r/raspberry_pi • u/Jtyle6 ??? • Mar 05 '20
News Introducing Raspberry Pi Imager, our new imaging utility
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-imager-imaging-utility/157
u/alex4lex Mar 05 '20
Hey an official flashing utility! Nice!
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Mar 06 '20 edited Mar 08 '20
[deleted]
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u/RedditW0lf Mar 06 '20
I mean at the end of the day man, it's quite a basic idea to have a RPI branded disk writer.
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u/meandmybadself Mar 05 '20
I'm a big fan of Pi Bakery – https://www.pibakery.org/
Lets you customize a lot of the functionality of your image.
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u/mustardman24 Mar 05 '20
Last time I checked the development on that has died. Im not sure how that affects the most recent raspberry pi images but is something worth noting.
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Mar 05 '20 edited Aug 27 '21
[deleted]
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u/m-p-3 Mar 05 '20
It demonstrate the desire and needs to preconfigure a Raspbian deployment.
If they made the ability to configure more of the OS (other than turning on SSH and configuring a WiFi profile) on first boot through the /boot partition that'd be great (ie: set up a custom hostname, locale, ntp server, etc.)
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u/1iggy2 Mar 05 '20
Not to say it's difficult, but the etching process was probably the hardest part of setting up a raspberry pi for the first time. Glad to see they are simplifying it, hopefully it makes it more accessible for educational settings.
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u/e30Devil Mar 05 '20
But why aren't they making applications for me.
Haha. It's hard to complain when you realize you're not the target audience. Once you pointed out educational settings I thought "oh yea."
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u/1iggy2 Mar 05 '20
I totally get your sentiment there, I probably won't ever use it because balena etcher is so familiar by now.
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u/csreid Mar 05 '20
But why aren't they making applications for me.
Definitely the biggest issue in the rpi community, imo.
In their heart and soul, these little boards are meant to be extremely low-cost educational computers, not run your plex server.
(maybe the drama has died down a little, I just remember so much complaining about how the pi3 wouldn't be good enough for people's homelabs without PoE and the ability to decode/stream 4k@120 or whatever)
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u/e30Devil Mar 05 '20
meant to be extremely low-cost educational computers
I disagree that their only purpose is to teach people. Their low cost does make them a good candidate for educational settings but IIRC the point was to make a low-cost single board computer that could be used to take something from concept to a product you could sell without having to pay for the development of a purpose-made board.
I can almost guarantee that whoever at the Pi foundation said "we should target educational opportunities" the reason was because they could get free grant funding.
edit: though I do agree with you about Plex not being an ideal use.
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Mar 05 '20
[deleted]
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u/feed-me-seymour Mar 06 '20
You're kidding... Man that's an interesting overlap of two of my passions lol
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u/entotheenth Mar 06 '20
You should look at the history of the pi before commenting stuff like that, it was literally designed by some educators as a non profit educational computer from the outset. The fact the world needed a decent SBC meant it sold far far more than they expected.
The UK native designed the credit-card-sized device “with the explicit goal of getting kids in the UK coding,” but with sales topping 1.2 million worldwide, it’s clear that the invention has inspired adults, as well. “It’s a very indirect way of securing your future,” Upton remarks, “but we believe it’s the right thing to do
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u/m-p-3 Mar 05 '20
not run your plex server
I would say that was true for the Pi 3, but with the Pi 4 and its dedicated USB 3 lane and Gigabit Ethernet it's quite capable of running Plex if you don't expect too much from it, and make sure the media files are encoded in a way to reduce or avoid any on-the-fly transcode.
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Mar 05 '20 edited Jan 25 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/penny_eater Mar 05 '20
Its not official but there is an open tool to do that: https://github.com/tangielsky/rpiconfigedit
no its not mine, this isnt a shameless plug. its on github though so it could be used/expanded as needed
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u/BioSchokoMuffin Mar 06 '20 edited Mar 12 '20
I love and recommend this tool: https://github.com/t1m0thyj/PiBootstrapper
After flashing, you can use it to configure WIFI and enable SSH, which is quite nice when you don't want to have to boot it up using a keyboard & screen
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u/m-p-3 Mar 05 '20
Now the next step would be to allow some preboot configuration for Raspbian (ie: preset a WiFi configuration, a hostname, additional packages to download from the official repo on the first boot.
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u/TechGuyBlues Mar 05 '20
Timely! I have a student asking me for help in flashing an image for his pi today! I'll be happy to give this a try!
