I will apologize in advance for the long post ...just want to clearly explain everything prior to my questions.
I have been teaching a bunch of kids about the RPi at a local summer camp. The cards that came with the kits were preformatted 8 gig cards with the NOOBs installer. I wanted to show the kids OpenELEC as well so I formatted all the cards on my home network with a wired connection. When I launched the Pi I was presented with many OSes and to the right they had an RJ45 icon that implied that they would be pulled down from the net. I was happily successful installing Raspian and OpenELEC on all the cards....again from what looked to be from the net...not OSes on the actual card.
I taught this same camp a few weeks ago and had the kids just install Raspbian from the NOOBs SD card. At the community college where this takes place they will not allow us to wire direct ... we have to use the campus Wifi. In the earlier camp with the SD card version of Raspbian, the Wifi setup was a bit clunky ... and I seemed to have lots of Wifi connection issues...dropping signal a lot. I attributed most of the network problems with the campus Wifi network and just mottled through.
The Wifi configuration interface with the networked Raspbian version that I installed from home over the net has a much cleaner Wifi management utility I think. I liked it much better. And I like that by default it had a wifi "bars" icon in the right top panel...something the kids were very in tune with. They can quickly look for the "bars" and see if they have signal strength. And we really did not have much network trouble at all this time around...all in all the network connectivity was much more stable.
So - here's finally my issue. As part of the class after a couple days I had them reinstall the Raspbian OS from the SD cards...wiping out the existing version of Raspbian and OpenELEC. The exercise was to get back into NOOBS setup and remove OpenELEC and install only Raspbian. Of course this time around the OS version was coming from the card. After this was done we ended up back with the other clunky version of Wifi config and we also seemed to start having the connectivity problems again. And now we do not have the "bars" Wifi interface we had before.
Even after doing updates and upgrades via apt-get the distribution still had a different Wifi config tool it seems.
Questions:
1. Is there a way to add that version of Raspbian that installs when you have a network connection right onto the NOOBs SD card?
2. Is there a way to "after the fact" get the version of Raspbian that's on the card now to change or update to the version that I got when loading the card with a networked connection?
3. Is there a way to at a minimum replace or enhance the existing Wifi utility that I have now with the one that exists on that other Raspbian distro?
4. Is it odd that the distro on the NOOBS SD card and the one that is installed if you are network connected are different? I would hope they would be the same...even if the card version was a bit out of date...it should be able to update/upgrade and get to newest version.
Thank you for any feedback.
ER