ok - I stand corrected after more experimentation. You’re good for a clean installation with a slightly different manual procedure to get from nothing to a beta installation on a clean SD…
The key is to grab the ‘develop’ version of the script in the wget command…
# grab the 'develop' branch version of the installer
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/peted-davis/WeatherFlow_PiConsole/develop/wfpiconsole.sh -O /var/tmp/wfpiconsole.sh
# call the script with the 'install' option
bash /var/tmp/wfpiconsole.sh install
# for more debugging this incantation displays
# verbosely what it's doing as it runs, and also
# generates a logfile that looks like the default installation console
# (in another window do "tail -f /var/tmp/mylog.txt" to see its progress)
#
#### bash -xv /var/tmp/wfpiconsole.sh install | tee /var/tmp/mylog.txt 2>&1
However, after installation the installed wfpiconsole tree will still be set to ‘main’ and if you try to start it and startup will fail due to not finding kivy stuff installed. The fix is to simply switch the installed wfconsole to the ‘develop’ branch. This is the same as ‘wfpiconsole beta’ notionally anyway, as you just installed the latest greatest develop branch content.
# move the .service file aside temporarily
cd ~/wfpiconsole
mv wfpiconsole.service ~/wfpiconsole.service
# switch to develop
git checkout develop
# move the .service file back
mv ~/wfpiconsole.service wfpiconsole.service
At which a ‘wfpiconsole start’ gives the expected prompts for configuring it. Cool !!!
I did not try flipping back and forth via ‘wfpiconsole beta’ or through the gui but the steps above are pretty painless for getting nothing=>udp-enabled-beta.