Puppy Raspi Zap6

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MU
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#21 Post by MU »

here are fotos of my prototype.

The sytem (Zap6 with the new Kernel) boots into the camera viewer in 15 to 25 seconds. I have not found out yet, why it is sometimes faster, sometimes slightly slower.

(I run "exec luvcview -s 1712x960" from /root/.xinitrc instead of jwm and rox.)

Resolution is 1792x960 on a 1680x1050 Monitor.
I later will add a small puppybasic program, that places a black borderless window over the controls of luvcview (have this done on raspian already).


The camera is placed in a carton box.
I also added 4 LEDs to light up the box. They are soldered in parallel, each with a 470 Ohm resistor. They have their own power supply with 9 V. I think I will use 8 or 10 LEDs finally for optimal light. I have cut the round end of the LEDs to get diffused light, as with the round bulbs they act like spots.

I also tried to power them using a passive usb-hub from the raspi, but they flickered. I think the raspi and cam together need quite some power, so I don't want to stress the usb-ports too much.

The image is excellent, even better than on the fotos (they got distorted a bit using a webcam in the dark to take the fotos).

The image needs around 2-3 seconds to adjust if you move the cam, this is working pretty good.

I finally will place the LEDs on a circuit board, at moment they are "freely wired". Apart from such minor fixes the system now is ready to present it to my mom :)

Mark
Attachments
lens1small.jpg
preview of the whole system
(35.68 KiB) Downloaded 1416 times
lens1.jpg
all three components that make up the "digital lens". You can read 2 rows of a newspaper side by side. Image is very crisp and sharp.
(193.07 KiB) Downloaded 692 times
lens2.jpg
the box from bottom. A hole for the cam, and 4 LEDs with restistors.
(32.82 KiB) Downloaded 1438 times
lens3.jpg
the box opened from top. You see the webcam placed on a piece of carton.
(81.31 KiB) Downloaded 697 times
[url=http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=173456#173456]my recommended links[/url]

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antiloquax
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#22 Post by antiloquax »

I haven't checked in here for ages. :0
I will have to download the latest image and have a play.

I have been working with arch instead, but my latest remix of arch is quite heavily puppy inspired.

If anyone gets a chance to test it, I'd really appreciate the feedback.


.zip here
Attachments
embedded_python2.png
(90.18 KiB) Downloaded 1378 times

Wac
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Sound on zap6

#23 Post by Wac »

The sound on my Raspberry Pi`s earphone port does not work, is there any fix for this jet? I am using zap6.

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davids45
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Printing (not) with ZAP Pi

#24 Post by davids45 »

G'day,

Because it's so cold here (day-time and it's only 14C!!), I thought I'd stay inside and try to set up a print server using a Raspberry Pi and an oldish Epson Stylus Photo RX430 (USB-only, ink-jet, all-in-one).

Started yesterday with Raspbian on the NOOBS package from Pi but gave up after a day wasted because of sudos and non-permissions and a generally extremely slow response (Midori - horrible), as well as being unable to print when I finally got CUPS running.

Using an old TV (Composite) doesn't help as the graphics are oversized with its coarse display. Generally the 'OK' buttons, etc are off the bottom of the display unless the window is maximised.

Enough of that so today it was back to Puppy. But I couldn't get BK's SAPs running (no lit-up green LED on the Pi so my 8GB SD card wasn't booting for some reason), so switched to ZAP and had 'instant' success (instant is a relative term with Pis).

Took a few goes to get internet access (wizard buttons were off the screen and I wanted to choose a static address as this was suggested by the Raspbian how-tos for a network print server).

Iceape was giving me the start-up "bin" problem box I was told to ignore but then would browse (slowly).
The Pi comparison between PuppyZap & Raspbian felt like lightning versus lard.

Opened Cups with the wizard and tried set up the Epson as a local printer (connected by a USB cable) but found no Epson drivers were included in ZAP. Downloaded a Debian Gutenprint package (5.2.7) and eventually found the Epson ppd in gz format. Copied the ungz-ed ppd to the Cups /usr/share/ directory and Cups seemed to accept this when browsed to it and indicated the Epson was now an installed local printer on the Pi.

But I can not print a test page (via the maintenance option). Cups replies that there is no file or directory found (?). Is this Cups because Cups has been trimmed for ZAP?

As an alternative printer check, I tried to print a one-line file from the text editor as the Epson was showing up as the default printer but nothing happened.

Unplugging the printer's USB lead from the Pi and into this desktop and everything will print.

So.................can anyone advise me on how to get the Epson printer printing locally from the Pi?

