new RPi firmware allows multiple distros on same SD card

Former Member over 12 years ago

There is supposed to be an announcement in a few days that

new RPi firmware allows multiple distros on the same SD card,

that RPF plans to sell.

We learned today that Fedora plans to be one of the distros,

with their soon-to-be-released hard-float version, called Pidora.

http://www.element14.com/community/thread/18095?start=67&tstart=0

"a day ago firmware: add support for booting from alterative partition. [Dom Cobley]"

https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-firmware/tree/ca7a2103f0a994051dafc097c9bc762684933f5b

"The change just allows an alternative partition (on the sdcard) to contain the normal firmware files that bootcode.bin subsequently loads."

...

"All will be made clear in a few days."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=43875

Former Member over 12 years ago

It would be good if this was a menu that the GPU displayed allowing you to pick a kernel/config.txt/cmdline.txt combination.

If not, I don't really see the point. You already have the ability to select the kernel that's loaded in config.txt and cmdline.txt passes the kernels root= param that will tell the kernel what partition to boot from, so it's already possible to have multiple distros on one card in different partitions.

The missing piece has always been something like lilo / grub / syslinux that allows you to select what to boot from a menu...
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interested1 over 12 years ago in reply to Former Member

I second the idea and observation of the lacking features that a lilo / grub style booting provide. Would be nice to have at least as an option!
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penguintutor over 12 years ago

This is available at the moment using BerryBoot http://www.berryterminal.com/doku.php/berryboot

Easy to use - graphical boot screen.

My daughter uses this to switch between OpenElec and Raspbian depending upon whether she's watching TV (XBMC) and programming.

It will be good for this to be a feature of the official firmware though.
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Former Member over 12 years ago in reply to penguintutor

good point about berryboot.

It's unfortunate that switching between watching TV and programming
requires rebooting a different OS. I've heard that attempts to run XBMC
on top of Raspbian have really bad performance, but I'm not sure if that's
a solveable problem or not. I believe that XBMC uses full-screen
accelerated OpenGL rendering, so it doesn't play well with X Windows.
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penguintutor over 12 years ago in reply to Former Member

You can get XBMC to run on top of Raspbian.

I didn't have much success with the pre-built binaries, but compiling from source worked. It's the 24 hours it takes to compile that is a real pain, especially as it took a few goes to get it right.

Performance does seam to be better with a dedicated distro and for XBMC you really need to squeeze everything you can out of the Pi. I did all this on the 256Mb version, it may be better with the 512Mb ones, but switching between the two modes using BerryBoot is not such a big deal for the purposes we use.
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Former Member over 12 years ago in reply to penguintutor

the new SD card is apparently being called NOOBS,
for "New Out Of Box System".

May also include option to boot directly to a custom web browser.
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penguintutor over 12 years ago in reply to Former Member

I've been reading a little about NOOBS and it sounds like it's based on BerryBoot. The custom instant boot web browser is a new feature, but BerryBoot includes the option to download and install by just picking from a list of supported OS's.

Sounds like it will be even better when released as NOOBS.
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