Already-installed OSes appear to be re-installable from Network even with no Ethernet connection

[lurch]

Not sure if this is worth fixing, but figured I might as well report it anyway...

It really only affects NOOBS Lite. Consider the following scenario:

1. User writes NOOBS Lite to their SD card
2. Then they boot up NOOBS Lite on their Pi with an Ethernet cable connected
3. Then they use the 'network install' feature of NOOBS to install e.g. Arch and OpenELEC
4. Time passes... and they decide they want to remove Arch and install just OpenELEC
5. So they boot up NOOBS again and press shift to access the recovery GUI, but this time they have no Ethernet cable connected
6. As Arch and OpenELEC were both installed from the network, they display the network icon next to their name
7. Then the user unticks Arch, and clicks the Install button
8. They say Yes they're happy for everything on their SD card to get overwritten
9. Even though no network connection is available, the NOOBS install appears to start, but then stops shortly afterwards with an error dialog saying
   Error downloading or extracting tarball wget: unable to resolve host address 'downloads.raspberrypi.org' tar: short read
10. Clicking on Close then results in nothing but a black screen until you power-off

Maybe NOOBS should display a warning dialogue if you're about to try installing OSes from the network and there's no active network connection? (Perhaps NOOBS can 'tell' it has no network connection if it hasn't been able to download http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/os_list.json in order to display the 'full' list of OSes in NOOBS)

I guess the same scenario would also occur if you used NOOBS Lite on a Model B Pi to install various OSes to the SD card, and then later tried using the recovery GUI after the same SD card has been swapped into a Model A Pi.

[Ruffio]

@lurch is this still an issue?

[aaaschmitt]

I just did this actually. I already had raspbian installed and wanted to reintstall it because I was having strange internet problems. I had a wifi dongle plugged in and wasn't thinking that the rpi needed a wired connection. Oh well guess I'll just plug it in and hope it works.

[lurch]

Early versions of NOOBS had no WiFi support. Later versions of NOOBS only support the official WiFi dongle and the Pi3: https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs#wifi-networks

All versions of NOOBS support wired Ethernet ;-)