Pi Power Tools

Pi Power Tools

General Purpose Raspbian Image & SD Card Manager

Want to build your own custom Raspbian SD card image? Like enabling ssh, modifying /boot/config.txt, doing an apt update, enabling VNC, or installing something?
Have a pile of sd cards and curious what\’s on them? (and don\’t want to boot them, one at a time, in a Pi?)
Want to run two versions of Raspbian at once?
Or, how about running Raspbian Stretch on a Pi 4?

No other tool can do any of these:

• Boot – Powered by Vdesktop. Runs the Raspbian image in a virtual machine. It even shows the desktop!
• Flash – Flashes Raspbian directly from the Internet to the selected device. Tuned for maximum speed, proven by benchmarks.
• Mount – Full control to manage loop devices and mountpoints.
• Edit – Auto-creates a loop device, then lets you mess up its partitions with Gparted.
• Resize – Add or remove free space from a disk image with a single click. <– This also repairs the image!

Sneak peek:

Want to give it a spin? Great!

To download & install

Run this command in a terminal in the desktop session, not from the console:

wget -O - https://raw.gi*th*ubuserconten*t.com/Botspot/Pi-Power-Tools/master/update | bash

This clones the repository to /home/pi/Pi-Power-Tools, adds a menu button, clones my vdesktop repo, and asks permission before installing YAD. Nothing is modified outside of your home directory.

System requirements:

• Raspberry Pi 3B, 3B+, or 4B (untested on older models)
• Running Raspbian Buster or Stretch
• Passwordless sudo ability for pi user
• Internet connection (recommended for update checking & img downloading)

After installing, Pi Power Tools can be launched from the Menu:

To uninstall:

If it\’s not working for you, please open an issue.

sudo apt purge gparted yad systemd-container xserver-xephyr expect
rm -rf ${HOME}/Pi-Power-Tools ${HOME}/Pi-Power-Tools.old
rm ${HOME}/Desktop/ppt.desktop ${HOME}/.local/share/applications/ppt.desktop

Instructions

Table of Contents

• Home
  • Settings
• IMG Mode
• USB Mode
• Flash
• Button explanations
  • Boot
  • View
  • Edit
  • Advanced Mount
• Under the hood
  • Directory Tree
• Q&A

Home

The menu button opens this window by default. Enter IMG Mode or USB Mode from here. The Update button will appear if an update is available.

Settings

Currently, you can change what the menu button opens by default – (Flash, IMG Mode, USB Mode, and Home), if the Boot Button launches the Desktop, whether or not to run zerofree when the Shrink Button is clicked, and how much free space to add when the \’X GB free\’ button is clicked.

IMG Mode

Customize Raspbian Images.

Before you can see that above page, you first have to select an img.

4 ways to select a Raspbian Image:

1. Click the arrow on the right to see any previously used disk images:
2. Drag-n-drop a Raspbian image from File Manager to the text box:
3. Click Download New to download & unzip a new Raspbian image:

   Download mode has been tuned for maximum speed.

4. Or create an img from your running Pi by clicking SD to IMG.

After a disk image has been selected, this main page appears:

Buttons:

• Back: Back to the image selection window.
• Flash: Copy everything from the selected img to a device. Details
• Boot: Attempt to \”boot\” the selected device using a virtual desktop. Details
• View: Mounts the image to /media/pi/pi-power-tools so you can modify the filesystem. Details
• Edit: Modify the partitions using Gparted. Details
• Reset PT: This button attempts to fix the partitions if you messed them up somehow. It replaces the partition table with the one from Raspbian Buster Full. Your Mileage May Vary.
• Advmount: Control exactly where to mount each partition. In theory this will work for any kind of disk image, but has only been tested on Raspbian images. YMMV. Details
• Shrink: Removes all free space from the selected image. If enabled in Settings, zerofree will run afterwards to remove unused blocks from the disk image.
  • Though similar in function, the script used to do this is entirely different in design and does not utilize RonR\’s image-utils in any way.
• 1 GB Free: Adds one gigabyte of free space to the root partition. Customize how much free space in Settings.
  • It is not accumulative, so clicking it multiple times won\’t result in multiple gigabytes of free space.

USB Mode

Manage storage devices connected to your Pi.

Select a drive in the list, then click an action button on the bottom.
Your Pi\’s internal SD Card (/dev/mmcblk0) cannot be flashed or booted.
Buttons:

• Home: Back to the home window.
• Refresh: Check for any newly inserted storage devices.
• Flash: Copy everything from an img to the selected device. Details
• Boot: Attempt to \”boot\” the selected device using a virtual desktop. Details
• View: Mounts the device to /media/pi/pi-power-tools. Details
  Intended for Raspbian devices only, as this button assumes there are 2 partitions. (and mounts partition 1 to /media/pi/pi-power-tools/boot)
• Edit: Modify the partitions using Gparted. Details

Flash

Select an input disk image and an output usb drive. The filesystem root device (/dev/mmcblk0) cannot be flashed and so is not listed.
In addition to any previously used img and zip files, there are three download options:

If Download is selected, this window will appear next asking which download mode you want.