David S.

And I know that I could get a brand-new network-enabled ink-jet printer for a few dollars and should put the old Epson in the bin (the Pi too?). It's just the principle of the thing. Even if I fluke it with the Epson, I'll probably keep using our colour laser network printer anyway, it is much faster and better quality :) .

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davids45
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Puppy PiPrint Server

#25 Post by davids45 »

G'day,
Just an up-dated up-date on the above post.

Puppy PIPrint Server achieved (1 out of 2)
By copying all the files in the first partition made by ZAP to the not-loading SAP SD card, I got SAP booting and working and, with a bit of a learning curve climbed, found SAP will function as a print server for the Epson Stylus Photo RX430 with other Linux (Puppy) computers on my home network. Unfortunately I had not got a Windows computer (7 or XP) to connect immediately. It's her-indoors' printer and her Windows computers so it was a problem on the 'local' network until I entered the full and correct details for the printer address and name to the the Windows 'Add Printer' prompts :oops: . And now even a Windows computer can print through the Pi to the Epson :D .

ZAP problem with CUPS 1.5.3 unfixed
I think ZAP has a cut-down CUPS-1.5.3? There are few printers listed in the 'Add Printer' options. With a ppd file added by me for the Epson RX430, CUPS seems to add the printer but still gives the "Unable to print test page: No such file or directory" message and then "/commandtoepson" not available: No such file or directory" Status message if I try the "Print Test Page" in the Maintenace options.
Trying to print a simple text file from Geany where the Epson is listed as a 'Local Printer', printing fails (CUPS State is "stopped") with the Status message "/rastertogutenprint.5.2" not available: no such file or directory"
I do see cupssddk_1.5.3-1 listed as a CUPS transitional package in the System section of the ZAP Puppy Package Manager under debian-wheezy-main. HoweverZAP does not let me install this from the Puppy Package Manager (mirrors wont respond - 404 message). Do I need a gutenprint drivers package to correctly add the Epson, and if so, from where/what type and how to install such?

Thanks for any ideas.

David S.

starhawk
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#26 Post by starhawk »

What is the status of this PupPi version? I now have a RasPi (a friend gave me one) and I would like to get Puppy running on it. I can assist with testing but my dev skills are barely there so I can't really program anything :(

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#27 Post by starhawk »

starhawk wrote:What is the status of this PupPi version? I now have a RasPi (a friend gave me one) and I would like to get Puppy running on it. I can assist with testing but my dev skills are barely there so I can't really program anything :(
*hears crickets*

:( :( :(

bark_bark_bark
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#28 Post by bark_bark_bark »

It would be nice to see some more progress on this project.
....

starhawk
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#29 Post by starhawk »

bark_bark_bark wrote:It would be nice to see some more progress on this project.
I wholeheartedly agree! ;)

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vtpup
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#30 Post by vtpup »

Sorry, missed this thread before I started another RPi thread in Puppy Derrivatives -- though in that one I'm talking about Squeezed Arm puppy Alpha 4.

With regard to the slowness issue -- I/m running a B+ board which has 512 megsof memory, and overclocked to 900 mhz without problems. The standard Raspbian raspi-config program allows overclocking without voiding the RPi warranty.

I'm also running root/ on an external USB drive (either thumb or HD) in Raspbian, which speeds things up quite a bit compared to the SD card. The sdcard is simply used at boot time, and can be slow and 2 gigs in size (even that isn't needed technically, but is a minimum available supported size)

I hate to see this project abandoned because I see great potential here with a $35 computer.

Berryboot offers Squeezed ARM Alpha4 as one of the OS choices, but not Zap6 -- if you want more interest in developing this, maybe we should get that out there.

The Raspi community doesn't understand the advantages of Puppy, and with some small but simple to correct UI flaws in the Squeezed Arm puppy, people are quickly discouraged from going further with it. I'd like to solve these issues if we can. There are 3 million boards out there, I believe.
[color=darkblue]Acer Aspire 5349-2635 laptop Tahrpup.[/color]
[color=blue]Acer R11 and C720 Chromebks Bionicpup64[/color]
[color=olive]Acer Iconia A1-830 tablet no pup[/color]
[color=orange]www.sredmond.com[/color]

amj
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Raspberry Pi 2

#31 Post by amj »

A week ago today I took delivery of a Raspberry Pi 2. I've run the current Raspbian on it (a joyless experience) but am now slightly suprised to be able to say that I have Puppy zap6 running on the RPi2.

