Raspberry Pi Radio

[Zema Bus]

I'll check and see if I have dosfstools in Arch, I do have it in Slackware.

I double checked, with the holes perfectly lined up and a screw in both ends it just spins freely, so I have a defective case, maybe they over drilled it. I watched a few videos (on the RP5) of people assembling that case and for them the screws tighten down.

[Zema Bus]

I have it in Arch too.

[Grogan]

Jeeze, I'm glad that didn't happen to me. I'd hate to have to pack up all that shit again in the boxes and send it back.

I really wanted to work on that thing tonight, I'm pissed off about the card reader. I'm going to have to somehow use that Raspberry Pi Imager, because any other method of blasting that image on (dd, Rufus, other image writing program) just writes the image, whatever it is. The rest will simply be unallocated. I presume the raspberry pi imager expands to the size of the card?

To be honest I'd have preferred a manual install where you boot with media and set up Arch.

[Zema Bus]

I'm glad it didn't happen to you as well, on your first Raspberry Pi foray

I have Arch running on it (EndeavourOS). I haven't overwritten the SD card that came with it yet, I used a 128 GB SD card I had to see how it would go. I checked disk utilization and it did expand the image to the size of the card. It gives you a list of DE's to install including no DE.

You might be able to find the version of the Raspberry Pi Imager on their Github page from before they started using QT6 and then compile it. When using a local image to write to the SD card you just need the option at the bottom of the list: "Use Custom"/ "Select a custom .img from your computer", so that should work just as well with an older version of the Raspberry Pi Imager I would think.

[Grogan]

That's good that the imager does expand the fs across the card, I wasn't sure. I could also just write the image with something and then just create another partition with the unallocated space after. Mount /home there after or something.

I could also just temporarily install QT6, install the rpi-imager package, taking note of all the dependencies that get pulled in (for QT6), then write my image and remove all the poo I installed.

When I go to buy a card reader, I was also planning on getting another TF card to keep the original OS preserved. Maybe a 512G one if I can find it in town. Ideally, the more storage the better so I can keep a lot of shows on it.

I may have another option too, I got to thinking that Dad's laptop may have a USB-C port. I really don't want to install software on there though, who knows what that Raspberry Pi Imager for Windows could cause on Windows. It's not mine to fuck with. Also, that little card reader that came with it looks mickey mouse.

So the EndeavourOS is good then? Does it pull from Arch repos or do they have their own packages?

Is this what you used?

enosLinuxARM-rpi5-latest.img.xz

[Zema Bus]

Yeah that's the one from https://endeavouros.com/endeavouros-arm-install/. So far so good with it. It pulls from the Arch repos, they also add their own repo for a few tools, packages and themes but that could be easily removed.

[Grogan]

OK then, "enos" (rhymes with penos) it is

I bought a $14 card reader at ballmart and a 256G (they didn't have any larger) microsd card. It doesn't say "TF" on it, but they are often just called "micro sd".

This
https://shop.sandisk.com/en-ca/products ... 256G-GN6MA

I have it plugged in, and I'm seeing it as /dev/sda (and there's a partition on it, sda1 so it's being seen correctly).

So now it's just a matter of installing that rpi-imager poo

P.S. After I took the original SD card out of the device to switch them, the card I bought is the exact same one it shipped with. I didn't realize at the store, but nice coincidence.

[Grogan]

Well, I should be all set. One thing I didn't like though, is that the setup scripts on first boot refused to proceed without an internet connection. "Fix your internet and try again". (Fuck off! That's very short sighted and stupid... what if I needed to fix up network drivers later?). It didn't matter because the wifi worked, but that will piss somebody off. I didn't really want to start updates at that time (later, with pacman -Syu) but it was forced. I'm connected to my 5GHz wifi so it didn't take long to get hundreds of packages, but for me, during setup is not the time.

