NOOBS does not work over RCA unless you press "3" Wut?

I decided to take a glance at NOOBS, out of curiosity, since it's mentioned regularly in this group.

Unlike Raspbian, I got a blank screen.

So I re-tried burning the SD card and looking at the install instructions again. No luck. Tried a different SD card. No luck. Had I done something wrong with the formatting of the card? No, the install instructions just say format the SD-card as FAT, unzip NOOBS, and copy the files onto the card. So I try a different tool for reformatting the card and try again. No luck.

Google "noobs not booting" and start ploughing through pages of stuff.

And finally there it is: Unlike Raspbian, NOOBS can not detect that the HDMI is not connected, and requires you to press "3" on the keyboard to switch to the RCA. (I'm using a small video monitor.)

How unfriendly is that? I wonder how many newbies would have thrown the RPi away before working out what had gone wrong because of that one.

Given that the Pi is aimed at education, and newbies to computing, maybe for people with limited money and resources, I find this particular issue surprising. Opinions?

Reply to
Dave Farrance
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Yes it is unfriendly, but no more than a lot of other things you'll encounter computing. If you throw it away after such a minor hurdle, you wont be learning much.

---druck

Reply to
druck

Well... The guides on the Pi site tell you how to hook up the video, and give connecting to an old television via RCA as an option, which I'd have thought was one of the most obvious options for somebody receiving the Pi as a present and wanting to just try it out. So the guides give instructions that lead to dysfunction. I'm an electronic engineer, and think I have reasonable Google-fu, but it still took me a good while to figure it out.

Reply to
Dave Farrance

Been there, done that, jabbed three. NOOBs arrives.

Next hurdle: No "network install" options in NOOBS, just 1 Raspbian. This is fair, no network cable plugged in yet!

Plugged it in, moments later NOOBS vanishes and drops me to a text console. Not friendly. Ummm, reboot + press on with the on-card Raspbian then.

Next hurdle: Raspbian installed and working on a *non-networked* Pi, so plugged in to wired network, booted, and ... nothing. No display. Press 3. Nothing. Press 3. No NOOBS no Raspbian.

Hello?

Simple mistake: DHCP not running on my network (don't particularly use DHCP, everything is static).

It appears the PI had detected the network (good) and was seeking some DHCP action. You'll have a long wait there ... I have no idea what the timeout was, but my patience was shorter. Maybe eventually it would have given up and booted.

I've turned on DHCP since, it works fine now.

I can see this would freak people out that are not used to this stuff. It's just a minor annoyance otherwise.

--
--------------------------------------+------------------------------------ 
Mike Brown: mjb[-at-]signal11.org.uk  |    http://www.signal11.org.uk
Reply to
Mike

On Sat, 14 Mar 2015 12:45:51 +0000, Dave Farrance declaimed the following:

In this day&age, the only gear I have that has RCA composite outputs are ancient video games (a Nintendo 64 [1996-2003], Sega Dreamcast [1999-2001], and Nintendo GameCube [2001-2007]), and NTSC video recorders (VHS tape anyone, NTSC DVD-R -- Oh, and an archaic portable DVD player). My WII [2006] had component video, and my WII-U has HDMI.

These days, $200 can snag an HDMI flat-screen TV [Best Buy, 32" 720p, $220; 19" 720p, $100] {Okay, I wouldn't touch a 720p display, but a 24"

1080p is only $140} The cost in electricity savings alone could probably make up for the purchase price over using an old NTSC/PAL CRT in short time. For a computer display, 24" is large {I remember paying over $700 for a 17" multi-sync CRT to handle the >NTSC output of my expanded Amiga -- and that unit wouldn't handle most modern computers as it only went to 40kHz [I think] -- but did go down to NTSC for booting)

Sure, new screens still have at least one RCA A/V connection -- mainly meant for those old devices, and maybe video camera direct playback; but for the latter, it's likely easier to just copy the SD card contents to a USB flash memory and plug that into the TV [note: my video cameras are still miniDV tape -- even the $3500 prosumer HD camera].

--
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN 
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/
Reply to
Dennis Lee Bieber

outputs

720p,

mainly

all valid points & Noobs is aimed at a market where you would probably expect a HDMI. that said, forcing HDMI mode instead of allowing the board to detect does seem to be a bit of flawed thinking. I can only assume it is to cater to people who forget to connect the HDMI first

--
Kirk to Enterprise -- beam down yeoman Rand and a six-pack.
Reply to
alister

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