sale (initially $180). The base price for this model should be $65 CAD. They have raised the price 3x. Oh well they are sold out everywhere.
@@bitstream_ ya total scam atm
3:14 Missed opportunity to call that the Green Screen of Life.
Actually, Microsoft has started doing this on new devices from different vendors.
Vendor can put a URL in bios to connect to and download a Boot.vim file directly from Microsoft.
Shhhhhh. Year of the Linux Desktop is here. Any day now. ;-)
If I ever find a Microsoft URL in a BIOS I'll take them to court!
And you've been able to do it on your own for over a decade if not decades too... It's not new in either camp.
@@1pcfred Any modern computer contains code and certificates from MS in the UEFI boot loader as MS is currently the only company who has set up a signing authority for secure boot. It's not that they want to be the only one with that ability, it's that no one else is willing to invest the money to set up an independent signing authority.
@@Hans-gb4mv I run Linux and use legacy BIOS.
I love the QOL updates that are coming to this space, especially in recent years. I remember being TERRIFIED of overwriting something when I first got into Linux, and then the same feeling years later with Pi operating systems. Seems like those scary new user feelings of "am I formatting the right drive" or "is this the right text config" where forums tell a new user to pop open the terminal are slowly coming to a close :)
This is something I didn't touch on in the video, but I'm right there with you.
I think that's one huge distinguishing factor between Pi and other SBCs-I still have that dreadful feeling of "oh my gosh I might brick this thing by not following step 7 of 24 correctly to get it running"
Versus with my Pi's, it's been at least 5 years since I bricked one. Red Shirt Jeff found his own way to cope with the stability, though...
Amazing developments !
@@JeffGeerling Yes that's 100% true, the Pi team has removed a ton of those feelings, and it's an amazing spot to be in! I've considered other boards in the past, especially with the shortages now, but the user experience just brings me back. I can't say I've ever bricked a Pi, so maybe that's further testament to the platform as a whole.
Red Shirt Jeff would be very proud of all of the linux installs I've bricked over the years however ;)
@@duke_ferdinand3758 Hhmmm maybe we need a Red Shirt Jeff and a Red Shirt Duke video comparison? Topics for the video could include ... who has bricked more devices .... who has bricked the most Pis and a bonus would be who has done more physical damage to devices ????? 🙂
The Mouse that Roared! Wonderful capabilities being added to such a fabulous and cost effective platform. Very interesting to see where their development road map leads them.
just flashed the beta bootloader on my Pi400 with rpi-eeprom-update (pointing it to the beta bootloader file on the Pi) and it worked great. even without having any SD card inserted or DOK, the imager loaded, and once inserted a SD card, it recognized it immediately. great stuff from Raspberry
Your videos inspire me to tinker with my pi everyday. I love your content!
The least i would want on my new PC is a direct hardcoded connection to Microsoft servers so it can download and install windows
Heh, though if you're running Windows, and you haven't spent a bunch of time severing those connections already, it might as well be on their internal network :P
@@JeffGeerling true, but not from factory... The raspberry mecanism is open source and os agnostic... I don't picture it on a PC bios, specially since the last time it was "improved" with secure boot, it botched any os that weren't Microsoft's for years...
@@darioampuy you have a closed source firmware from MS in your Pi tho
@@retrocomputing you meant the visual studio secret code microsoft injected into raspbian that sends telemetry to their servers? well, it doesn't come integrated in the firmware and you can avoid it by installing plain debian for example, something that can't happen if that code came in the "bios" of the board from factory
@@darioampuy nnnope, I'm talking about ThreadX
This sounds like one step closer to emmc on the Pi so you don't need the sd card. Plug in to the network and with no OS, the Pi does the network install and allows you to choose from a list and pulls down an OS, installs it to emmc and uses that as the boot device. If you manage to screw up the image, holding down a key on boot enables network install to get a different image.
The internet recovery on macs is also part of the firmware (just like this new Pi feature), not of the built-in storage (as suggested in the video)
Really looking forward to the PXE boot especially with clusters of Pi4s and CM4s. Way back in the day I made multiscopic displays with synchronized rendering over clusters with Linux and PXE.
I think the biggest thing being glossed over with this new feature is the underlying assumption that people who don't have a separate computer to help create a boot image for their RPi will somehow have an ethernet cable and available port on a router.
