[HN Gopher] A New Raspberry Pi Imager
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A New Raspberry Pi Imager
Author : raus22
Score : 56 points
Date : 2025-11-24 16:52 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.raspberrypi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.raspberrypi.com)
| Mr_Eri_Atlov wrote:
| A fairly useful update!
|
| Raspberry Pi continues to show that its real value is in
| continuous software and community support.
|
| Even if their hardware isn't the greatest value, the software
| always shines.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| What about _manual_ pre-provisioning? I just found out a few days
| ago that you can 't pre-provision wifi via placing
| wpa_supplicant.conf in /boot any more, you now need to use that
| GUI provisioner.
|
| I appreciate that RPi is trying to make the ecosystem more
| accessible for newcomers - but not at the cost of power users,
| please!
| giobox wrote:
| I had to go and read the docs to confirm this was true, I'm
| really surprised this has been removed (since Raspian Bookworm
| apparently). It was a ridiculously common way to configure wifi
| on RPis over the last decade!
|
| It's the little paper cuts like this that really hurt on a
| platform who's original aims were to target the education
| market, there is still a mountain of tutorials online advising
| to drop in that file for wifi setup.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > a mountain of tutorials online advising to drop in that
| file for wifi
|
| Cannot emphasize this enough. People with barely enough
| knowledge ("script kiddies" so to speak) are configuring and
| using RPi's. They just want to follow the tutorial and get it
| working so they can do what they really want. (Eg image
| processing or run their 3D printer.) Nothing against this
| kind of user. I help them when, but...
|
| This creates a situation where "the wrong tutorial" problem
| is unnecessarily easy to stumble on.
| sq_ wrote:
| Networking on Linux in general seems to be very susceptible
| to "wrong tutorial" in recent years, what with distros
| switching between different network control suites.
|
| So far, I've been a big fan of netplan (which I guess is
| tied in with cloud-init?). Dropping a YAML file that
| declares the network setup I want and lets a swappable
| renderer make it so on the backend is a nice change from
| the brittle-over-time series of commands that it took
| previously.
| supercoffee wrote:
| I recently needed to create some heavily customized pi images
| for a fleet of Iot devices. I came across this tool that did
| the job nicely. Only downside is that it only works on Linux.
|
| https://github.com/gitbls/sdm
| exasperaited wrote:
| Good news:
|
| rpi-imager --cli
|
| Has really expanded options over the previous versions.
|
| Including:
|
| --first-run-script <first-run-script> --cloudinit-userdata
| <cloudinit-userdata> --cloudinit-networkconfig <cloudinit-
| networkconfig>
|
| Though it doesn't support the old simple config text file,
| presumably most of that is replaced by cloudinit network
| config.
|
| I am guessing this is available in the Windows version. I am
| seeing this from the macOS binary.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yeah but I really really don't like tools doing black magic
| to be honest, I'd like some documentation what it does. And
| if it is just cloud-init, no big deal, I already know more
| than I'd ever wanted about this particular piece of annoyance
| from wrestling with AWS, just tell me what exactly the Pi
| userland expects me to hand to cloud-init...
|
| Thanks anyway for digging into the source, really
| appreciated!
| exasperaited wrote:
| Alas I don't know much more than that; I only remembered
| about the CLI bit in 1.x and went to check it was still
| there.
|
| You may be able to build exactly what you want with the
| image generation tools, as it goes:
|
| https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-image-gen
|
| https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen
|
| Customising the OS with pi-gen is not that bad. It's an
| idiosyncratic tool but it works; I've not used the newer
| rpi-image-gen stuff.
| akerl_ wrote:
| It feels odd to complain about "tools doing black magic"
| when the new way is "cloud init, a tool used by a ton of
| infra platforms" and the old way is "drop a file in this
| directory and it will somehow get slurped into the right
| space at the right time".
| ahepp wrote:
| Isn't cloud init just slurping its own config file, then
| generating the "real" config files and slurping those
| into the right spaces?
|
| To me, "copies a file named wpa_supplicant.conf from
| /boot to /etc on first init" is simpler than "parses some
| yaml, the generates /etc/wpa_supplicant".
|
| Maybe I'd find it worthwhile if I had encountered cloud
| init years ago before I invested in learning the other
| 900 linux networking configuration tools, but now it just
| feels like a case of XKCD 927 (+1 competing standards).
| If cloud init is even better, it definitely doesn't seem
| 10x better to be worth the change.
| akerl_ wrote:
| Cloud init is a tool with documentation and a file format
| for config, that's used all over the place.
|
| I'm not making the case that it's better, just that it's
| no more "black magic" than wpa_supplicant's config file
| is, and it's less magical than dropping a wpa_supplicant
| file into /boot and the raspberry pi doing a bespoke RPi-
| specific shuffle to move it into place.
| pm wrote:
| I don't think _wpa_supplicant.conf_ has been used for sometime,
| as they moved to _cloud-init_ for bootstrapping. It requires
| the _network-config_ file instead, the format of which is
| documented on the _cloud-init_ documentation page.
|
| I happen to have been experimenting with this for the past few
| weeks, and the most persistent issue was getting wi-fi to work
| correctly. It's quite a common issue, with any number of hacks.
| I offer my own _network-config_ below, though I 've only tested
| it with provisioning Ubuntu Server on the RPis so far (I have
| two 3B+s). network: version: 2
| renderer: networkd wifis: wlan0:
| regulatory-domain: "AU" dhcp4: true
| dhcp6: false optional: false access-
| points: "<access-point-name>":
| password: "<password>"
|
| The important parts are:
|
| 1. The renderer, as the default is NetworkManager, which
| doesn't work correctly with RPis (at least on Ubuntu Server).
| It may work with RPiOS, but I haven't tested it yet.
|
| 2. The regulatory domain, the lack of which is what disables
| wi-fi in the first place. I forget how much testing I did with
| the format, but I believe it must be uppercase (I don't
| remember about quoting the string, however).
|
| 3. Disabling IPv6 _may_ be relevant, though unlikely. It was
| just in a working configurations I found; I just haven 't had
| time to confirm it. The relevant line in my _user-data_ file is
| as follows: bootcmd: - sysctl
| net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1
|
| The rest of the configuration is standard, though I
| purposefully made the wi-fi non-optional so I could confirm
| that wi-fi worked (my only Internet at the moment is through my
| iPhone hotspot, which was another source of issues, but that's
| a whole other story).
|
| NB. According to someone else, the imager has the respective
| command line options for _user-data_ and _network-config_ ,
| which I didn't know.
| ahepp wrote:
| I've been using buildroot for my Pis, and adding a config
| script to /etc/init.d that can copy over whatever config files
| you want from /boot
| risyachka wrote:
| Had no idea it just came out! Was using it today to install os on
| my old raspberry and ux was very smooth!
| sq_ wrote:
| Raspberry Pi seems to have been on a tear of good stuff this
| year. Lots of activity on both the hardware accessory and
| software side. I've been following their secure boot provisioning
| work in particular.
|
| Conveniently for me, they keep releasing things right as I start
| to have an interest in using that thing.
| nodesocket wrote:
| Awesome news. I actually use Raspberry Pi Imager to create
| bootable thumb drives for Debian and TrueNAS on MacOS. Works
| great.
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