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I tried the cd buildroot ; make legal-info as documented, and it printed several warnings, including these two:

WARNING: rpi-firmware: cannot save license (RPI_FIRMWARE_LICENSE_FILES not defined)
WARNING: rpi-userland: cannot save license (RPI_USERLAND_LICENSE_FILES not defined)

I investigated the problem and found that buildroot/package/rpi-firmware.mk and buildroot/package/rpi-userland.mk use RPI_FIRMWARE_LICENSE_FILE and RPI_USERLAND_LICENSE_FILE respectively, whereas the buildroot documentation http://buildroot.uclibc.org/downloads/manual/manual.html#generic-package-reference says it should be like LIBFOO_LICENSE_FILES (_FILES plural, not _FILE singular).
So I added the missing 'S' to rpi-firmware.mk and rpi-userland.mk and re-ran make legal-info and the two warnings mentioned above disappeared.
(I've just checked, and these errors have already been fixed in the upstream buildroot http://git.buildroot.net/buildroot/commit/?id=8dee06013eb9b766add3c94be8a82c3dbe8576d5 )

Also, the .mk files for the 'arora' and 'recovery' packages that NOOBS has added don't contain any licensing info, so they also produce warnings in the make legal-info output.

I have a bug and want to check if it is fixed in the latest version of NOOBS. How can I do this whilst keeping the OS installed? (I know this isn't a bug but I wasn't sure where else to post and I was directed here from the RPi forums.)

Add a sub-menu for advanced users with options to backup a user-selectable (default to /home ) folder from the currently installed OS to another mounted USB storage device.

E.g. so that can backup user data from one distro before switching to another distro and then restore their data again.

N.B. If they know what they're doing then they could do this from within each distro. But this is for NOOBS. Also this is safer (and teaches a better habbit) than just preserving the /home partition when switching. That wouldn't make sense with Risc OS anyway.

Hi,

I'm really glad that the noobs software was realeased recently, I'm trying to organise an easy classroom setup and think the noobs system would help pupils

I want to install noobs system --> install raspbian --> configure for our specific school setup. (each pi needs to be configured with a VNC server)
image the pi and create an xz image that could be added to the noobs directory on each pi.

this way if a pupils breaks their pi they they can noobs reset and it will still work in school.

I'm currently exploring the image file to see the structure but if you could help explain how you build xz images that'd be great.

Currently NOOBS only works with wired networking. Ideally it should also support wireless networking via USB WiFi adaptors.

Rob, as discussed with you last Sat at the Cheltenham Science Festival.
What I would like is some sort of ability to "kick-start" an install with pre-configured apps.
Perhaps an "install" txt file that contains the apps that raspi-config can read and act upon after initial installation.
BTW it was great to meet you grovel grovel

Add a sub-menu for advanced users with options to:

1. delete unwanted distro installers from NOOBS to free up more space.
2. Update the NOOBS distro installers from latest internet version
3. Add new (rarer) distro installers such as Xbian, RedSleve, Slackware, BSD? from internet.

I ve tried NOOBS but while installing raspbmc after the step 2 :

• Download Kernel : ok
• extract kernel : ok
• reboot Raspi : Kernel panic (rootfs error )

while intalling openelec : no problem works fine.

Sd card : Kingston Class 10 4Go Fat formated.

Pressing keys 1-4 while focussed on the mainwindow of the recovery app will allow you to change to the following display modes;

1. HDMI preferred
2. HDMI safe
3. Composite PAL
4. Composite NTSC

Unfortunately the QWSServer does not detect the framebuffer resize meaning only a portion of the app is shown.

Help from Embedded QT experts welcomed.

With only a keyboard attached (no mouse), it is not possible to use the items on toolbar or select a language.

when I attempt to create an image with Win32DiskImager (win 7 64 bit) I only get the Recovery partition. How can I image the user partition (or all partitions) for backup and cloning?

