A Few Notes about the Raspberry Pi Imager

[Nutul]

This is very nice, indeed.
It would be fantastic if it also allowed the whole configuration from the command line... ;-)

I get that...but AFAICT tell it's complicated. Maybe if I were proficient in C++ I would think otherwise. Check the github issues log for some related discussion.

The Imager creates a firstrun.sh file in the /boot directory and all the magic about the first user/pw and its home directory, as well as SSH, WiFi, etc., gets done by it during, you guessed it, first boot. Then it deletes itself.

This isn't all that different from what traditionally happened with the moodecfg.ini file, if present. Obviously, though, firstrun.sh is executed directly in the shell. To an extent they overlap in functionality. If the .ini file is present at first boot now, settings in it may supersede some settings made by firstrun.sh---notably hostname and WiFi configuration. Still, I continue to add in moodecfg.ini because it gives me more control over moOde as opposed to just Raspberry Pi OS.

I'm thinking that for my own use I may cobble together a solution of my own strictly for moOde which would flash a new player where all my "standard" settings remain the same except for the hostname (and renderer names based on it)---but I sure wouldn't want to offer it up and then have to support it

Regards,
Kent


PS - Boy does it get boring watching the progress bar creep forward as I repeatedly flash uSD cards to test what's going on. I need to get myself some super-fast cards.

Hi Kent,

thank you for taking the time looking into its source code. The fact it creates a shell script (well, what else would you do on a Linux machine, actually???) makes things very easy - download the image / patch it / flash it. But I'll have a look at it tomorrow afternoon.