The methodology I followed is derivative of that described by woodenshoe here and by MU here. The sequence was as follows:
  • Download the latest rpi-firmware from Git (see posts by woodenshoe and MU). That got me kernel version 3.18.8 plus associated modules.
  • Write the zap6 image onto a micro-SD card (open a terminal box and use the dd command).
  • Mount the boot partition on the micro-SD card and delete bootcode.bin, kernel.img and start.elf.
  • From the rpi-firmware master, copy the following files to the boot partition: bootcode.bin, COPYING.linux, fixup_cd.dat, fixup.dat, fixup_x.dat, kernel7.img, kernel.img, LICENCE.broadcom, Module7.symvers, Module.symvers, README.md, start_cd.elf, start.elf and start_x.elf. (This is probably overkill, working out a minimal set is for later. However previous experiments using sub-sets of these files did not work).
  • Edit config.txt. I added to the start of the file a device_tree= command (i.e. no device tree). My understanding is this tells bootcode.bin to boot up the old-fashioned way and not to go looking for .dtb files.
  • Unmount the boot partition and mount the Puppy partition.
  • From the rpi-firmware master, copy the 3.18.8+ and 3.18.8-v7+ directories to lib/modules (so that they co-reside with the original 3.1.9-zapu-cutdown modules).
  • Put the micro-SD card in the RPi2 and boot-up.
  • If you have a system, be patient, allow the system time to execute first-boot procedures and then run through the usual Puppy startup tasks of choosing locale, timezone, keyboard layout etc.
  • Once all is stable, open a terminal box and type depmod.
  • From the menu, go to System -> Info -> Hardinfo hardware information and look at the summary. I was told Puppy had 949Mb of RAM. That seems to imply that 64Mb was allocated to the GPU by default.
I've not started developing a system as yet. This is just a quick post to say that it is possible to run zap6 on RPi2.

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#32 Post by starhawk »

Now that 01micko might actually read this since he's back... ;)
starhawk wrote:What is the status of this PupPi version? I now have a RasPi (a friend gave me one) and I would like to get Puppy running on it. I can assist with testing but my dev skills are barely there so I can't really program anything :(
My Pi is a Model B, not a B+ and not a 2 :)

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don570
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#33 Post by don570 »

Barry Kauler wrote that he ordered a Raspy 2 when it was first announced
but he hasn't mentioned it since.

_________________________________

starhawk
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#34 Post by starhawk »

Doesn't help me, I've got the original...

01micko, you around here somewhere? ;)

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01micko
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#35 Post by 01micko »

Starhawk.

It should work (on a B or B+), but I'm not supporting any more. Too much other stuff to do. You'll have to find a work around for the 256MB RAM limit, I think MU in an earlier post changed the kernel; not so difficult as it only supports full installs.
Puppy Linux Blog - contact me for access

starhawk
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#36 Post by starhawk »

01micko wrote:I'm not supporting any more
:cry: :cry: :cry:

amj
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#37 Post by amj »

Over the past couple of weeks I've put together a zap6 system running with 3.18.8 kernel to run on a RPi2. I've played around with zap6 several times but this time I've put together a system I intend use. I'm not displeased with the rusult, so I decided to re-read this thread and see if there was anything 'useful' I could add to what has already been posted.

Several of the early posts above refer to kernel issues/bugs. It has amused me to see how several of the early examples of 'odd behaviour' (in both alpha4 and zap6) have simply disappeared as the kernel has progressed and various shortcomings eliminated.

By the way, the latest kernel I have downloaded is 4.1.13. For the hell of it I ran zap6 with 4.1.13 half expecting it not to work at all, but found it behaved OK. I've not done enough with that kernel to be able to say that it works, but I did not encounter any obvious problems.

There is an issue with gparted that has not been mentioned above. There is a missing dependency. You need to download and install libatkmm-1.6-1_2.22.6-1_armel.deb. Once that is done gparted will work OK.

As has been pointed out above, the processor in the original RPi simply was not powerful enough to facilitate web-surfing (no matter which browser you installed or how you configured your system). It's a different story with the RPi2. The RPi2 is a much more capable device and the version of Seamonkey/Iceape built into zap6 works well.

Now that Debian have taken the squeeze armel repository offline, anyone who wants to run Puppy on RPi/RPi2 and enhance it with pre-compiled binary packages (rather than compiling applications via devx) has no other option than zap6.

