Most Useful Raspberry Pi Software

[Tamsyn Michael]

So, after a bit of faffing about to get usb tethering up and running I
now have a net connected Pi (woot!). While I'm installing
gargoyle-free I was wondering what other folks have decided to run?

[Thomas Sprinkmeier]

On 18 October 2012 15:18, Tamsyn Michael <tamsyn.j...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So, after a bit of faffing about to get usb tethering up and running I
> now have a net connected Pi (woot!).

You mena USB connected to 3G dongle?

That's what I want on mine, currently using a USB-Wifi to talk to it (yuck!!).

I got as far as finding out about usb_modeswitch and needing an XP
machine to snoop on the setup traffic.
Haven't gotten motivated enough to chanse down an XP machine yet...

Other than that my in-use RasPi is the home i/net gateway, DHCP, DNS,
VPN, firewall,...

The other one is waiting for RaspBMX-rc5 to install cleanly. Had some
problems with it the other night, haven't had time to try again.


Thomas

[Thomas Sprinkmeier]

On 18 October 2012 15:18, Tamsyn Michael <tamsyn.j...@gmail.com> wrote:

also...

raspi + apache + bins + USB-WiFi dongle = pretty decent photo-album
server for tablets, phones etc.

[Tamsyn Michael]

Nope, I mean over tethering for my phone:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=16867&p=196707#p196707

It was sheer dumb luck that it worked, but I'm not complaining. Maybe
give it a go :). Or get wicd running - I've had a lot of luck with it
and dongles of various descriptions.

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[Jamie Mackenzie]

So I'm not the only one having issues with RaspBMC at the moment?  I have wiped the SD card reinstalled about 3 times and I get constant crashes every time after the first reboot.

I have given up on it for the time being.  Glad that I didn't pull apart my HTPC, hehe.  

[Thomas Sprinkmeier]

On 18 October 2012 16:12, Jamie Mackenzie <jrrmac...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So I'm not the only one having issues with RaspBMC at the moment? I have
> wiped the SD card reinstalled about 3 times and I get constant crashes every
> time after the first reboot.

Mine just goes into an install loop...

painful on crappy slow internets with low quota :-)

> I have given up on it for the time being. Glad that I didn't pull apart my
> HTPC, hehe.

I had the earlier version working but wanted to upgrade to see if I
could get wireless.

Should have imaged the SD card.....


Thomas

[Steve Roehrs]

I had a similar issue last week. Instead, I setup a second SD card, which then worked for a while, before giving me the same issue.  I turned it off and forgot about it (went away for the weekend) and ended up putting the original SD card back in, and now it works fine, for the moment.

No idea what is causing it, but I do wonder if it's power  supply/heat related.  I'm using a decent USB power supply, but I'm thinking something internal to the board.

Disconnecting the ethernet seemed to make a difference - maybe I should be looking at the USB polyfuses, although I'm not actually using any USB devices.  The onboard ethernet does run off the USB bus, but I don't know where it gets its power from.

Steve

[Jamie Mackenzie]

Yeh, I've had the install loop too.  Although it was more of an upgrade loop.  I feel your pain :)

[Paul Schulz]

Hi Thomas,

Mine was doing the same thing with RaspBMC, until I gave up and lent
it to Dale until his PaspPi arrived.
I was hoping that someone would notice and fix the installer.. and
this was probably 2 months ago.

[Tamsyn Michael]

Hmmm, that does not sound good. I haven't even tried it and I'm
already annoyed at the way they force you to use the installer.

I found this:
http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianXBMC

though I don't have a connection to do it over - next time we have a
24 hour hack session maybe.

[Thomas Sprinkmeier]

On 18 October 2012 16:34, Tamsyn Michael <tamsyn.j...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hmmm, that does not sound good. I haven't even tried it and I'm
> already annoyed at the way they force you to use the installer.
>
> I found this:
> http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianXBMC

Do you mean the installer script?

I just dd'ed the image onto the SDcard and booted off it.

The first time I tried it I had no monitor plugged in , didn't realise
it was still busy and rebooted after a while. Fail, my fault entirely.

