Raspberry Pi does what Microsoft can't!

The new beta of Network Install is here, and I'll tell you how it works, which Pis are compatible, and why it matters.

Mentioned in this video:

#RaspberryPi

Contents:

00:00 - Network Install
01:51 - Testing the beta on your Pi
03:24 - Imaging a microSD card
05:10 - Imaging a USB drive
05:40 - Thumb drive ISOs
06:22 - How secure is it?
07:23 - Limitations
08:31 - A new era for Pi

[jmsiener]

One upside to there being no available pi’s anywhere is that when you do find one in the future this should be on its eeprom!

[MarcoGPUtuber]

3:14 Missed opportunity to call that the Green Screen of Life.

[duke_ferdinand]

I love the QOL updates that are coming to this space, especially in recent years. I remember being TERRIFIED of overwriting something when I first got into Linux, and then the same feeling years later with Pi operating systems. Seems like those scary new user feelings of "am I formatting the right drive" or "is this the right text config" where forums tell a new user to pop open the terminal are slowly coming to a close :)

[GordonjSmith]

The Mouse that Roared! Wonderful capabilities being added to such a fabulous and cost effective platform. Very interesting to see where their development road map leads them.

[anonylesss]

just flashed the beta bootloader on my Pi400 with rpi-eeprom-update (pointing it to the beta bootloader file on the Pi) and it worked great. even without having any SD card inserted or DOK, the imager loaded, and once inserted a SD card, it recognized it immediately. great stuff from Raspberry

[--icn--]

Actually, Microsoft has started doing this on new devices from different vendors.
Vendor can put a URL in bios to connect to and download a Boot.vim file directly from Microsoft.

[TheLonelyLPer]

Your videos inspire me to tinker with my pi everyday. I love your content!

[darioampuy]

The least i would want on my new PC is a direct hardcoded connection to Microsoft servers so it can download and install windows

[ledhceb]

Really looking forward to the PXE boot especially with clusters of Pi4s and CM4s. Way back in the day I made multiscopic displays with synchronized rendering over clusters with Linux and PXE.

[davidg]

I'm pretty excited for this. I hope the final will include an option to input a download link to images. Maybe with a security warning on that option.

[middle_pickup]

This is a seriously cool feature. I can see this will make bouncing between OS images way faster with the custom image loader. Looking forward to testing.

[HiltonT]

Currently the biggest stumbling block for brand new Pi owners is, well, actually being able to buy any Pi to *become* a brand new Pi owner. :(

[Loady]

This is great! It reminds me of the day of iOS 8.0 when I discovered PXE boot. I was able to boot any network computer right from my phone and able to reset admin passwords on windows xp and 7

[fyremoon]

This sounds like one step closer to emmc on the Pi so you don't need the sd card. Plug in to the network and with no OS, the Pi does the network install and allows you to choose from a list and pulls down an OS, installs it to emmc and uses that as the boot device. If you manage to screw up the image, holding down a key on boot enables network install to get a different image.

[SchioAlves]

The internet recovery on macs is also part of the firmware (just like this new Pi feature), not of the built-in storage (as suggested in the video)

[john_hawley]

Thank you for covering the security concerns!

[nathanaelculver]

Thanks for this video! I was completely unaware of this feature. Way cool!

BTW, This appears to now (May, 2022) be out of beta and is now available under "Misc utilities" / "Bootloader".

After flashing the EEPROM, remove the SD card and reboot the Pi. An Ethernet connection and an attached keyboard are required. Once the RPi-imager has been downloaded you can reinsert the SD card and proceed as normal.

Heads up: after writing the OS to the SD card and verifying, your Pi will automatically reboot into the OS. This startled me the first time.

[JustinEmlay]

They could make the community explode even more by letting people offer complete turn key installs. Buy Pi, plug it into power and network, select Pi w/Pi Hole image. Boot into OS, a few config options and done!

[StephanvanIngen]

Good step in the right direction!

Not ready for production-roll-out though, but I will keep a close eye to this ...

[JBoya]

A network install looks cool. I just did the uSD card shuffle to get 64-bit OS onto my 8GB Pi4 which boots from a NVME-USB drive. Took about 45 minutes to get it going. A network install right to an SSD would have been very useful.