![]() I had talked about this change in the previous post, and mentioned why I thought it happened. I hadn't thought about this before, but the original NOOBS distributions included images of all the available operating systems, not just Raspbian as it does today. But the Raspberry Pi Zero and the Model A/A+ don't have a wired network connection, so that presents a problem for this kind of NOOBS operation. The Raspberry Pi Model B, B+ and 2 have on-board RJ-45 wired ethernet connections, so that has become a sort of de facto standard way of downloading and installing other images. But if the Raspberry Pi it is booting on has an active Internet connection, it will also scout around on the web for a variety of other operating system distributions, and if it finds them they will also be included in the list, as shown below. The one thing it will always included is Raspbian, because that is included on the NOOBS disk itself. Exactly what is included in that list is variable. When a NOOBS card boots, it brings up a graphic display which has a menu across the top, and a list of available operating systems to install down the center. It simply looks for the first FAT partition on the SD card, and then looks for a properly named boot file at the top level of that filesystem. When the Raspberry Pi boots, it doesn't try to read a Master Boot Record (MBR) or UEFI boot partition from the disk, as most "typical" PCs do. Good stuff.įor those who might be curious about how NOOBS works, it's really pretty simple. No special tools, no special commands, no danger of getting confused or making a typo and wiping your root filesystem by mistake. If you choose to download the image, all you have to do is extract the files from the ZIP archive onto an empty FAT formatted SD card. You can either purchase a preloaded NOOBS SD/microSD card, or you can get the latest image from the NOOBS Download page. ![]() What NOOBS does is take the standard Raspbian distribution and wrap it up in an installer package that makes it easy for anyone, technical or not, experienced or not, to select and install any combination of one or more operating systems on any Raspberry Pi. ![]() ![]() As I have said before, NOOBS is undoubtedly one of the major factors in the success of the Raspberry Pi. NOOBS is the New Out-of-Box Software package for the Raspberry Pi family. In fact, I will do that as an example in the Customizing LXDE post later this week.įor those who are using the Raspberry Pi for development, Scratch has been updated with more and better MIDI and PiFace support, and a new GPIO Zero library is included which makes it easier to access the GPIO pins from Python.Īll in all, this is a good, useful Raspbian update and it is well worth the time and effort needed to either update an existing system or install a new one. It has not yet earned a launcher on the Panel, but you can find it in the Programming menu. One of the more notable is the Node-RED application for wiring the Internet-of-Things. There are a few other new utilities and applications in the latest Raspbian release as well. This is likely to be a very welcome addition for many of those who were still using the CLI apt-get command for package management. Speaking of adding packages like midori and shutter, the latest Raspbian release includes a new graphical package manager, also derived from Gnome. However, I don't spend much time on videos, and I still have problems with the stability and functionality of Epiphany (I was not able to write this blog post using it, for example), so I still always load midori as one of the first steps after installing a new Raspbian release. The new release includes some Epiphany improvements in video playback, so if that is your thing you will appreciate this release. Some time ago Raspbian switched to a custom version of the Epiphany (Gnome Web) browser. Oh, and I don't get disgusted and just close my eyes, hope for the best, and yank out the USB stick any more. I don't have go looking around on the desktop for a removable filesystem icon which might have popped up just about anywhere when I plugged in the stick I don't have to scour the Panel looking for an icon which should have appeared when I plugged in a USB stick (but frequently doesn't), and I don't have to go off and start a File Manager just to get to the eject icon. It is such a simple solution to the problem of managing removable storage (read as: USB sticks) without losing data or corrupting the filesystem. This may seem trivial, but I absolutely love it. At the right end of the panel is the Ejector icon.
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