Most routers come with an Ethernet port (despite Starlink's new one not including it), and most include an Ethernet cable in the box.
There are always exceptions, but every router I've bought in the past 20 years was that way. Even the cheapo ones ISPs send have it.
@@JeffGeerling not to mention if your main is down or otherwise occupied lets you keep rolling on other projects.
@Jesus has given you all. Repent or die.
He preparest an sd card before me in the abscence of mine network cable.
@@JeffGeerling i think that was about access to pi for people who don't have computers
for example, many people don't have wifi and would want to use pi to tinker around (including me). But atleast there's still the older way of using another computer, and usb tethering is helpful too
There’s nothing glossed over. It’s another option. It’s not like you can’t flash an SD card anymore or buy an SD card already flashed.
But more than that, with the exception of Starlink as Jeff mentioned, every router that I have seen in the last ~30 years has had at least one LAN Ethernet port. And every single one of those included an Ethernet cable. So who do you think would want to use this but is going “darn I can’t because it doesn’t work over Wifi”?
It’s right up there with complaining that someone who doesn’t own a car has no use for a spare tire.
4:08 missed opportunity to add a "Press to run setup" prompt.
They could make the community explode even more by letting people offer complete turn key installs. Buy Pi, plug it into power and network, select Pi w/Pi Hole image. Boot into OS, a few config options and done!
Network boot on MacOS can be done with blank storage on Macs with replaceable system storage. The utility doesn't live on system storage, I'm not 100%, but I think it's part of the UEFI. It was added at a later date on some Macs and is independent of system storage
I mean pxe boot is usually a feature of the nic, and so it has to be enabled in uefi, but like on my machines running chelsio offload nics, I can enable it’s pxe boot functionality directly from its uefi plugin. Either way though, I’m missing which part of this Windows can’t do? I work at msft and network imaging is literally how we install or setup EVERYTHING. They even have it worked out so machines shipped from OEMs boot into a tool to load the current image the first time after unboxing rather than shopping with an OS installed. Plus it’s always been possible to use other bootloaders to my knowledge. Either way tho, this seems more like hardware/firmware than an OS feature to begin with.
For Mac's I believe they have a "mini shell" built into the BIOS that lets you do basic things like format and secure erase disks, plus install the OS. It is possible that this "mini shell" is stored on a partition on the disk though and maybe takes up so little space (like under 100MB) that it's not noticed when you format or look at the disk space free after formatting as most people probably assume it's consumed by the file system (as you do lose a percentage of your total available disk space on average to the file system, regardless of file system: FAT, EXT, NTFS, etc).
@@amnesia5490 confusing names: NetBoot vs Network Booting.
As I understand it:
NetBoot is PXE, and you’re right it depends on the on NIC. It pulls typically (always?) from a server on the local network. And you can determine which server it pulls from and configure what it’s going to pull. In my understanding, this doesn’t install the OS locally although from what you said it seems that might not always be the case. 🤷
Network Booting is pulling the OS from across the Internet and installing it locally after which it runs entirely from the local storage on that machine. As implemented on Raspberry Pi and macOS, the server it pulls from is specified in the motherboard firmware and it can only pull from that server. It is absolutely not user configurable. So it’s a another way to get a standard image from the computer manufacturer installed on the local storage. It doesn’t permit you to specify any other image including an image that you have created.
@@HR-wd6cw a Mac can start the process from a completely blank unformatted brand new disk so it’s not relying on something storied locally on a disk. It’s firmware based.
I did this with my new Pi 400. Works like a charm. Did it 2 days ago with the new 64bit OS. It was a great way to install the OS.
Jeff, your channel is quickly becoming the best channel on TH-cam for all things RPi!
1:10 : This is exactly the same as the Pi. [Option] + [R] will boot to recovery from the hard drive, but [Option] + [Alt] + [R] will boot from the internet. Yes, technically this is only possible because a tiny bootloader is embedded in storage soldered on to the mac, but we are not talking about the SSD. We are talking about the firmware, just like on the Pi. If you have an older mac where the hard drive is removable you can replace the drive with a drive from Newegg, boot while holding [Option] + [Alt] + [R] and re-install Mac OS entirely from the internet.
