A warning on use of BerryBoot for your RPi

[fox]

I've been a big fan of BerryBoot because it lets one easily set up multiple distros on a Raspberry Pi. But I learned one bad thing about it today. Once you set it up with wifi and without plugging in your ethernet cable, you cannot use it with ethernet unless you start all over. I had BerryBoot set up to use four OSes, including NextCloud and OpenMediaVault. When I went to try out either, I couldn't get them off of the command line and I couldn't even get them on wifi. I figured that plugging them into my ethernet would give me an internet connection, but they wouldn't connect. I went back to Raspberry Pi OS, plugged in the cable and turned off wifi, and it wouldn't connect either. I tried modifying the config file to allow a cable connection, but I couldn't make that work either. I tried searching for an answer, and one post indicated that if you don't set it up initially with ethernet plugged in, the only way you can get an ethernet connection is to reset it, which means losing whatever OSes you have set up. Not a big deal since I'm only playing with it, but now I know.

I think that this is specific to BerryBoot because when I put in the Noobs card SD that came with my kit and ran the Raspberry Pi that I had previously set up, it could connect by ethernet. Now that I know, I want to reset BerryBoot with the ethernet plugged in before trying OpenMediaVault. I had a spare SD card and I successfully set up OMV by putting Raspberry Pi OS light on the card with the cable plugged in, but not in BerryBoot. An advantage to setting it up in BerryBoot, in addition to being able to use multiple OSes, is that BB makes it easy to set up your distro(s) to boot from a USB drive.

[ssfc72]

Thanks for the tip, Mike. Very good info, to know.

[Jason]

It's Linux so I would expect there to be a way via the terminal to switch to ethernet networking. However, on the RPi 3, not sure if it's the case for the RPi 4, ethernet is shared with USB. So it may be that the Pi has to load a special driver related to USB that isn't installed unless you choose a hard-wired connection on install. If you go the other way, it might work, start with wired and then switch to wireless. If so, that's possibly the issue.

[fox]

I'm not sure if the USB-Ethernet setup is different in the Pi 3 and the Pi 4, but the connection setup is definitely different between BerryBoot and a single distro startup manager like the one you get in Noobs or by installing Raspberry Pi OS directly on your SD card. I know that because I tried both from wifi, and BerryBoot will not run through a wired connection after that, whereas the single distro installations will. But any of those systems will work on wifi if you install them with Ethernet first.

You're probably right that there must be some way to switch a BerryBoot wifi installation to an Ethernet network, but I couldn't find instructions on how to do this. I did try modifying the config file in BerryBoot to allow an Ethernet connection, but I couldn't make it work. In the end, it was easier to just start over again, this time with the Ethernet connection, than to try to fix what I had previously. That's the nice thing about having a Pi, at least for me. I'm using it to try things and to learn, not to depend on it for any particular use. If I ever get to the point where I actually want to use it for something, I'll probably buy a second Pi for more experimentation.

[Jason]

I'm not sure if I quite understand here. Did Berryboot setup your connection or the installer?

[fox]

BerryBoot is both the bootloader and the installer, and it sets up the connection. The way it works is that you download the BerryBoot bootloader. (You can get it here, along with instructions.) You unzip it it and copy the files to your SD card. Put the card into your RPi and start it up. BerryBoot then does the rest of the setup on your card, and allows you to install any of several OSes, including Raspberry Pi OS or Raspberry Pi OS Lite. There are others that it is set to download directly, or if you have some downloaded in BerryBoot format and put onto a USB drive, you can install those. If you initially start it up the SD card (i.e. before installing anything) with the Ethernet cable plugged in, BB will have the wired interface available in any distro you install with it. Regardless of whether you set up wireless initially or not, wireless will be available in any distro you install in BerryBoot. But the reverse isn't true - if you initially start up BB running wifi with no Ethernet cable plugged in, you won't be able to add a wired interface later (at least I couldn't figure out how to do it or find instructions on how). This Ethernet thing seems to be unique to BerryBoot in that running a distro on an SD card not using the BB bootloader will allow you to connect with Ethernet regardless of how it was initially installed.

[Jason]

Thanks for the clarification. I thought Berryboot's only feature over NOOBS was that you can multi-boot but this is an even better feature, IMHO. It reminds me of the approach that VMware takes with their Player. Tell it the distro and it does the rest.