A New Raspberry Pi Imager

A fairly useful update!

Raspberry Pi continues to show that its real value is in continuous software and community support.

Even if their hardware isn't the greatest value, the software always shines.

I had to go and read the docs to confirm this was true, I'm really surprised this has been removed (since Raspian Bookworm apparently). It was a ridiculously common way to configure wifi on RPis over the last decade!

It's the little paper cuts like this that really hurt on a platform who's original aims were to target the education market, there is still a mountain of tutorials online advising to drop in that file for wifi setup.

Good news:

rpi-imager --cli

Has really expanded options over the previous versions.

Including:

--first-run-script --cloudinit-userdata --cloudinit-networkconfig

Though it doesn't support the old simple config text file, presumably most of that is replaced by cloudinit network config.

I am guessing this is available in the Windows version. I am seeing this from the macOS binary.

Alas I don't know much more than that; I only remembered about the CLI bit in 1.x and went to check it was still there.

You may be able to build exactly what you want with the image generation tools, as it goes:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-image-gen

https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen

Customising the OS with pi-gen is not that bad. It's an idiosyncratic tool but it works; I've not used the newer rpi-image-gen stuff.

I don't think wpa_supplicant.conf has been used for sometime, as they moved to cloud-init for bootstrapping. It requires the network-config file instead, the format of which is documented on the cloud-init documentation page.

I happen to have been experimenting with this for the past few weeks, and the most persistent issue was getting wi-fi to work correctly. It's quite a common issue, with any number of hacks. I offer my own network-config below, though I've only tested it with provisioning Ubuntu Server on the RPis so far (I have two 3B+s).

  network:
    version: 2
    renderer: networkd
    wifis:
      wlan0:
        regulatory-domain: "AU"
        dhcp4: true
        dhcp6: false
        optional: false
        access-points:
          "":
            password: ""

The important parts are:

1. The renderer, as the default is NetworkManager, which doesn't work correctly with RPis (at least on Ubuntu Server). It may work with RPiOS, but I haven't tested it yet.

2. The regulatory domain, the lack of which is what disables wi-fi in the first place. I forget how much testing I did with the format, but I believe it must be uppercase (I don't remember about quoting the string, however).

3. Disabling IPv6 may be relevant, though unlikely. It was just in a working configurations I found; I just haven't had time to confirm it. The relevant line in my user-data file is as follows:

  bootcmd:
  - sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1

The rest of the configuration is standard, though I purposefully made the wi-fi non-optional so I could confirm that wi-fi worked (my only Internet at the moment is through my iPhone hotspot, which was another source of issues, but that's a whole other story).

NB. According to someone else, the imager has the respective command line options for user-data and network-config, which I didn't know.