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new RPi firmware allows multiple distros on same SD card

Former Member

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

Parents

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

Reply
  • 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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