Currently the biggest stumbling block for brand new Pi owners is, well, actually being able to buy any Pi to *become* a brand new Pi owner. :(
@@Quickcat21MK Smartphones have locked bootloaders, don't support Linux in any convenient way if you manage to unlock it, and are quite lacking in I/O ports (and lack any GPIO pins,) all for maybe 3x the price of an equivalent Raspberry Pi.
This is great! It reminds me of the day of iOS 8.0 when I discovered PXE boot. I was able to boot any network computer right from my phone and able to reset admin passwords on windows xp and 7
This is a seriously cool feature. I can see this will make bouncing between OS images way faster with the custom image loader. Looking forward to testing.
This is a great guide. I read about this on the raspberry pi newsletter(I think, maybe it was an article) and this really goes into detail. Great guide!
I'm pretty excited for this. I hope the final will include an option to input a download link to images. Maybe with a security warning on that option.
A network install looks cool. I just did the uSD card shuffle to get 64-bit OS onto my 8GB Pi4 which boots from a NVME-USB drive. Took about 45 minutes to get it going. A network install right to an SSD would have been very useful.
This is good to deploy a new version of a system. I have a few raspis running the same code in a building, and today I have to login in every raspi to update their system and custom code, solve dependency problems and what not. With netboot I can walk with a pendrive and deploy a new system (already tested) in a single process. Of course I could pre-flash a bunch of SD and replace those in production, but now we have one more option.
Thanks for this video! I was completely unaware of this feature. Way cool!
BTW, This appears to now (May, 2022) be out of beta and is now available under "Misc utilities" / "Bootloader".
After flashing the EEPROM, remove the SD card and reboot the Pi. An Ethernet connection and an attached keyboard are required. Once the RPi-imager has been downloaded you can reinsert the SD card and proceed as normal.
Heads up: after writing the OS to the SD card and verifying, your Pi will automatically reboot into the OS. This startled me the first time.
The RPi Foundation should be focusing their efforts into either pushing Broadcom to release the bootloader's source code or developing their own open source clone bootloader rather than putting up with Broadcom's gag order and developing these features behind closed doors.
I'm sure they signed an NDA. If we want the details I am pretty sure the only way would be to file a class action suit on behalf of Pi owners.
@@joshuahigginbotham6745 Signing an NDA doesn't prevent the RPi Foundation from developing a clean room alternative and this exact situation has already been tested in court when IBM tried to sue everyone that sold IBM PC clones and argued the BIOS was their IP. They lost.
Thank you for covering the security concerns!
Good step in the right direction!
Not ready for production-roll-out though, but I will keep a close eye to this ...
Awesome addition to the Pi4 family. I will be experimenting with it soon.
Aye yooo, I didn't realize how sick this actually is. This is super cool, useful and can reduce initial clutter.
Thanks for making this, will definitely update the bootloader post beta. I find myself flashing SD's more often than I thought.
Extremely helpful. Thanks Jeff!
The thing I love about this channel most is that dude's haircut
Like always I leave with a new thing to try with my Pi.
This is, once again, a fascinating video.
I walked into a Micro Center in Maryland and, behold, two pi 4s were sitting there, all alone. Sure, they were 2GB, but getting them allowed me to use one of them as my RetroPie set up and the 8GB one as my desktop. But, yeah, it was just random luck that they had those.
The local MC manager told me they get shipments every now and then... they're just sold out within minutes every time. You did, indeed, get lucky!
Hopefully it won't take luck though as we get further into the year. This shortage has been painful!
Love your videos. Plain and straight forward to follow. Thanks Buddy
Excellent video as ever, Jeff - can't wait for your netboot video, interested to see that working on non-CM4s, maybe Pi0W and some others? :)
I love these updates from the raspberry pi news network :)
Thanks, Jeff! Another interesting video about the Raspberry Pi 😊.
I can also see this being very useful for children who have a Raspberry Pi, but don't have any other computers.
Thanks Jeff! This is the best Pi feature since the RPi 4! Now, If I can just get the Pis to use it with
Ahh Jeff..I do enjoy your videos....beyond learning something every time...You NEVER tell us you will GO AHEAD. If nothing else I love that.
Nice! This makes me even more excited for the future of Pi. Come on Pi5!!!
Although to be fair, when I deploy a Pi I deploy it headless. So while I don't have to swap a drive from PC to Pi I do now have to connect a monitor to the Pi which is a bigger inconvenience. Hum...I need a way to simply connect the Pi to something like my iPad to make it more convenient.
Same sort of thing here. I have the additional problem that none of my monitors have HDMI, so I either have to plug it into the TV in the living room, or find my adapter for VGA.
You know, if I'm setting up my rPis as "headless", perhaps I should name a couple of them "Mami" and "Tomoe"? Yeah, bad joke.
Why is deployment a problem at all? Micro SD cards are really cheap. Just prepare any OS and prepare SSH or VNC. Then clone that. The clone will work the same but they get another ip address. You can keep some spares and just use the one you like
@@alexruedi1995 It's not a problem. They are just making it even easier by not needing another machine....ever. For me though I don't use SD cards. They usually crap out in about a year with all the reading and writing my deployments do.
@@JustinEmlay Yeah my sd cards do not live long neither..
Just tried to help..if you setup vnc you can see the screen on your ipad. not sure how or why it is advantage to not have to use another machine. My "other" machine is much faster, even at writing to sd cards, always running and the tool to use (whenever i need a display). Always use your advantages. In your case maybe some script that mounts your ssd and copies from sd card. Anyway, those two commands will be faster on my main computer and the installation includes this. So even in best case, it will take me longer
Nice new features, thanks for bringing them up
I just bookmarked your video and will watch when Pi will be back in stock.
Awessome video Jeff !!!! Thanks for explaining, will have to try.
I tried this out today and it worked first try. I did try to install twister OS from a thumbdrive without being connected to the network but it was a no go. It needs the network to download and boot into rpi imager. Wouldn't it be sweet if you could install rpi imager onto my the eeprom and that way you would not need network at all. Just boot into imager and install from a thumbdrive.
This Feature is similar what Debian Linux had in the past with the Netboot Image where you just had the installer on your drive and the rest was downloaded from the internet while installing.
This feature is actually pretty damn cool.
Hey Jeff, just so you know, the subtitles no longer matches the video in the part about imager sourcecode.
Subtitles: "the source code that actually builds the Raspberry Pi Imager buildroot image that makes this all work _isn't_ public-yet. Tim Gover, one of the Pi engineers said they intend to put the buildroot script on GitHub, they just need some time to do it."
Video: "the source code that actually builds the Raspberry Pi Imager buildroot image that makes this all work is up on GitHub in the Imager project's embedded directory."
No idea if this is something youtube does automatically, or if you have to add it manually, but I just thought I'd mention it since hard-of-hearing peeps might get a bit confused.
Sorry about that, and good catch-I've fixed it. That was a last-minute change that didn't hit the subtitle track I prepare for TH-cam.
Ventiy is a game changer for installing images to bios/uefi computers :D would be cool though if you could download any image within ventoy, though its basically just as fast to just download it and copy onto the drive :D
Awesome! Thank you for another useful video. You never cease to amaze me with your knowledge and ability to explain technology.
So awaiting feature on raspberry pi, I ordered a pi 4 8G and waiting for more than a month, hope it will reach when this feature is out of beta.
Amazing, a semi-normal install process for a Pi!
I don’t understand half of these combinations of words but I’m excited
remote pi imager url web your router your ethernet pi4 the tiny eprom storage with the net/usb boot loader to start loading pi 'stuff'
"You can't buy any pi at this moment" Proceeds to cut one in half
Finally! A great reason to have procrastinated for so I long, after getting my Pi 3B...
Now that I have the time-and most of the accessories-but, I’d be screwed, if I were to go looking for one, today...
The product page connected to my order is no longer even there...
= Hooray for procrastination!!!
Jeff, I would love to have a working walk through for net booting. Everything I tryed so far was not working well for me. So you have my 10 fingers up for this ;-) Thanks for you fantastic work. T'care out there 🤗
I've only been in the pi community for about two years now. But I swear the level of progress is getting bigger and faster.
I saw something like this like 10 years ago on a Dual Socket 2011 board from Supermicro - it was around €600 for the board alone if I remember right. You could simply load any ISO into memory by supplying an UNC, HTTP or FTP address. The ISO stayed resident until total power failure or unloaded from BIOS. And the BIOS was available over the Network too. I always wondered why such a useful option never made it into more mundane boards.