I installed mpv and smplayer and should be good to go for bringing this over to the TV. I checked and the audio output is HDMI audio and looks to be working.

I chose XFCE of course:

enos-xfce.jpg (512.23 KiB) Viewed 1430 times

[Grogan]

Well yes, I got it hooked up to the TV as a display and I can watch movies and shows and the HDMI audio works and everything. It's an old Sony big screen LCD TV in the basement rec room, it was like 10 grand a few decades ago, but an old clunker now. It was before smart tv's.

It didn't take long to get to that point once I got the card reader.

I also opened it up and checked all the screws, cross tightened for snugness and they were fine (I'm sure my nephew would have noticed, but you got me paranoid lol).

I also didn't think the fan was working, but I just hadn't gotten it worked up enough. I disconnected and reconnected the fan to the header but it looked OK I think. So I started a kernel compile (just defconfig... heat the CPU up compiling bollocks lol) and looked with the flashlight through the venting holes at the top, and it did start up.

P.S. pacman -R libb2 qt6-base qt6-declarative qt6-translations rpi-imager

I'll just install rpi-imager again if I need to write a new image. Apart from that, it's just usb-storage if I want to copy files etc.

[Zema Bus]

That's great to hear

[Grogan]

So... good old fucking xfce4-power-manager. I uncheck "lock the screen" it still keeps locking the screen. Fine, I turn off display power management, it still shuts it off and locks the screen. This is why I never install the power manager package, but I didn't install XFCE this time, the distro did. This is the same bullshit as last time I had that installed, years ago. So I turned off the screensaver and locker, and power manager daemons (in Sessions and Startup). That at least reverted it back to X11's facility that I can control with xset.

Other things to note, it seems the best video output driver is opengl ES 2 (GLES 2). With smplayer that's not in the list (that front end needs some modernization) therefore I didn't try it but I tried VLC and NONE of the accelerated output drivers worked (black screen) except "opengl for embedded systems 2" where I found full screen video with much less lag. With smplayer/mpv the "gpu", or vdpau, or vaapi or even vulkan video output drivers with a custom command line, while they all worked, were all the same, laggy and a bit ghosty, at least with HEVC. So now that I know that, I can use some custom options for mpv in smplayer to try gles2. Something like "-vo=gpu -gpu-api=opengl --opengl-es=yes" (from the man page, I haven't tried it yet)

P.S Nope, it works, but it's the same as any other hardware acceleration method in mpv. Poor performance with full screen 1080p HEVC even with GLES 2. So overall, vulkan video is the best I'm going to get for mpv. Apparently on these Broadcom GPUs (v3d gallium driver, vulkan-broadcom), the only hardware accelerated DECODING implemented is for HEVC (that's just decoding though, there's enough CPU for that). How silly, why just that one?

I don't know why it works better with VLC, but I guess VLC it is for watching movies (I don't like VLC as much).

[Zema Bus]

An NVME drive can be used on a Raspberry Pi by using an adapter:

m2-hat-completed.jpg (38.87 KiB) Viewed 1157 times

[Grogan]

Holy snappin arseholes batman... that's bigger than the device

It looks like the heat sink and fan couldn't be used with one of those things mounted. It would be nice to have faster storage than that TF card though. Although, you'd be limited by bus speeds as to what you can do with it, it's not the fastest computer in the world anyway.

[Grogan]

So EndeavourOS does have their own repos, it doesn't use Arch's (though you probably could). They do differ, for one relevant example, Endeavour still has Firefox 139.0.1 while Arch has 139.0.4 in their aarch64 repo.