Leaving keyboard input enabled while writing the image to disk causes two problems:

• you can press Esc which closes the dialog, leaving NOOBS in an 'inactive' state
• you can press L and change the language, which then means you have two different languages (!) displayed on the dialog as the progress-text updates

NOOBS has a fully localised GUI (which is great) but there's currently no mechanism for the slide images (displayed while the OS image is being installed to SD card) to be localised, which I imagine would be a bit jarring if you're running NOOBS in a foreign language.

I've had a bit of a 'dig' and it should be fairly straightforward to add a simple mechanism to enable this - I'm imagining that e.g. the English slides for Raspbian could remain in /slides/Raspbian/ and any French slides could be copied into /slides/Raspbian/fr/ (obviously falling back to English if language-specific slides for the current language are missing).
I'd be happy to submit a pull request for this, but my only sticking point is that from within either MainWindow::on_actionWrite_image_to_disk_triggered() or ProgressSlideshowDialog::ProgressSlideshowDialog() I'd need access to LanguageDialog::_currentLang, and as I'm not familiar with QT I'm not sure how to set this up. But if somebody could give me some pointers... ;-)

And I guess it also might be nice if we had access to LanguageDialog::_currentLang inside main.cpp as then we could set the default language as a command-line option, which in turn could be set by the /init script reading a special value from /proc/cmdline (which would allow you to e.g. pre-set NOOBS into Dutch before bootup by simply editing recovery.cmdline - which may be of use e.g. in school classroom environments?).

So I guess one approach might be to move the _currentLang variable to inside main(), and then pass pointers to it to the LanguageDialog() and MainWindow() constructors? Is there a neater way?

Because of https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs/blob/master/BUILDME.sh#L30 the build-timestamp file looks like e.g. BUILT-05-27-2013

Please consider changing it to the UK date-format DD-MM-YYYY, or even better adopt the ISO date-format YYYY-MM-DD

At the moment we have version 1.1 in the field, identified by the version number on the zip file (NOOBS_v1_1.zip). Once the files are copied to the SD card, there is no obvious reference to v1.1 - the filesystem has the file BUILT-05-27-2013, and the GUI main window has the title "Pi Recovery - Built:May 27 2013".

It might be a good idea from v1.2 onwards to put the version number somewhere in the filesystem, and in the GUI, as I think it would make it easier to identify which version a noob has on their system.

I noticed that buildroot includes a libcofi package, which provides optimised memory-access functions for the RaspberryPi https://github.com/simonjhall/copies-and-fills however it isn't enabled by default for NOOBS https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs/blob/master/buildroot/.config#L924
I dunno if NOOBS specifically will see any noticeable benefit to including libcofi, but I guess it can't hurt?

Like #8 this isn't an "issue" but merely a "useful information" post in the hope that other people find it useful. @Rob-Bishop Would the wiki on here be a useful place for those, or is that intended to be more of a "user wiki" than a "developer wiki" ?

As you may be able to guess from all my i18n (internationalisation) and l10n (localisation) related pull requests, in a previous job I developed a big localisation system :-)

One useful technique I found for testing that the i18n was fully working as expected everywhere, without having to wait to have 100%-complete translation files (which is obviously a constantly-moving target during active software development) was to auto-generate a 'dummy' translation file, by simply reversing the English strings. When your program is switched into a backwards-English locale it makes it very easy to spot any parts of your program that are still displaying normal forwards-English text ;-)
And this is exactly how I spotted that be1693b needed fixing.

I've now managed to boil this down into a small 100% automated patch file, available here. It should cleanly apply to the NOOBS source tree (only on the 'dev' branch, it doesn't work on the current 'master' branch) with patch -p1 < add_backwards_language.patch. After applying the patch (and building NOOBS and copying the recovery.rfs to your SD card) you should then have a "sdrawkcaB" (Backwards spelled backwards!) language at the bottom of the language list in NOOBS, and selecting this should then make every string in NOOBS be displayed backwards. If you find any places where the text still displays normally, then that's a localisation bug that needs to be fixed.
After you've finished testing/playing with the funny backwards language, you can then undo the patch again with patch -p1 -R < add_backwards_language.patch, rebuild NOOBS, and everything should be back to normal.

