Designer?? What does it do? Do I need it? Can't get it to start on Raspberry PI?

[Mark Spohr]

Sorry for these dumb questions but I am confused.

I have OpenHAB running on RPi with the demo site and want to start customizing it for my installation.

I've installed the OpenHAB-Designer files (32 bit Linux version) on the Pi but it won't start.

Does Designer run on the Pi?

Do I need it?  (Can I just edit the configuration files directly?)

Can I run it on my Mac and transfer the configuration files to the Pi?

Again, extreme noob here so I need someone to point me in the right direction.

Thank you.

[Paul Muldoon]

Designer is a tool to help you edit your configuration files, item files, rule files, etc that ensures you have proper syntax and no errors.

If you want to edit your config files on the PI,  you can have a couple of options.

Log into the PI with SSH and use Nano to directly edit the files.

Edit them on your PC or Mac with with any text editor or Designer and then transfer them to the PI

or a popular method of 

Install Samba on the PI.  Then Use text editor or designer to edit the config files directly on the PI.

[Christian Menz]

Or even without Samba, run WinSCP or anything alike and edit files on Pi from there with e.g. local Notepad++.

Cheers,

Chris

[Chris Jackson]

Or you could use HABmin for a lot of the interfaces :)

https://github.com/cdjackson/HABmin

Chris

[Mark Spohr]

Thanks for all of these great answers. I appreciate the help.

It looks like Designer is built on Eclipse which is probably overkill for the use I will be needing it for... I've never had the skills, patience (and luck) necessary to get a stable functioning Eclipse installation so I will not try further there. (BTW, I tried it on my Mac OSX v10.10.2 and only got as far as the splash screen and on my Ubuntu machine it started but told me the embedded browser was not available and it wouldn't let me set the Demo configuration directory... it told me it was an invalid configuration directory.)

I can certainly edit the files with nano or copy to another machine for editing. I'll also look into the HAPmin project since this looks promising.

Again, thanks for all of your help in getting me pointed in the right direction.

.Mark