Transmission-gtk (bit torrent) works extremely well on alpha4. On zap6 you run into the same problem that prevented the inclusion of gnome-mplayer. Transmission wants GTK 3 and zap6 doesn't have it. One way to sidestep this issue is to install Tranmission-qt (plus the QT4 modules it needs). That will give you a prefectly usable bit torrent client. The menu entry created when you install Transmission-qt does not work. I suggest you add a script to /usr/local/bin to launch Transmission and create a desktop icon to launch the script. That does work.

Audio players are a matter of taste. I've never been a big fan of gnome-mplayer and am not bothered by it's absence. By the way, pmusic works fine. You can edit the 'play' icon on the desktop to point to it. I experimented with quite a few audio players on alpha4 but Aqualung was the only one that worked really well. That said I've not tried it on zap6. I have tried xmms2 on zap6 and gave it a definite thumbs down. However what I have done on both alpha 4 and zap6 is to install VLC. Of course Debian builds of VLC will not run as root, but you can run VLC from a console as spot. As an audio player it works perfectly on default settings (and it gives me the functionality I want).

Other applications that run OK on zap6 are XFE file manager, Sylpheed mail client, Pan newsreader and Geeqie image viewer. I also have a few multimedia tools installed including mhWaveEdit and MKVtoolnix.

At a practical level, putting together a RPi/RPI2 system is easier than it used to be. There are now very good HDMI to VGA converters available that work and are inexpensive. Lots of people have an old VGA monitor in their spare room, not everyone has a spare HDMI monitor doing nothing. My local hobbyshop sells HDMI to VGA converters for 15 euro each. I have a 15 year old CRT monitor attached to a RPI via a converter and it gives a very good result.

To my way of thinking, the Raspberry Pi and Puppy Linux are a natural fit. Both being rooted in essentially similar minamalist philosophies.

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don570
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#38 Post by don570 »

Playmusic works well as audio player in Puppy Linux alpha4 version.
It's one version behind. version 0.1.8 is the final version

PLAYMUSIC code

_____________________________________________

There are deb packages that can be downloaded from official site
for instance mtpaint 3.40. I wonder if they can be used??
http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/pool/main/m/

____________________________________________

If people had apps they wanted to distribute for Zap6,
The easiest way would be to make SLACK txz archives.
This maintains folder structure.

______________________________________________

amj
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#39 Post by amj »

Device Tree boot

When I first got my hands on a RPi2 in March and set about trying to see if zap6 (and alpha4) would run on the new board I stuck with the legacy boot sequence. At the time the new device tree boot sequence was an extra unknown in a situation that already had enough unknowns.

Recently I decided it really was time to see if I could switch to the new boot sequence. It turned out to be ludicrously simple. Remove the device_tree= instruction from config.txt which instructs the bootloader to use legacy mode and add to the boot partition (/dev/mmcblk0p1) the standard device tree file for Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, called bcm2709-rpi-2-b.dtb. That's it.

I've been running with the device tree boot for a while now and as far as I can tell the system functionality is not effected in any way. The boot sequence is a little faster and a couple of error messages that used to be logged during start-up (see: /tmp/bootkernel.log) have now disappeared.

VLC

Another change I've made to my system concerns VLC. I've been running the Debian build of VLC as spot (since it won't run as root). If you navigate to /root/.config, add a directory called vlc and make spot owner of that directory, VLC will be able to save it's settings. But VLC will still be under some restrictions that may at times be inconvenient.

I wondered if there was an alternative approach (short of re-compiling VLC). Various web sites have multiple procedures listed which supposedly allow Debian builds of VLC to run as root. Some are OS specific, others apply to specific versions of VLC. But it seems there is a simple procedure, a two byte change to the VLC binary with a hex editor, that is likely to work under all circumstances. It tried it. I'm now running VLC as root and have made it default media player for zap6 (see: /usr/local/bin/defaultmediaplayer).

Open the VLC binary in a hex editor, search for text string geteuid and modify it so that it reads getppid. Save the file. Obviously this change is best applied before you start VLC for the first time, but it can be applied retrospectively as well. My retrospective change brought a message from VLC saying 'can't find /root/%U'. So I created a zero byte file in /root called %U. VLC was happy and the message disappeared.

On the subject of hex editors, the ghex binary from the Debian wheezy armel repository will not run on zap6 because of the GTK 2 vs 3 issue. But there are other hex editors that will work.

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ally
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#40 Post by ally »

berryboot has a version of BKs builds that works on the rpi2

had the issue of no repository, with infinite patience you can still find file mirrors but it's a pain in the butt

amj, could you look at getting fatdog arm working on the rpi2, I do not have the skills.....

agree the rpi2 is a much better machine, even the pi zero is pretty nippy

:)

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