For some reason, my mouse does not seem to work with NOOBS.
Regardless, NOOBS should support keyboard navigation.
Currently with the release version (Build Date May 27 2013) I can move up and down the list with the keyboard, but I can't change language or open the online help. I've tried using tab (doesn't change what's highlighted) and alt+h or alt+o, and the underlines don't appear when I press Alt and the online help doesn't open.

I found another mouse that does work and Auroa works fine with keyboard shortcuts and is usable without a mouse, but NOOBS isn't.

I was wondering if it a good thing to keep the binaries here in the git.
The repo already takes 42,6MiB (62 commits!!) of space and after
checkout about 80MiB. Every time the generated recovery.rfs is updated,
several MiBs are added into the repo, quickly bloating it.

• The recovery.rfs can be generated by building the source.
• The kernel and bootloader blobs can be fetched from the firmware repo.

I would recommend on simply rm:ing both from the repo.

Another solution would be creating an external repo for ether the output
folder or the app source recovery folder. This could then be used as a
submodule in the noobs repo.

Discussion of issue here http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=46080

According to http://www.abeel.be/content/determine-uncompressed-size-gzip-file it's easy to read the uncompressed size of a gzipped file.
I converted their sample Java code to C, but I dunno enough QT to make it fit in with the style of the other getUncompressedSizeXXX functions in recovery/imagewritethread.cpp

uint64_t getUncompressedSizeGZ(const char *filename) {
        FILE *f = NULL;
        if (f = fopen(filename, "rb")) {
                if (fseek(f, -4, SEEK_END) == 0) {
                        uint8_t sizebytes[4] = {0};
                        if (fread(sizebytes, 1, sizeof(sizebytes), f) == 4) {
                                return (uint64_t)sizebytes[0] | ((uint64_t)sizebytes[1] << 8) | ((uint64_t)sizebytes[2] << 16) | ((uint64_t)sizebytes[3] << 24);
                        }
                }
                fclose(f);
        }
        return -1;
}

Add feature to switch output to preferred mode with fallback to safe mode is a dialog box is not pressed by user within certain time period.

Commit 75ef271 (currently on the 'dev' branch and not 'master' yet) added functionality to allow the NOOBS GUI to be entirely keyboard-navigated (fixing issue #5).
Pressing the 'L' key is supposed to allow you to change the language, but this isn't currently working.

When trying to install Raspbian using NOOBS, I keep getting this error (apologies for the poor phone pics):

Then when rebooting into Raspbian:

I started out with the latest dev commit, copied the files onto a freshly formatted SD card, and then copied the Raspbian image from the NOOBS download on raspberrypi.org.

I then added config.txt containing hdmi_force_hotplug=1, as my monitor setup requires it to be set.

The image is expanded (progress bar continues to 100%), and when it is finished, the LBR error is displayed. After this, the Exit button is disabled, so I have to hard reset to boot into Raspbian, when I end up in KDB.

This is a working Pi with working SD cards (2 tested, both 4GB).

The partition table created by NOOBS is invalid. This makes it difficult to read/copy from other devices.

Honestly what kind of system is this, I paid good money for this and it can't even make my tea...

And I'm not even going to start on what happened when I poured the water over it...

Gordon

Top level BUILDME.sh script, line 15 reads:

if [ $1 = "update-firmware" ]; then

it should read:

if [ "$1" = "update-firmware" ]; then

i.e. put quotes around $1.

Imagine that someone's been using NOOBS to run ArchLinux, and they now decide they want to give Raspbian a go, and imagine that they know that there's certain config.txt settings they need to add before they can get a display... (if they don't edit config.txt, they don't get any output on their non-standard TV ;-) )

With the current version of NOOBS, the built-in config editor can only be used to edit the config.txt of the already-installed OS, you can't use it to edit the config.txt of the OS you're about to install. And as soon as NOOBS has finished writing the new OS image, it reboots without giving you a chance to edit config.txt first.

