[LAU] Setting Up Raspberry Pi Media Players for Installation

[Bill Purvis]

On 24/03/2022 20:52, Len Ovens wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Mar 2022, Brandon Hale wrote:
>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I know this might be a weird place to ask, but thought some of you 
>> may have some insight. I'm setting up four raspberry pis for an 
>> installation to just loop through videos on four TVs with vlc and 
>> openbox.
>>
>> Do you think I could set up the image on one pi, and then clone them 
>> on other sd cards for the other 3 pis? There should be no issues with 
>> doing that, right?, especially since I don't plan on giving them 
>> internet access. The pis all have the same size sd card too, making 
>> this even easier. I think I'm just going to throw 32-bit arch linux 
>> arm one of the pis, set one up the way I want, and then clone them 
>> for the other pis.
>
> The only problem I can see (assuming using dd to copy) is that all USB 
> cards can vary somewhat in size even for the same size (ssd do this 
> too). You may wish to make your master copy partition just a little 
> bit small. Even a network should not be a problem as I think DHCP can 
> be set up to make sure all node have unique names as well as IPs. So 
> streaming from a central server or making content changes there would 
> not be out of the question.
>
> -- 
> Len Ovens
> www.ovenwerks.net
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-audio-user mailing list
> Linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
> https://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
I'm doing something similar, though my Pis are networked. I set up one 
the way I want, then use a script to
back it up to my laptop, then another script to copy it to SD cards for 
the copies. I tweak the hostname
on the laptop before writing individual cards. Basically, I set up 
partitions on the SD card making the
root partition fill the card, then use the 'sudo cp -x' command to copy 
all the individual files. This
avoids any problem about the variations in size of the cards. If anyone 
wants to pursue this, I'm
happy to email my scripts and other notes off-list. For the case above, 
it's just a case of running
the two scripts, download the original card, then duplicate to the copies.

Bill

-- 
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| Bill Purvis                            |
| email: bill at billp.org                  |
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