Raspberry Pi - $35 Linux computer

  • Thread starter Thread starter daz
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I just bought a Raspberry Pi 3 B. Have literally only spent an evening looking into what it can do. But I have a quick question before I get too involved with the thing... I bought a starter park which was meant to have come with NOOBS pre-installed. I powered the Pi up and it went straight into what I assume is Raspbian. Is that normal? Is there a way to go to the NOOBS menu and install a different OS? I thought the first thing I would see is the NOOBS menu, but it went straight to the Raspbian GUI.
 
Hold shift down when you first power on to enter Noobs, you'll need wired LAN to download options as Noobs can't use wireless and yes going straight to Raspbian is normal (make sure you update it as normally it's horribly out of date)
 
It uses the 3B's on-board wifi fine, in the NOOBS menu there's an option for connecting to a wireless network and then after a moment it shows all of the downloadable OSes.

Not on all of the Noobs being distributed via SD with the official starter kits, quite a few of the images dumped on the SD cards are hideously out of date.
 
Hold shift down when you first power on to enter Noobs, you'll need wired LAN to download options as Noobs can't use wireless and yes going straight to Raspbian is normal (make sure you update it as normally it's horribly out of date)

Brilliant :) Much appreciated :) I updated Raspbian last night - Seemed like it took aaaaagges :p Really enjoying playing with this though :)

If I was to install a different OS using NOOBS, can I hit shift again and install a different one? Or will installing a new OS mess up the NOOBS menu?
 
Not on all of the Noobs being distributed via SD with the official starter kits, quite a few of the images dumped on the SD cards are hideously out of date.

True, in which case it doesn't take long to get a fresh copy.

If I was to install a different OS using NOOBS, can I hit shift again and install a different one? Or will installing a new OS mess up the NOOBS menu?

I think you can, but the new OS will overwrite whichever OS you've already got installed. If you want to try multibooting I've heard people say good things about BerryBoot.
 
I played around with multibooting but in all honesty I just found it much easier to buy a batch of microSDHC cards and stick a different OS on each. It just makes for far more hassle free experimentation.
 
I use my Pi 2 for OpenELEC only but interested in pi-hole now that I've seen it. If I installed pi-hole onto raspbian would it still work even if I didn't boot into it? I'm assuming I'd need to set up dual boot using NOOBS?
 
LibreELEC is much better than OpenELEC btw.

OpenELEC is as good as dead.

edit, that Pi-Hole looks neat!
 
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I use my Pi 2 for OpenELEC only but interested in pi-hole now that I've seen it. If I installed pi-hole onto raspbian would it still work even if I didn't boot into it? I'm assuming I'd need to set up dual boot using NOOBS?
Yes you should be able to. Its very good once setup.
Look at http://dietpi.com/ too that lets you install various things including pihole at once on a blank pi.

Is there much difference between openelec and libre elec. Im on a krypton version of open elec I assume its not worth moving over until next version?
 
The old development team from OpenELEC all moved to create LibreELEC, only of the original developers remains at OpenELEC.

LE is more stable and will soon have Kodi 17. Here is the nightly thread, just to show the number of changes and updates.. every day since April, new modules/features have been introduced.

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=269814
 
Do love Raspberry Pi's as have 3 now one running OpenMediaVault another with PiCorePlayer with screen plus just setup Pi-Hole

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I'm still trying to get my head around if I have a need for a Raspberry Pi. Part of me feels like I am missing out because its SO popular and so many friends have them as well. I've looked up Pi-Hole since seeing it mentioned here and think the network level ad blocking could be excellent.

But not sure what else it could be used for?

Also do people use each Pi for one specific purpose or can they be setup to handle multiple things?
 
Also do people use each Pi for one specific purpose or can they be setup to handle multiple things?

They're like any other machines, how many things you can give them depends on how much each of those things taxes the machine. If you really want to you can set up multiple microSD cards with different purposes.
 
I'm thinking of getting a Pi 3 as a present for someone but I'm not sure if I just get it on it's own and let them buy accesories or get a starter kit. The starter kit I found had a few bad reviews because of the SD card being faulty.
 
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