This is all Arch's arm PKGBUILDS that are different from normal Arch PKGBUILDS (some of them are the same but just compile for aarch64)
https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs

Anyway, if I'm going to install Firefox binaries, and the distro isn't going to provide current enough builds, I might as well just use Mozilla's aarch64 binaries. I'd expect that they'll be the best optimized precompiled binaries for the architecture anyway. (I looked at about:buildconfig and it's all in there)

So I removed the distro package with pacman -R, extracted firefox-139.0.4.tar.xz (downloaded from the linux-aarch64 directory)
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/rel ... x-aarch64/

to /opt, appended /opt/firefox to the PATH (/etc/profile), opened and closed it once and then edited the .ini files to reconnect my profile. Since it was just two, I edited the files and removed the other (and deleted the new profile dir). That should not happen again now as I'll stay on mozilla's builds and the distro won't be updating firefox again. I don't think I want to build it on here, a profiled build would take probably 6 hours.

[Zema Bus]

I noticed updating it was not like updating regular Arch in that I expected a ton of updates after a week but there was only a handful. I'll probably switch it to the freestanding binary directly from Firefox.

Finally got it in a case. I didn't want to go through the hassle of boxing it all back up and sending it back over a $15 case, I've already had enough hassles to deal with lately. It's just a cheap plastic one but it works.

RaspberryPi5_4.jpg (68.4 KiB) Viewed 867 times

[Grogan]

Oh well, the one in the kit is a cheap metal one. The plastic is probably better

By the way, mine is now officially a useful device. My nephew stayed over yesterday, and we used it to watch movies (even though he brought his laptop which we normally hook up to the TV). I connected to the VPN with wireguard, used Transmission and then watched them with VLC, all on the device. (I get about 7.5 Mb/s from the WiFi while connected to my 5 GHz)

So that consummates a successful project, actual use.

[Zema Bus]

Glad to hear that's working out

[Zema Bus]

So I installed the MATE desktop and now screen power management works correctly

[Grogan]

Mine works correctly with just Xorg and xset (which is what I have with xfce4-power-manager out of the picture)

[Grogan]

Have you noticed that EndeavourOS has a customized Pacman? It formats the output differently (columns with old version and new version) and the progress is shown with a pulsating letter C that gobbles up dots lol

P.S Actually it's just settings in pacman.conf. I could have these on Arch too. Color, ILoveCandy and VerbosePkgLists

Code: Select all

# Misc options
#UseSyslog
Color
ILoveCandy
#NoProgressBar
CheckSpace
VerbosePkgLists
DisableDownloadTimeout
ParallelDownloads = 3
DownloadUser = alpm
#DisableSandbox

[Zema Bus]

I did notice that I didn't know it was just settings in pacman.conf.

Here's what mine looks like now, I haven't done much with the panels yet, just made them transparent. The big clock on the desktop is a setting in Variety.

RP5MATE.jpg (299.93 KiB) Viewed 185 times

[Grogan]

That looks great, I like the green gradient window decorations.

I haven't spent much time customizing it, the only thing I've done with XFCE is change some settings. It's a somewhat dark theme, good enough for an appliance that's meant to watch movies anyway. I'm still using the default "Mercury" wallpaper, I like it enough. I did sftp over my demonic "Rage" mouse cursor though. My style ("Plasmafire") will be broken on that newer XFCE, so meh.

[Zema Bus]

Thanks, the Mercury wallpaper is in the mix too, I set Variety to use both local and remote sources (there are multiple sources that can be used including NASA images), with the checkbox checked to favor darker wallpapers. It changes them periodically, I think I set it to once every two hours.

[Grogan]

I added those settings to my Arch /etc/pacman.conf. I like the coloured warnings (Ignorepkg warnings) and the column formatting. The only thing is I can just barely catch a glimpse of that C gobbling the dots, because the operations happen so fast on this machine. I'll probably see it next time something large gets updated. There aren't many large distro packages here (I compile most shit), maybe QT5 or webkit2gtk

P.S. I fired up the old nehalem computer, with mechanical storage and enabled those things in pacman.conf. There were about 150 updates, and I clearly saw the ILoveCandy there in operation

[Zema Bus]

CatchyOS has those. I'll add them to my vanilla Arch install.