pi-top: installing pi-topOS on BerryBoot

Fairly easy to install a new O/S on BerryBoot. However, the pi-topOS has a few hidden features to get working.

The video jumps around a bit as I test out what things are working and what things are not. This was the first time I ran into a "compatibility" issue with BerryBoot. All the previous installs went smoothly, just install and boot.

I found the pi-topOS on this Berry Boot server: https://berryboot.alexgoldcheidt.com/images/ Images on this server are stored in a compressed tar file format and BerryBoot wants to see the uncompressed image file. So I downloaded a selection of image files, extracted then with WinRAR and then put them on a USB stick. There are setup instructions on the BerryBoot site for setting up a Windows share on a PC or an iSCSI share on a NAS to be able to install images over the network.

It turns out the pi-topOS has some hardware specific settings in the config.txt file that are not included in the default BerryBoot config.txt file. I didn't see any mention of this on the BerryBoot page: https://www.berryterminal.com/doku.php/berryboot I think that the BerryBoot config.txt file is loaded at boot time as one would expect. But it seems that the config.txt file of the target O/S isn't loaded or some of it's parameters are not used.

The way the pi-topOS handles things like turning on the speaker is to write some lines to config.txt and reboot. Normally works fine, the settings tool writes the changes to the file, you reboot and they take affect. But under BerryBoot, those lines may not actually be interpreted because they are in the config.txt file on the SSD and not in the config.txt file on the SD card.

So one needs to merge the pi-topOS/SSD config.txt lines with the BerryBoot/SC card config.txt file.

Another example of this would be if you install the video codec licenses on your system. Those activation keys would need to be in the BerryBoot config.txt file and not in, for example, the OpenELEC/Kodi config.txt file.

But once you understand this limitation, it's not too hard to work with. The only major issue you might run into is say pi-topOS needs I2C and SPI enabled while some other O/S won't work unless those are turned off. In that case, you may not be able to run both O/S versions with the same BerryBoot setup. To date, I've not run into a conflict like this.

config.txt changes: max_usb_current=1 #dtparam=audio=on dtparam=i2c1=on dtparam=spi=on

More to come, getting the internal audio working...

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Intro: Louisiana Fairytale by Austin Rogers http://drfiddle.com/show_tune.php?id=94

#pitop #pitopOS #raspberrypi #raspbian ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSCECyakJyw