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Author Topic: Noobs layout for piCore?  (Read 2203 times)

Offline sihorton

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Noobs layout for piCore?
« on: June 05, 2016, 02:02:46 PM »
I am playing around with a raspberry pi and setting up a multi-boot system with raspbian and retropie. I would love to also have piCore on the same sd card for running an apache server. The advantage with a side by side os install is that you can just reboot into another os rather than having to swap sd cards all of the time.

Using the noobs installer from raspberry pi you can select a number of operating systems on first boot and it will install them side by side, unfortunately piCore is not on that list (yet). Using this tutorial: http://bobbyromeo.com/technology/triple-boot-raspberry-pi-on-usb-raspbianretropieopenelec-part-1/ I was able to write retropie to a blank sdcard, boot it, then ssh into the running machine and tar the contents of /boot into boot.tar.xz and / into root.tar.xz, then I could copy the noobs/os/Raspbian folder, swap out the boot.tar.xz and root.tar.xz, change the name and icon and it then comes up in the list of os to install. The size of the partitions can be set in partitions.json, install details in os.json and there is even a directory to hold slides to show during install.

It is possible to define a partition size and then a tar ball of the contents of that partition so hopefully this would not be too different to what we already have in piCore-7.0.img. The offical documentation for custom os install is available here: https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs/blob/master/README.md#how-to-create-a-custom-os-version

piCore boots directly into memory and so works a little differently to raspbian. Is it possible to produce similar instructions to the retropie tutorial so we can boot piCore from noobs and what would need to be done to boot piCore within the noobs layout?

/Simon