General discussion • Re: STICKY: PINN - An enhanced version of NOOBS.

I think you were lucky with your Pi4 backups. Image may be NSFW.
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TBH I used the principle an ex-coworker used to call "works? don't touch" Image may be NSFW.
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Each OS has an os.json file with a release_date field in it. This is what PINN uses to determine the date of an OS.
If there are multiple copies of an OS (with the same name), say one on the internet, and one on a local USB stick, then it will compare the dates and only show you the latest one. If they are both the same, it will prefer the local USB version to save downloading it again. Of course, if your local USB version is older, then the newer internet version would prevail. (You can tell the source of the file from the icon at the right hand side).

Yeah, when I first found out about PINN I got pretty familiar with what's in SETTINGS and RECOVERY partitions, I remember needing to do some tweaking like update fstab with the right UUID of the partition or some-such to get some OSes installed. Then I stuck with LE and TwisterOS. TwisterOS was abandoned (?) and I did the LE updates the way I described above so I had no reason to investigate other ways, it just worked.

Only if the newest OS is later than the one that is installed will it show "NEW VERSION".
If you are not updating the os.json file, then it will probably be the same date as the internet version.
Maybe your Pi4 USB version had a later date in os.json.....

Nope, definitely not, I've always updated the date in the json, it never would've worked otherwise and I've done it tens of times I believe. And please note that my ported OSes from RPi4 to 5 with the new PINN boot perfectly fine on the 5. FWIW I set the date to dec 31 2024 the second time just to make sure Image may be NSFW.
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Also be careful that most OSes have checksums for their tar files, so just replacing a tar file without updating those (where they exist) would cause the installation to fail.

The way I understand it most (all?) RPi OS'es have a SYSTEM file in the FAT partition which is a squashfs of the root files and there's a MD5 for it (makes sense), I'm not aware of any other hashes, at least not with LE and well, since it worked...

PINN has it's own Backup feature in the maintenance menu that will backup the OS in PINN format to a USB drive. Have you tried that out? (As always, try testing out a new restoration to a new SD card for the first time to preserve your existing setup, just in case Image may be NSFW.
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I'll look into it, not sure it's what I need though. What I need hence my rather convoluted way is upgrade LE to whatever version I choose (including nightlies) while keeping the settings. I'm creating the setting/media/etc backup tar which PINN uses, copy it to /os folder on the flash, update the other tar with the kernel and other system files from the unpacked new .img of the OS, edit the json with the new version and date (yeah, it was the date it looks at, now I remember), NEW VERSION is shown and if I click install everything works perfectly, it boots into updated and backed up LE no problems.

I'll experiment with PINN some more to understand the proper (simpler?) way. I'm not the type to tinker with stuff past the point I get the intended job done, hence my ignorance Image may be NSFW.
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Statistics: Posted by gn77b — Fri Mar 08, 2024 6:04 am

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