Also there are Ready-to-Run Containers (look for iPXE PXE ISO) for normal servers which add this function for any PXE client. It even has a nice interface to select different Images. One can debate if this is different from booting an ISO without an PXE wrapper but from a client/enduser perspective it is definitely the same.
Thanks!
Jeff: Good luck finding a RPi
Also Jeff: Cutting RPi gore-ly like no tomorrow
TTBOMK, Apple internet recovery does not rely on the soldered down SSD. It was already available on my MBA2011 even without a functional SSD installed. So it’s doing it from eeprom as well.
True, but what I mean is the install target (at least on most of the newer M1 macs) is the internal soldered-in storage. On the Pi, it's pretty agnostic as to what you install to (NVMe, USB device, eMMC, microSD).
Nice, looking forward to you doing one on netbooting, the last one I was was over the top, and required me to replace my ISP's router - not an option here (it does 4G backup & voip)
Actually a new feature that impresses me. It's been a while.
0:46 Micro Center Brentwood!
It's just killing me to find Raspberry Pis this last year!
Haven't checked, but if they haven't done this, they should have on the PiZeroV2. But as I say, haven't checked, so perhaps it was rolled in? If so, we could start weeing it rolled into V2 of Pi4, and if anyone gets around to rolling out more Pi3's, a V2 of that as well. On the other hand, it sounds like to even configure the option, you're going to need another computer to burn a MicroSD, so a first step is probably to add the function to the list of boot options out of the box.
The downside to network restore and network install is that your device is hackable from the get go when the powers on. A pc is safeish until it logs onto the os. as the network isnt enabled.
I used to do network install with FreeBSD 20 years ago. I would boot from the floppy, then select the network install, I could then select a local network source or install over the internet. It's nice this is now available for the RPI.
You booted off a floppy. That means you had boot media. The floppy was boot media. It means you were running FreeBSD before you installed FreeBSD. What's going on here is the BIOS has a boot image in it. You cannot get a no OS found system error. Being as an OS is embedded into the firmware.
@@1pcfred the OS is absolutely not embedded in the firmware. There’s enough code in the firmware to connect to a sever across the internet and start the download and install process. No more than that.
Don’t know the details of how the Raspberry Pi does it, but on Apple computers the firmware connects to their servers, downloads what might be best called a shim program that can format a disk and then start to pull down the actual disk image. The one user selectable option is whether you get the OS version that originally shipped with that model or the most recent compatible OS version.
@@williamp6800 Intel CPUs have Minix in them. It's there to handle internal housekeeping tasks. It's completely invisible to the user.
@@1pcfred
1) it’s not in the CPU. It’s in the chipset. It originally was a separate chip but for quite some me time it’s been integrated into the chipset.
2) Yes it’s part of the firmware but it’s not a boot image. It’s the OS of the Management Engine. It runs before the computer boots and it does not and cannot boot the computer.
3) Yes you can still get an “OS not found” system error. The Management Engine does not boot the computer. Just open up your computer and disconnect your boot drive me you’ll see.
Without a boot drive , you can get into the BIOS/UEFI, but that’s it. If you let start up proceed normally you will get a message telling you there’s no OS.
4 I agree it’s completely invisible to the user, in part, because… it doesn’t boot the computer.
@@williamp6800 no one knows what it does. I've heard it is right in the CPU. The Chinese government won't use Intel hardware, that's for sure. That alone should tell you something too.
3:00 Show how to type in a torrent magnet link to an ISO (or img) file _(or a local directory such as the usb or cdrw or ftp for the actual dot-torrent file)_ so the pi grabs the full linux iso you have personally chosen _(i.e. the magnet link or dot-torrent file, e.g. via rtorrent or rutorrent or Libtorrent2 even if it needs qemu to work on arm)_ so then it installs the linux-iso after that. Also, what with the eeprom limitation, how can this (iso or img) all be forced into RAM _(like in a 4GB/8GB version)_ moments before install, like a LiveCD? Cheers.
BTW "Wubi exe" in ubuntu (an xubuntu etc) 14-04LTS used to do the torrent method. Worked great in case servers were not available, years on.