The second time, with TV attached, I saw the
'downloadin/installing/rebooting/....' messages, waited and had
XBMCrunning beautifully (even responded to remote control via SymLink
magic).

Now I'm in the install loop.....


Thomas

[Andrew Helgeson]

Did anyone look at this?
http://www.dex-os.com/DexBasic/DexBasic.htm
I was thinking of getting just to run it

Andrew

Thomas

[Tamsyn Michael]

Naw, not into bare metal stuff.

So, is there a way to power the pi from the hub?  Neither of the hubs I have work, and yet my laptop does ???  I'm thinking they must be non-spec.  :(

[Steven Pickles]

I did a bit of faffing about to set up a Pi to go in to looping a video at startup (using raspbian). Since we are talking about Pi uses, I'll put what I ended up with here:

It turns out that the hardware accelerated movie player "omxplayer" is an odd beast. It can actually play while in console mode. Unfortunately it doesn't black out the letterbox/pillarbox area around the video, it just plays over the top of whatever else is happening in the background. I tried blanking out the console with "clear" but you are left with a blinking cursor, which is not so cool. In the end, I decided to get it to boot in to X so that I could properly clear the screen.

Now, because of the weird way that omxplayer writes to the framebuffer, if you start it too soon after booting X, the image doesn't appear because (I think) it is still writing to the console-mode part of the framebuffer while we are seeing the X framebuffer. It seems that the safest way to make sure that X is fully set up before starting omxplayer, is to launch a terminal emulator, and have it launch omxplayer.

this method uses a few programs that aren't on the Pi by default so you will need to install them:

sudo apt-get install xterm feh unclutter

Firstly, I had my Pi set to _not_ boot into the desktop (in rasp-config) (because we will start a minimal X ourselves)

Then, in /etc/rc.local, I added this line:

xinit -fg white -bg black -e /home/pi/play.sh -- -s 0

xinit normally starts X and opens xterm. The other options (up to the --) get handed to xterm.

"-fg while -bg black" set the colours of the terminal.

"-e /home/pi/play.sh" tells the xterm to launch /home/pi/play.sh (instead of the users shell)

the options after the -- go to the X server itself.

"-s 0" disables screen-blanking.

/home/pi/play.sh does the work and it looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

# this launches a program that hides the mouse cursor after 1 second of idle time

unclutter -idle 1 &

# this is a full screen image viewer, used to black out the letter/pillar-box area

feh -Z -F /home/pi/black.png &

# we store the process ID of feh.

FEH_PID=$!

# we keep looping as long as the feh process is still running

while ps $FEH_PID >/dev/null 2>&1 ; do

 # each loop, run omxplayer

 omxplayer -r "/home/pi/video.avi" 

done

you also need to make play.sh executable:

chmod u+x /home/pi/play.sh

pix

ps. i know I could have used lxterminal and reduced my dependencies by one, but I like xterm ;)

On 18 October 2012 15:18, Tamsyn Michael <tamsyn.j...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Tamsyn Michael]

I don't like LXTerminal, but I'm not sure why.  It seems the same as other terminal programs.

[Steve Roehrs]

xterm brings back memories of when xterm was the ONLY terminal program, and it was sooooo cool because you could see multiple terminals on a big graphical screen instead of using a serial terminal.

Steve (feeling old now)

[Ken]

Don't feel old, Steve. The first terminal I used at work had a printer for output. :)

Ken.

[Thomas Sprinkmeier]

On 19 October 2012 11:59, Ken <k...@waggies.net> wrote:
> Don't feel old, Steve. The first terminal I used at work had a printer for
> output. :)

I remember those!

I miss the infinite scrollback buffer...

Thomas

[Andrew Helgeson]

I used to have an ASR33 hooked up to my SYM-1, my parents hated it!
Had to move it to my shed, then had to line the shed with foam and ply to stop the neighbors bitching!

Andrew

ps

still have the SYM-1!

[Steve Roehrs]

I used my dad's Superboard II, it had a 24x24 screen, and an ASR33 for the printer.  Yes baud rates do go as low as 110 baud :)

Steve

[Tamsyn Michael]

Cave story runs pretty well in full screen.