This means that in the hypothetical example above, after they've written Raspbian to the card, NOOBS will reboot into Raspbian with the standard config.txt. As the user can't see their display to do a safe-shutdown, they're forced to do a hard power-off, and then load up NOOBS again while holding the shift key, and only now can they edit config.txt to add their required display settings.

It would be nice if NOOBS could be altered to give you the option of editing config,txt of the about-to-be-installed OS and/or the option of editing config.txt of the just-been-installed OS.

I guess an alternative approach (which could even overlap with the above system) might be to have a default_config_options.txt on the NOOBS boot partition (which you'd write to the first FAT32 partition using Windows) which NOOBS would then read, and always set those options to those values in the config.txt of any OS it writes in the future.

It'd be handy if you could add a brief one-liner description of each OS on that screen, for the noobs of course.

Here are some words for RISC OS:

"RISC OS is very fast and compact system initially created by the same team
that developed the ARM microprocessor. www.riscosopen.org"

The activity LED does not show any activity even though data is being written to the SD card by NOOBS

This isn't really an "issue" as such, just information that I think ought to be reported/recorded somewhere...

After a bit of an effort, I managed to determine that the version of buildroot used in noobs is from this (arbitrary) git commit http://git.buildroot.net/buildroot/commit/?id=e9b771283765e74792df6a05775383f6d4da2636 rather than the "released" 2013.05 version.
So I was then able to produce a diff between the "source" version of buildroot, and the version of buildroot that's included into noobs, which people may find useful (to see exactly what NOOBS changes).

Short version: http://www.andrewscheller.co.uk/buildroot-noobs.short.diff
Long version: http://www.andrewscheller.co.uk/buildroot-noobs.long.diff
(I tried posting these diffs inline, but github wouldn't let me - possibly because they're too long?)

@popcornmix We're seeing a lot of people have issues getting their monitors to display with HDMI safe mode enabled (as is the default for NOOBS). Perhaps this is actually less safe then just using the display's preferred mode (found via EDID).

What do you think?

Currently can't get to the "Edit config" or "Help" selections using just the keyboard. We will have upwards of hundreds of Model As being set up at Jams and schools that will only have keyboards (no second USB port and no need for mice for command line work).

See this forum thread for details: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=47840&p=374836&hilit=noobs#p374836

Note that formatting the SD card using the "Full (Overwrite) Format" setting for the SD Association's Formatting Tool before installing NOOBS has been known to fix this in some cases.

I would gladly make a Hungarian translation for this tool. I have already took a look at the language files, but it doesn't seem like that I can/should edit them simply, using a text editor. So, how do I get started?

Add a sub-menu for advanced users with options to remove as much as possible of the NOOBS system itself and allocate the recovered space to the currently installed OS.

E.g. After the user has tried each distro and they've found one they prefer, let them have that extra 1GB of SD-card space back.

This is just a continuation of my question that I raised on the forum at http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=48344&p=377766#p377766

How does this work then?

NOOBS actually implements a soft reboot which triggers the BCM2835 to read the boot files from a different partition.

How does it reboot into a different kernel than the one used to boot NOOBS itself? (i.e. without endlessly booting itself?)

Some state is saved in the soft reboot that indicates which partition to read.

How does it know to boot this kernel from the extended partition number 5 (or whatever)?

See above

And finally (and crucially) Is it possible to select which partition to boot the kernel from, from within the noobs recovery program?

No. This would require a firmware change.

So I'm guessing that the partition number has been hardcoded into bootcode.bin(?) ready for the soft reboot? And to make it more flexible to boot from an arbitary partition would require the GPU to read the partition information from somewhere else (file on mmcblk0, known memory location etc) that the NOOBS recovery program can write to? And this reading of partition number would be non-trivial.....?

I'm not suggesting this is put into noobs, (noobs serves a distinct purpose), but it seems this would be an elegant solution to the multi-boot question, if it were possible.