As an aside, other than installing over the GPIO, installing over the ethernet protocol in the HDMI would be based-pilled. That or squarewave audio data (like a modem scream) via the headphone/mic jack. Or by 'videoing' thousands or millions of version40 (3KB) QR codes via the camera. You know... like how Johnny5 Short-Circuit reads a book à la _"more input"._
My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining... Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love. Also, I'd say Matthew6.
Nice intro about Windows. Just to clarify though, so the Raspberry Pi can now set itself up, including the OS download from boot. Sounds like they did an excellent job of reproducing the Mac Internet Recovery partition.
Honestly though, enough shade. All OSes copy each other. MacOS has got bits in it from NeXT OpenStep by design, and although they won't admit it, I see allot borrowed from Linux, Windows, and BeOS also. Mac, Windows, and Linux Display Environments and Window Managers have been borrowing heavily from each other for many years now. It is nice to see that start to go deeper and bring us quality of life improvements that hit before you even start the OS.
I didn't intend this to be something negative towards Microsoft, really-it's pretty much an impossible situation due to the way their OS is structured (officially supported on dozens of different manufacturer's systems).
But I think it is important to highlight some of the benefits of the more vertical integration Pi has (while still being very OS agnostic; you can easily install any other OS compatible with the Pi through their own installer).
@@JeffGeerling LOL I was watching "This Raspberry Pi controls ANY PC (BliKVM)" when I saw the notice you replied.
Is the PI Imager literally needed? Or is there no difference compared to switching to "beta" in /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update and run rpi-eeprom-update -a?
You can do it that way too... I probably should've mentioned it in the video, oops!
This is insanely cool. One must wonder why this isn't being done on EVERY computer. What manufacturer wouldn't be drooling over the idea of a system restore method that calls home?
Oh God! That's amazing... now I'm just waiting to get my hands on some new pi's to work with. In the meantime, I want to thank you for sharing with us and i hope to have some more time to start with ansible (yes, i bought that book too 😉
Happy automating!
Apple internet recovery is actually on the eeprom/efi firmware as well not the ssd. Plenty of models with removable ssd support it. Even the old 2011 MacBook with SATA hdd
It'd be cool if we could ssh (or possibly telnet because of eeprom space constraints) in and network install that way, that way we don't need to bother with a monitor and keyboard at all.
Would be nice, though I'm not sure if they have the space available for that (I've heard there's only a few dozen KB left in the EEPROM at this point... might be enough but they don't want to fill it).
Well on a pc the issue is that you would either have it somehow universal, or only on MS PCs because i am not sure if i wanted an MS thing so deep on a pc
I need this to be an API I can hit with a "pictl" binary or something of the like.
Being able to automate all of this with ansible would be awesome.
That + ansible config for k3s, is cloud like infrastructure provisioning!
Dear Jeff, thanks for your effort with each video, they are great!
I wanted to start again with Raspberries, but then I saw that prices have increased a lot (pi4, 8gb went from 80€ -> 140€ in Europe).
Do you know where this came from / can you do a video about it?
Cheers
Hmm, your channel has interesting videos. Subscribed. 😮
Great video Sir.
Great job 👌
Great feature, now can install Raspberry Pi OS directly into my HDD
I never knew Steve Bushemi made TH-cam videos about the pi... I'll have to check out future videos
I had this problem when I bought my Pi4 back in 2020. My system76 laptop broke (my fault) and living abroad, I couldn't get it fixed. So, I went without a computer for several months. I learned about the pi, did some more shopping around, and finally decided to get one. I assumed that everything would work just fine after I got it set up, as it was faster than the laptop that I bought back in 2013 (and I didn't realize the difference between ARM and x86-64). I didn't have a computer to set it up, so I had to rely on the store to do it for me, and I felt a little uncomfortable about that.
Its going to be wonderful feature...Pi is now advancing to more and more feasible features..
Actually, cool story. On intel macs, internet recovery has no requirement for anything to be on the drive. It uses code in the EFI BootROM that downloads the kernel directly from the internet, which then downloads the base install system directly from the internet.
This works even if there is no internal storage installed (or working).
Apple Silicon Macs are a whole different story.
Nice cut at 7:19, lol the CC still shows the old content though
heh, oops! Got it fixed now though.