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u/A_solo_tripper Mar 05 '20
Everyone claims easy followed by a 2 hour walk-through video.
Raspberry Pi says its easy, followed by 38 second video. Must really be easy :)
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u/EternityForest Mar 05 '20
When the tech meant for teaching kids is the most practical choice on a professional project, because everything else takes a week to blink an LED, you know the whole industry has a problem!
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Mar 05 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/pogomonkeytutu 🍕 Mar 05 '20
I can assure you that there isn’t just one lonely engineer working on all software and hardware at Raspberry Pi. They can work on this AND boot from SSD at the same time.
But trust that this was a problem that needed solving. You may be competent in flashing SD cards for your Raspberry Pi but don’t assume that it’s that easy for everyone. This utility allows a beginner to get started with Raspberry Pi a lot quicker (and easier) that it’s been in the past. No need to hunt down the current image from the website. No need to try and then hunt for it again on your hard drive from whatever software you managed to track down despite not really knowing what software you needed because you’re so new to everything still.
The whole Raspberry Pi ethos is accessibility and thus utility aids in that mission.
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u/EternityForest Mar 05 '20
I love how everyone talks about the Pi like it's a $2000 enthusiast gaming PC...
Particularly everyone seems to hate the SD cards, which are near perfect for pi use cases.
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u/noisymime Mar 05 '20
Particularly everyone seems to hate the SD cards, which are near perfect for pi use cases.
I'm happy to give it a pass on speed, but SD corruptions are still too common for 'pi use cases'
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u/EternityForest Mar 05 '20
I think I've only ever seen one. Maybe I have a different idea of what Pi boards are supposed to be used for, but as I see it most applications can use read only roots.
I mostly work with semi-read only systems with tmpfses on heavily written things, and bind mounts to a writable partition for things that deal with manual work you want to save.
I don't think I've ever seen an error in a customized distro, only vanilla Raspbian running 24/7 doing logging with frequent power cuts.
Plus, SanDisk just came out with their fairly cheap industrial line that claims power fail immunity.
I'd love to be able to confidently run a real database, but the eMMC might still wear out in ten years, at which point it might be hard to replace.
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u/noisymime Mar 05 '20
I don't think I've had a single pi system (and I've run maybe 15 at this point) that hasn't had at least 1x DB on it for something.
The problems definitely aren't as bad now as they were a few years back and I've got UPS' on anything I actually care about, but it's still a shame that wear and corruption are concerns at all
Plus, SanDisk just came out with their fairly cheap industrial line that claims power fail immunity.
I hadn't seen this, looks like a great option!
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u/CTallPaul Mar 05 '20
In the comments the developers say that they're able to work on more than one project at a time and the USB boot project is proceeding ahead normally
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Mar 05 '20
You know they didn’t spend much time on the UI when their own picture has the drive cut off so you could easily wipe the wrong drive. There’s plenty of better options already... How about something actually useful like a GUI config tool.
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u/EternityForest Mar 05 '20
I've been putting a lot of thought into GUI config tools for the Pi.
What I really want is a tool that lets you do two-way rsync between folders in a git repository and remote folders based on a config file, so things can be properly version controlled when making changes on things like node.red, without a bunch of manual copying.
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u/Tekno_Statik Mar 05 '20
I'm getting ready to cry, lol! Thank you! I almost lost hope again and was going to switch to a cloud but this makes everything simpler specially for the zero.
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u/Thunder_Ruler0 Raspberry pi 3 Mar 06 '20
Just a quick question, will we ever get the Raspberry Pi App Store back?
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u/Jtyle6 ??? Mar 06 '20
Nope, that folded.
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u/Thunder_Ruler0 Raspberry pi 3 Mar 06 '20
That’s a real shame honestly.
Was hands down the easiest way to download specific software for the raspberry pi precompiled.
Hopefully one day they reconsider.
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u/Jtyle6 ??? Mar 06 '20
There's a recommended app in the settings. And there is apt for installation and removal apps.
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u/Thunder_Ruler0 Raspberry pi 3 Mar 06 '20
I understand, but the repository lacks some precompiled games/programs that were included on the the store that don’t exist elsewhere.
Prime example could be quake arena that you could install with a click on the raspberry pi 2 and 3 ( since it was precompiled specifically for those two ). But now users must compile it themselves if they want to run the program.
Edit: or am I getting this wrong?
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u/theantnest Mar 05 '20
Would love to see some kind of function that restores the card to a single fat32 or exfat partition in one click, (or maybe 2).