It doesn't appear that WiFi autoconfig is included in any of the distros included with NOOBS, not even the Raspbian choice, which the standard distro does include. Jams and schools here have no wired Ethernet access but WiFi is ubiquitous, via a cell hotspot if needed. If WiFi is available, we can download other packages, but no WiFi and we can't download anything, do apt-get updates and upgrades, etc.

This bug has always been there, it's only become more apparent now that #38 has been fixed.

When operating NOOBS entirely with a keyboard, you can press L to pop-up the language selection list. Then you can use the up/down keys to choose a different language. But when you press the Enter key, as well as selecting a language, it also selects whichever OS image was currently highlighted and asks you if you want to install it.
(I guess the Enter keypress is being picked up by both the combobox and the listentry, instead of just the combobox)

The commit message for the fix to #43 refers to "requires new OS images".

The reply to #61 refers simply to compressing an existing image - is that still correct?

My interest is that I am 'shadowing' the development of NOOBS as I have a cheap HDMI-VGA adaptor that did not work correctly with the first public (zip) release of 1.1

Currently attempts to install an OS fail with an error relating to LBR. This is using compressed images distributed with NOOBS1.1

Have I misunderstood or misinstalled something, or what do I have to do to get compressed images compatible with the current /dev code, please?

NOOBS does not have any option to reboot or shut down the Pi while in the recovery mode.
And Ctrl+Alt+Del in the console mode makes the Pi get stuck on the rainbow screen of death. I don't know what the password and username are either - so I can't login to manually run halt or reboot.

The binary version of the translations should not be in the repository. Instead the .ts files should be updated, while building and then compiled into .qm files. This will ensure possible old and non used strings will be removed (providing lupdate is run with -no-obsolete).
Also as the binary files cannot be diffed, they can make the repository grow in size for nothing, and nobody likes huge git repositories.
Another possible problem that might arise from the current situation is that the translator simply forgets to generate the .qm file and the actual translation doesn't end up in the app.

Suggestion:

Write script somewhat like this

#!/bin/sh

lupdate -no-obsolete recovery.pro
lrelease recovery.pro
qmake recovery.pro

This would prepare the source for compilation with make.

My Raspberry Pi always generates graphics corruption unless config_hdmi_boost is set up high. Can the default config.txt set config_hdmi_boost to 7 (is it safe to do so) or will this cause some issues for people who's screen works fine by default?

The Arora Browser would be perfect for building a web kiosk. Is there a way to customize the GUI (fullscreen, no console, no exit, no address field, just home, prev/next and maybe print)
Noob should be able to start in Arora directly.

The only thing left is to configure one single postscript or pcl printer - but that's just optional.
If someone has a touchpanel (HDMI + USB) than mouse and keyboard are obsolete - if arora would provide a touch optimized virtual keyboard.

It would be perfect if arora would clear history (or better do not use history at all) and restart when crashed / 5 minutes after last user event (to clear everything).

Whenever I try to update the the existing NOOBS installation from the FAT32 partition from the repository, it automatically formats my existing operating system. Is there some kind of configuration or flag that's triggered to let NOOBS know if there's an existing partition?

I hadn't raised this issue earlier, because I'd believed that the intention of NOOBS was to effectively treat the recovery partition as 100% read-only, but 4c1e0ad#L1R351 makes it clear that this isn't the case.
So in that case, I think it would be nice if NOOBS 'remembered' which OS is currently installed and defaulted to highlighting that, rather than always defaulting to highlighting Raspbian, even if e.g. Archlinux has been installed.

After using NOOBS to install RISC OS, there is a Warning message "Machine startup has not completed successfully: 'File '&.!BOOT' not found'. This doesn't happen with the current version of RISC OS (riscos-2013-03-19-RC8).

Went back into Recovery mode and reinstalled but with the same issue.

Thanks
Ian

Allow explicit selection of HDMI or composite output to support those displays which don't work with hotplug detection.