Raspberry Pi Installation Help?

[lovingboth]

Long-term Xbian user, very happy with it - a Pi2 here has done nothing else but run it over the past decade. I wanted to put it on a Pi4 yesterday.

Issues with the current (version 1.5) installer:

1. On Linux, it wants to be run as root, rather than asking when it gets to the bits (writing to the microSD card) that need it.

OK, it's a reasonable design decision, but not one mentioned in 'getting started'.

2. Opening menu asks if I want to do so for the Pi/Pi Zero, Pi 2 to Pi 3+, Pi 2 to Pi 4 (beta), or CuBox-i and HummingBoard

Suggestion: if it doesn't work for the Pi 5 say so, and if it does change the menu.

3. Asked to select version. I *think* it gets this from looking at Sourceforge and giving options in the order of releases there. Certainly, each time I've run it over the past two days, the first option is the PINN one.

Suggestion: as looking here says that's only for people wanting to install more than one OS, a la NOOBS, don't have it as the default.

4. Nearly all of the times I've run it, I am only offered PINN 3.9.1 rpi4 and latest Buster rpi4. When doing another draft of this post, I wanted to be reminded of what one bit of the process looked like and.. oh.. the full list of releases is offered, from PINN 3.9.1 rpi5 to latest Stretch. I cannot get it to do that again.

Bug: that dropdown list is populated very quickly - is Sourceforge given enough time to respond or is it responding too quickly or what else is leading to just being offered two options 99% of the time?

5. Pick one, it says that's not been downloaded yet, do I want to? Yes. Button changes to 'preparing download'.

Suggestion: 'preparing download' really means 'downloading file' doesn't it? If so, could it say that? With an indication of how far it's got? Doing XBian_Latest_rpi.img.gz manually via a browser this morning took about an hour. If I saw 'preparing download' for a fraction of that, I'd assume it had crashed and started again.

6. Do I want to write to the card? Yes. Button changes to 'downloading 0%'.

Suggestion: that actually means 'writing to card' doesn't it? If so, could it say that? The 0% didn't change until it got to 100% either...

Having done that with PINN - it was the first option, so why not? - and powering up the Pi4 with it got the coloured square, then some terminal text about various missing things: "ioctl FBIOPUT_CONZFBMAP: Invalid argument" x2, "/bin/mount: special device /dev/mmcnlk0p5 does not exist" "/bin/mount: /settings not mounted", "Recovering application crashed" etc.

Leave it overnight. Still no change in the morning. Reboot pi4, same text. Looking at the card, there's a partition with boot files for assorted devices, it just doesn't boot successfully.

If I didn't know XBian is great, I would have given up there and probably several other points before then.

Getting another image and writing it with Balena Etcher has worked, but it's been more painful than it feels like it should have been.

[Nachteule]

@lovingboth
I really don't know how other users burn the image, I suspect that very few have ever used the XBian installer. You didn't say if you were able to download an image with the installer, I haven't been able to do that for years after Sourceforge changed something.
Also new built versions didn't work anymore, so I changed the Raspberry Pi installer a bit so it can also burn XBian images. But since I'm convinced that most users use other ways to flash the image anyway, I dropped this again
Personally, the linux tool dd is still the fastest way for me, it always works

[lovingboth]

(27th May, 2025 11:57 PM)Nachteule Wrote:  .. I suspect that very few have ever used the XBian installer.

Well it is the recommended way - I can see why you wouldn't point everyone to dd unless you wanted to deal with the 'You deleted my hard drive!!' complaints when someone gives the wrong device for the destination - so I am not surprised that the installers had 84 downloads in the past week vs 155 for the releases.

Given those numbers, you'd hope it actually worked and worked well or most of those 84 are going to look elsewhere.

Quote:You didn't say if you were able to download an image with the installer

Erm, I can't remember. It would install from one I downloaded manually, and I think it wasn't me who downloaded the PINN one.

Quote:Personally, the linux tool dd is still the fastest way for me, it always works

It's certainly how I did it for the Pi2, albeit with a safe version of dd.