Absolutley it will become the main way for alot of owners to install the PI, a nice feature :)
I would love to see your video on NetBooting a RPi. I replaced my wifes windows laptop with a RPi 4 8gb and she barely noticed any changes as the software she used for work also comes on the RPi ubuntu image I used.
Nice, the old Pi switcheroo
@@JeffGeerling Actually, her HDD on her windows machine started to Die, Linux even gave hardware errors so I used a live CD to recover what I could and replaced it. most of her stuff is saved on the NAS and so it was just configure the share to an NFS share and add it to the fstab :P It was great ^^
I wonder if they will add a SelfHosted option for this?
Just setup a few key files on your own web server
Hijack a specific Pi foundation DNS entry
Away you go.
Not trying to defend anyone here, but Microsoft had a PXE Server boot solution with the option for network install already. Also, this technology is very useful when cloning multiple machines (+20) at once.
True, though PXE boot/install is a bit different than a solution that works anywhere with an Internet connection (and doesn't require you to run your own image server somewhere).
I wonder if you can edit the web location the bootloader reaches out to to retrieve the image. It'd be really interesting to build a service that either lets you upload your own images so that you can deploy them anywhere OR a service that users can license to access managed images from anywhere. Imagine third party emulation cabinets that run raspberry pis that you could buy and not need to setup beyond a few steps on first boot (to retrieve and install the latest image).
I was thinking about this myself. Spin up a server in a VM somewhere in my network, that hosts the Pi distros that I cycle through for various uses; or even personalized images for when I swap out a Pi or an SD card, and just pull it off my server. Kind of like netboot, but like.... permanent. Not quite sure how to describe what I have in mind here.
@@tomshotdogs6645 if the images are hosted on your own network, how is what you’re taking about different from Netboot? What isn’t permanent about Netboot or more permanent about this idea?
well windows in recovery mode does have an option to download and install from cloud , this what I did today , if you only have one pc and you can not create a bootable media , this a super option , all you need is a LAN connection
raspberry pi 400 works pretty well with braille. it's one of the easier ones to setup. i created a RPi400 + Orbit20 reader (ie: 20-cells of braille) setup with no mouse or screen, working fine over USB from boot.
I can't figure out how to get an Orbit40 (40 cells of braille) to work due to a serial port conflict; but over bluetooth I can type a few commands before I can see any responses in braille... and can manage to get to a bash terminal in braille that way. the Orbit Readers are vastly cheaper than other braille terminals. they are so cheap that hobbyists that can see just fine can consider learning them.
to get it working with braille, install brltty, and then install something that can do braille without a GUI. then when you are in the GUI, you can setup Orca... which is needed to follow you around between windows and read everything to you, which is routed to braille.
WTF
I bought a Pi4 in October 2020 for 80€. Now I wanted to buy one for home office but it's hard to find one and if I have to pay 250€.
I knew that graphic cards are insanely expensive and electronic stuff became expensive but this is ridiculous.
The Pi 5 and Pi 500, will be glorious… Good job!
One thing that came in mind: Maybe the Raspberry Foundation could "ruggedize" RasPiOS a little if they move the user directory to a seperate partition from the main OS in the future? Then if things go wrong, you could re-install the OS with your userdata intact.
And as long as you don't use any non-default repos or compile stuff straight from Github, reinstalling all software is just one "sudo apt install [list of programs]" away from going back to a working state.
Container-izing user data into its own partition makes complete sense!!!
@@fookingsog unless you have magical dynamic size partitions, it makes not.
My standard procedure for an OS install is to allocate two OS partitions of, say, 50-60GB each, and leave the rest for /home. I install my distro of choice into one OS partition, and leave the other one unused in case I want to try something else in future: this way, they can both share the /home partition, so I have all my user files still available if/when I switch, without having to copy a whole lot of stuff across.
I installed RedHat 6 over a network onto my 486 about 24 years ago. It was the first time I ever saw a kernel panic. Good times.
Nice, i am going to try this out on weekend
I've got netboot setup already - but this is pretty cool! If you could select an NFS share to write the image to and then have the Pi boot to that NFS share, that would be REALLY cool. (i.e. set up netboot from the beginning.) All I'd need would be for the NFS share to be available with enough space for the image to be written to that directory.