The first mode is much faster than the second one.
Breakdown of the pros and cons:

Concerning speed, here are benchmarks made on a 4GB Pi 4:

Explanations for some buttons:

Boot

With this handy button, you can \”test drive\” your img/usb without needing to power down, switch sd cards, etc. Any changes made inside (apt install, change preferences, etc) will be preserved in the img/usb.

Instead of a Virtual Machine, this technique runs at 100% native speed (no emulation), because the guest runs the same kernel as the host device. Therefore, only booting Raspbian is supported, as other OSes require other kernels.
That means this method will still work just fine, even if the whole boot partition is corrupted!

First, the VM\’s Console will appear and display the boot text.
After the boot process has completed, and if \”Boot to Desktop\” is enabled in Settings, a window similar to VNC will open and display the desktop.

It is a known issue that the browser crashes with the Aw, Snap! error.

View

Mounts the selected device/img to /media/pi/pi-power-tools.

When you close the Viewing /dev/sdX dialog window, the selected device will be unmounted (ejected).

Edit

Lets you edit the partitions of the selected device using gparted.

Advanced Mount

Fine-tune control over loop devices and mountpoints for disk images.
If there are multiple loop devices associated with it, you will be prompted to select one and delete the others.
Which one to delete? Usually you want to keep the top one on the list. (in this example, that\’s /dev/loop0)

Now you can mount each partition where you want to:

When you\’re finished, be sure to click Delete to detach the loop device.

Under the hood

Pro tip: There are many comments in the shell scripts. Not only does this assist debugging, it also makes most of it self-explanatory.

Directory Tree:

Pi-Power-Tools/ – This is the main folder that stores everything.

During an update, the old folder is renamed to Pi-Power-Tools.old/

• Scripts:
  • installgui – This prompts for packages to be installed
  • flash – This is the Flash tool\’s script.
  • update – This script is what installs/updates Pi Power Tools.
  • home – This is Home\’s script.
  • img-mode – This script is IMG Mode.
  • usb-mode – This script is USB Mode.
• Other files:
  • installedpackages – Keeps a record of what the update script installed.
  • README.md – You are reading this right now.
• Folders:
• functions/ – Stores sub-scripts that do certain things.
  • advmount – The Advanced Mount tool.
  • buffer – The secret sauce behind the fast download speeds. This ARMHF executable ships with Pi Power Tools, to prevent adding a dependency for installing buffer.
  • edit – A short bash script that opens a Raspbian image in gparted. It handles creating a loop device and deleting it when done.
  • imglist-parser – Bash script that parses imglist, deletes entries that don\’t exist on the filesystem, removes duplicate entries, and echo\’s the resulting output.
  • milliways-image-backup – Fork of a fork of RonR\’s image-backup. I have made substancial changes to most of the script.
  • restore-pt – Short bash script to overwrite the specified disk image\’s partition table with part-table.img.
  • terminal-run – This simple script is used to run bash scripts in a terminal. It\’s a standardized workaround originally developed for Pi-Apps.
  • image-shrink – Botspot\’s version of image-shrink. Added a couple bug fixes and removed the interactive elements for better scripting usage.
  • zerofree – Another ARMHF executable for recognizing unused blocks and overwriting them with zeros. Shrinks a disk image even more. Only used if enabled in Settings.
  • zerofree_runner – Wrapper bash script to interface with zerofree. Creates a loop device for the specified img, runs zerofree, runs shrinkimage, then removes the loop device.
• data/ – Stores configuration files
  • home.conf – Stores the configuration from the Settings window.
  • imglist – Keeps track of what disk images have been used.
  • mirrors – URLs, sizes, and names of download sites. Feel free to add your own.
  • mountpoint – Change where to mount to. Default is /media/pi/pi-power-tools.
  • part-table.img – The default partition table extracted from Raspbian Buster Full. Used by the Reset PT button in IMG Mode.
  • vdesktop.conf – Stores the boot mode for vdesktop. Possible values are gui, cli, and cli-login.
  • version – The new location for the version file. Compared against the online version to check for updates.
  • ziplist – Exactly the same as imglist, but stores entries for previously used ZIP files instead. Currently only used by the Flash tool.
• icons/ – Stores all the icons for the user interface.
• vdesktop/ – Ships empty, but installgui populates this folder with all files from the Vdesktop repo.

Basic script design:

• The scripts all use YAD to handle the user interface.* I found that Zenity was way too limited. (and didn\’t allow for multiple buttons, button icons, customized tooltips, or much else)
  * Okay, installgui and update do use zenity because Raspbian does not include YAD by default.

Q&A

• Q: Unique logo.What inspired you?

It\’s a combination of BB-8, the RPi logo, and a saw blade. Also I think it looks a bit like like a pineapple, which is my favorite fruit.

• What made you develop this tool?

I while back, I wanted to download Raspbian, uninstall all programming tools from it, do an apt update & upgrade, add a chrome extension to the browser, then flash it to a SD card. It took several days to fumble around with terminal commands. The action was so simple, but the process so hard that I realized a tool to do it was sorely needed.

• Q: How long did it take to program this?

Several months. But it saved me enough time to be worth it. And I had a blast programming it all.