Rpi Imager Installation - georgejhunt/iiab GitHub Wiki

Installing RPI-IMAGER

Introduction -- Windows, Mac OS, Linux

Each of the three major Operating Systems has standard methods of adding programs. Raspberry Pi Foundation has developed a package they call rpi-imager for each of these Operating Systems. This page explains the steps that are similar in some respects, but also particular to each OS.

For each of the systems, after the normal install process, you can create a file, with the proper contents for your OS, placed in the correct place, which adds the IIAB images to the ones made available by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

The first steps are the same for each system:

  1. Open the browser you normally use,
  2. Click on the following URL https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/.
  3. Download the package for your OS.
  4. The downloads usually go into a predefined place. But you don't usually need to know where it is, because most browsers offer a "Open in File Manager" (or "Finder") drop down option.

Windows

  1. In File Manager, double click on the downloaded rpi-image.exe file. This will start the install process.
  2. On my Windows 10 machine, after doing the install process, there is a new rpi-imager icon on the start menu.
  3. The easiest way to use the rpi-imager with IIAB images is to open a command prompt and paste the following into it and then press enter (make sure you include the quotes):
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Raspberry Pi Imager\rpi-imager.exe" --repo http://iiab.me/images.json
  1. This cut and paste to the command line is great for exploration, but it requires finding this page again to do the cut and paste whenever you want an IIAB image. There are easier ways:
    1. Put the above command in an "imager.bat" or "imager.cmd" file, and you can navigate to it in File Explorer and double click it.
    2. Another approach is to pin rpi-imager to the task bar and then edit the icon adding the "--repo ..." clause.
    3. If you put you .bat or .cmd file in c:\windows, which is always in your path, you only need to type "imager" at the command prompt, (Get a command prompt by clicking start, type "comm", and then click on the command icon).
    4. Success is verified when you see the big red rpi-imager window appear, and when you click on "OS", you see an "IIAB" menu at the top of the list.

Linux

  1. Open a terminal. Depending on the flavor of Linux, try "Applications" -> "System" -> "Terminal".
  2. Use the Apt package manager:
   cd ~/Downloads
   apt install ./rpi-imager
  1. On my ubuntu machine, this placed the rpi-imager in /usr/bin/rpi-imager. This directory is usually in the path for the operating system. This means that you can type rpi-imager located in any directory, and it will start up.
  2. But we are going to put a little shell script into /usr/local/sbin/ which calls rpi-imager with a parameter which adds the IIAB menu items to the ones supplied by the rpi foundation.
  3. Use the text editor that your are familiar with to create a file with the following contents:
#!/bin/bash
# start up the rpi-imager and specify a root repo

/usr/bin/rpi-imager --repo http://iiab.me/images.json
chmod 755  /usr/local/sbin/imager
  1. Test your script. Type imager, and click on OS. Success is indicated if the top menu item is an IIAB item.

Mac OS

  1. Open the downloaded imager.dmg in Finder by double clicking on it.
  2. In the Mac world, dragging the rpi-imager into the Applications folder is the normal step.
  3. Execute the following lines by cutting and pasting into a terminal window (on my Mac the Terminal.app is in the Applications/utilities folder
cd   # navigate to your home directory
sudo echo "open /Applications/Raspberry\ Pi\ Imager.app/ --args --repo http://iiab.me/images.json" > /usr/local/bin/imager
sudo chmod 755 imager
  1. If you are wanting to use imager frequently, I find it convenient to drag the Terminal.app to the task bar so that it is easily available.
  2. In the terminal, you will need to type imager.