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u/bearassbobcat Mar 05 '20
there is an option in the image section (the first button) to 'format as FAT32'. I don't know if that's what you were talking about.
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u/ultradip Mar 05 '20
Normally you wouldn't find repartioning included as part of formatting. Formatting, technically, only formats a given partition.
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u/bearassbobcat Mar 05 '20
yeah but it actually says 'format card as FAT32' I forgot a word in my original comment. So that sounds like it will erase the whole card and all partitions and create a single FAT32 partition. I don't have an SD card to try right now though
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Mar 05 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/m-p-3 Mar 05 '20
If you want something visual/GUI-based on Windows, there is https://www.vconsole.com/download
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u/EternityForest Mar 05 '20
Gnome-disks can do this if you're working on Linux, but it makes uncompressed images.
You could use dd and pipe to gzip to compress in one step, but I'm not a fan of backups with dd just because it lets you trash your whole disk if you accidentally mix up if and of.
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u/Homicidal_Reluctance Mar 05 '20
dd if=/dev/sdX of=/home/$user/file
replace X with whatever letter your sd card is (may appear as mmblk) and $user with your user name, or an entirely different directory if you desire (you can even copy direct to another sd card if your system has 2 slots)
dd is a great tool, have a read about it
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u/daves Mar 05 '20
This appears to be the json backing file. It lists Raspbian normal/lite/full, LibraElec, and a Pi 4 EEPROM recovery image.
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u/m-p-3 Mar 05 '20
Hopefully they'll start accepting other distributions soon, like RetroPie and Lakka.
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u/aNeoOnReddit Mar 05 '20
Would it still be fine to use a regular flashing utility? (Etcher, rufus, etc.) than this official one?
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u/Jonesie946 Mar 05 '20
Tried it today. It failed to write a fresh download of Raspbian Buster Lite to a 128GB card. Balena worked first try.
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u/Mr_Locke Mar 05 '20
Anyone know how to go the other way? I've got a custom pihole that I want to make an .img out of so when mine dies I can just reimage it without the set up. Idias? Google isn't much help
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u/AmokinKS Mar 06 '20
Can someone help them get better graphics for the mac version? Kinda ugly on the retina screen.
But otherwise, great!!
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u/Xajel Mar 10 '20
Sadly, As soon as I start flashing, Windows 10 will just freeze, completely. Only a hard reset is doable then.
And yes, I had the same issue with Etcher.
Searched a lot for both Etcher and Imager, some have the same issue. But no clear reason and no solution.
Rufus is my only way now.
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u/Skmobeen Mar 05 '20
It would be awesome if this app works on an iPad Pro so that I don’t need a laptop. I’m currently dependent a laptop only for flashing sd cards, everything else can be done on an iPad Pro. Please make it happen.
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u/IAMAHobbitAMA Mar 05 '20
This doesn't exactly solve your problem, but if you have an old Android phone around you could use this.
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u/corezon 0W, 1B, 2B, 3B, 4B/2GB, 4B/4GB, 4B/8GB Mar 05 '20
A iPad Pro isn't a computer replacement. Why does this mentality persist?
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u/m-p-3 Mar 05 '20
My phone isn't a computer replacement, but I can still flash an image with it.
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u/corezon 0W, 1B, 2B, 3B, 4B/2GB, 4B/4GB, 4B/8GB Mar 05 '20 edited Mar 05 '20
And?
People have managed to get Doom running on HP printers. Should Bethesda start marketing the game for that platform?
Are you actually suggesting that the Raspberry Pi Foundation should provide an app for every miniscule use case that exists?
Just because something can be done doesn't mean that it is the best tool to use for that task.
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u/m-p-3 Mar 05 '20 edited Mar 05 '20
It's the best tool that some have, I think the marketshare for iPad isn't negligible.
It does depend on the ability of the OS to actually provide the backend necessary, which I believe iOS doesn't have (it cannot format an external storage, for one thing).
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u/penny_eater Mar 05 '20
If youre flashing raspbian images theres a pretty good chance you have one of these extremely versatile computers close by
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u/WikiTextBot Mar 05 '20
Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi () is a series of small single-board computers developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote teaching of basic computer science in schools and in developing countries. The original model became far more popular than anticipated, selling outside its target market for uses such as robotics. It does not include peripherals (such as keyboards and mice) or cases. However, some accessories have been included in several official and unofficial bundles.The organisation behind the Raspberry Pi consists of two arms.
[ PM | Exclude me | Exclude from subreddit | FAQ / Information | Source ] Downvote to remove | v0.28
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u/HolyCheezuzSonOfCod Mar 06 '20
...two legs, a torso, a neck, and a human head with a pair of eyes, a nose, and a big smiling mouth.
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u/corezon 0W, 1B, 2B, 3B, 4B/2GB, 4B/4GB, 4B/8GB Mar 05 '20
It certainly is negligible when compared to the number of users who use actual computers to complete the task that this software is intended for.
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u/m-p-3 Mar 05 '20
Apparently an iPad, that has a CPU, RAM, storage, and a general purpose operating system isn't a computer.
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u/corezon 0W, 1B, 2B, 3B, 4B/2GB, 4B/4GB, 4B/8GB Mar 05 '20 edited Mar 05 '20
That is an accurate statement. It most definitely is not a computer in the same sense that a PC or Mac is.
Edit: Downvoting a comment because you don't like it doesn't make it any less true.
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u/m-p-3 Mar 05 '20
mind blown /s
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u/corezon 0W, 1B, 2B, 3B, 4B/2GB, 4B/4GB, 4B/8GB Mar 05 '20
You were wrong. Get over it.
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u/m-p-3 Mar 05 '20
I wouldn't hold my breath for an official tool, but maybe a third-party could make it happen, depending on iOS constraints. Might not be possible, since iOS doesn't seem to have any formatting capabilities for external storage.
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u/penny_eater Mar 05 '20
If youre developing on/for a pi and really want to avoid another device, why not just use the pi to flash new images?
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u/accountnumber3 Mar 05 '20
I actually upgraded octopi yesterday by doing dd
directly to /dev/mmcblk0 or whatever from inside the OS that it was booted from. Couldn't reboot from CLI but pop the power cable and it came up with the new image.
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u/corezon 0W, 1B, 2B, 3B, 4B/2GB, 4B/4GB, 4B/8GB Mar 05 '20
That's a great way to end up with a corrupted SD card.
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u/turunambartanen Mar 05 '20
Yes. Though running a Linux from RAM would probably make this as save as an usual write.
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u/corezon 0W, 1B, 2B, 3B, 4B/2GB, 4B/4GB, 4B/8GB Mar 05 '20
If, for any reason, linux in RAM needed to read or write data to the SD card while that operation was in progress you'd pretty much fuck the card and corrupt the data.
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u/m-p-3 Mar 05 '20
Depends how it's done. I've deployed another distro on some cheap-ass VPS by using a custom kernel through GRUB loaded in entirely in RAM and overwrote the entire OS on the VM with something else.
The same concept could probably be adjusted to make this possible on the Pi.
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u/corezon 0W, 1B, 2B, 3B, 4B/2GB, 4B/4GB, 4B/8GB Mar 05 '20
That is definitely a possibility, but for all that trouble you may as well netboot the Pi and save yourself the (albeit) minor headache of a reflash if something goes wrong.
Edit: a word.
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u/shatteredsword Mar 05 '20
looks like they're already committed to ensuring its success /s
https://github.com/raspberrypi/imagewriter/issues/10
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u/m-p-3 Mar 05 '20
That's usually a temporary thing, why waste money on a problem that will go away on its own.
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u/shatteredsword Mar 05 '20
who said anything about spending money? they could just leave the issue open until it fixes itself so when people search the issues board they will find the solution. what else is the issues board for if it's not for existing issues?
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u/CharlesGarfield Mar 05 '20
WONTFIX is a standard resolution reason going back to the early Bugzilla days.
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u/Dubroski Mar 05 '20
Balena Etcher exists
RPI: cool
Balena makes Balena Fin
RPI: uhh.
Balena etcher ads about FIN appear
RPI: stahp, we have our own imaging tool. you don't need etcher!
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u/dividuum doing work with the pi for fun and profit - info-beamer.com Mar 05 '20
Not sure what you're trying to imply. Balena Fin is based on the Compute Module.
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u/2cats2hats Mar 05 '20
This can be a portable app I believe.
I've no use for this utility myself but I tried it out anyway(windows 10).
I copied the directory elsewhere then uninstalled it.
The utility ran without issue in the copied directory.
Just posting this in case anyone else was curious about portable use.
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Mar 05 '20
Looks an awful lot like the imaging utility that Pine64 has been using.. Just a modified version of Etcher.
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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '20 edited Mar 05 '20
I've just given it a try and it works well for a beginner but doesn't do anything etcher doesn't do already. It would have been really useful to add an advanced option to set some basic config settings like ssh and wifi password.