[Tamsyn Michael]

So does ScummVM - man, if only I didn't have stuff to do.

[Andrew Helgeson]

I'm gunna have to get a RasberyPi!
I think my evil robot army hell bent on world domination needs more grunt than an Arduino can provide!
Now I've seen a few PVM projects running on 'Pi's it seems cheaper than getting a few beagle boards.

Andrew

[Tamsyn Michael]

Pro tip, don't use the high setting.  Just trashed my install.  :(

[Steven Pickles]

high what?

[Tamsyn Michael]

Oops, overclock setting.

[Tamsyn Michael]

Pro tip:  No.

[Damien P]

Pis don't have a great deal of outputs, but they should be enough for roboty stuff, as long as the 3V outputs aren't a problem.  People seem to connect a microcontroller to them anyway.  You could run Firmata on the microcontroller, and connect it with the UART or SPI.

[Thomas]

Or get a gertboard:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/tag/gertboard

"""
If you want to use your Raspberry Pi to drive motors to open doors, lift
things, or power robotics; if you want to sense temperature and switch
devices on and off; if you want to flash lights; ...
"""

Some assembly apparently required...


Thomas

[Tamsyn Michael]

Gertboard tries to be too many things, I think an Arduino and motorshield would be a better bet for that price.

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[Cameron Milton]

Honestly, I've had a lot of luck just running the debian/raspbian weezy version off the raspberrypi.org site.
I've primarily been using mine as a NAS, so really just samba and openssh but I also had mplayer working relatively nicely except the output to tv failed horribly. Though I hear oxmplayer does a lot nicer.

I will be installing cups soon with predefined network printers for sharing them without having to share the drivers.

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[Tamsyn Michael]

Hey Cameron,

I have gotten omxplayer working quite well on the pi. Here's my method:
http://noobsquared.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/watching-movies-on-pi.html

I have a heap of other stuff I need to document about getting this
thing working nicely. Pro-tip, iceape (apt-get install iceape) has a
lower overhead than midori, and runs much . Plus it has an ad
blocker. You can also get gnash (flash alternative) running in the
browser - apt-get install browser-plugin-gnash - though I don't
recommend trying to watch youtube videos.

[Cameron Milton]

I would imagine links2 to have even lower overhead than iceape but I might be mistaken. I would also suggest checking out opera for performance. About a year ago I found it was lighter on RAM than chrome or firefox, but haven't done any testing recently.

There is also lightspark as an alternative to gnash, it doesn't have that great of support for youtube though: https://github.com/lightspark/lightspark/wiki/Site-Support , but you could always watch the html5 version of (certian) vidoes on youtube too: http://www.youtube.com/html5

[Kim Hawtin]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 12:44 PM, Cameron Milton
<cameron...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I would imagine links2 to have even lower overhead than iceape but I might
> be mistaken. I would also suggest checking out opera for performance. About
> a year ago I found it was lighter on RAM than chrome or firefox, but haven't
> done any testing recently.

I use Midori for lower spec machines if I need to test against a
web-kit browser.
You could also try Dillo if you need a GUI web browser. Don't expect
amazing things with Javascript heavy sites thought.

Alternatively for text there is w3m, lynx, elinks and links.
If you just want a http downloader, try curl, wget or craft a one
liner up in perl with WWW::Mechanise.
There is bound to be a dozen other languages with modules that can do
that too...

cheers,

Kim
--
"Art without engineering is dreaming; engineering without art is
calculating." --SKR

[Cameron Milton]

Links2 supports javascript apparently.

[Tamsyn Michael]

So does Iceape - kinda. Depending how much there is on the page.

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 4:42 PM, Cameron Milton

[Damien P]

On Monday, October 22, 2012 12:44:41 PM UTC+10:30, Cameron Milton wrote:

I would imagine links2 to have even lower overhead than iceape but I might be mistaken. 

I'd be surprised if Iceape/Seamonkey is any faster than Iceweasel/Firefox, since they're both based on the same platform (XUL).  Links2 should use very little memory since it's essentially a text-mode browser with graphics added.