Quirky Xerus 8.1.4 for Raspberry Pi2 and 3

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BarryK
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#21 Post by BarryK »

Another problem I am having, with both Pi2 and Pi3, is the screen flickers off momentarily.

This is a very common problem, as a google search shows.

I have a modern TV, with HDMI input. I did the recommended troubleshooting things, settings in 'config.txt' to force HDMI, boost the signal. No difference.

It usually happens randomly after power-up, but seems to clear up after awhile.

I found that moving the case slightly, causes it. Then found that push the HDMI plug very gently causes it.

This does seem to indicate a fault in the Pi, a hairline crack for example, where the HDMI socket is soldered in.

The fact that it seems to disappear after the Pi has "warmed up" supports this theory, as does gently pushing, barely more than touching, the HDMI plug causing it.

But the fact that it happens to both my Pi2 and Pi3...

But this problem goes right back, the Pi1 report here for example:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/view ... 28&t=82677

...that one seems to indicate inadequate high-frequency filtering on the 5V line into the Pi, which indicates a design shortcoming.

There are so many problems reported with the power supply being inadequate, all stemming from the decision to go for a micro-USB socket.
I have a bit of a "bee in my bonnet" about that. I think that they should have gone for a normal power plug and socket, and sold power supplies to match.

...which is what the Odroid people have done.

I also had a power problem with my Pi3, initially. I am using my new Mbeat Gorilla power charger, with 2.3A rated output on each USB socket. However, I still got the little rainbow rectangle sometimes, so I changed the cable, that fixed it.
So it would seem that voltage supply is not a problem anymore.
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BarryK
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#22 Post by BarryK »

gcmartin wrote:Anyone know if this distro has bluetooth enabled, OOTB?
Quirky Xerus has bluez and bluepup, so should support bluetooth.

However, /root/Startup/bluetooth_tray tests for existence of /sys/class/bluetooth, and if it does not exist, does not load the bluetooth tray applet.

On my Pi3, /sys/class/bluetooth does not exist. This may be due to the 4.4.x kernel still being under development for the Pi, especially Pi3.

EDIT:
Just did a test on my laptop, 'bluetoothd' has to be running, to cause /sys/class/bluetooth to exist.

I need to fix that. Currently the daemon is not started at power-up.
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#23 Post by Sage »

These Rpi units certainly are flimsy although I've not experienced the issues BK reports - yet. I think the intention is that one purchases their custom cases to anchor them to some extent. Mine are screwed to bits of old (melamine-coated) Out house cabinet. This helps stabilise the connectors as one can slide plugs into them with less force and more precision. I have experienced other HDMI and PSU issues, however. Not all TVs and, especially monitors, accept their output signals: ditto functionality of some PSUs and, worse, the Zero is fussy about USB hubs (all powered, of course, for the Zero). Fortunately, have boxloads to select from. One of the surprises I had was that an el cheapo HDMI-to-VGA, with sound pick-off was a great success with the B+ enabling use of old monitors for just over a fiver.
Reiterating previous comments, although I find it useful to be able run the oldest Puppy on these ARMv6/11 units, I see their greatest attraction in deploying their GPIO to operate relays, turn things ON/OFF, sensor inputs, etc. This is the intention of all educationalists in UK schools. Whether it will succeed depends on many factors, not least inspirational teaching, but many of the clever coders visiting fora like this could have a powerful contribution to make. Certainly, the latest ARMv7 Pi2 & 3 are not necessary for these purposes and Eban still regards the v6 architecture as current - hence the Zero

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pakt
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#24 Post by pakt »

BarryK wrote: This does seem to indicate a fault in the Pi, a hairline crack for example, where the HDMI socket is soldered in.
HDMI cables can vary quite a lot in quality, but since the signals being passed are digital, they usually either work or they don't. That also makes it hard to troubleshoot borderline cases, where you get a good image on the display but the signal strength is just barely over the threshold to deliver that image.

There isn't much surface area for contact on the many, tiny pins of an HDMI connector, and it wouldn't take much to get a bad connection at any one (or more pins). That's one place quality can come into the picture (or simply dirty contacts – note that HDMI cables usually come with a plastic cap covering the ends).

If you jiggle the HDMI connector at the end of the cable connected to either your Pi2 or Pi3 and the signal flickers, the problem causing the flicker is unlikely to be on both of your Pis. The HDMI cable would be much more likely the common denominator. The best way to find out is to try a different cable. I have a number of HDMI cables and I can vouch for the fact that they are not created equal ;-)
Methinks Raspberry Pi were ideal for runnin' Puppy Linux

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BarryK
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#25 Post by BarryK »

After trying, unsuccessfully, to get bluetooth working, I decided it would be wise to download Raspbian and get bluetooth going. Then I will have a working setup as reference.

If you want to download Rasbian using wget, rather than the browser, here is a direct link to Raspbian Lite:

# wget http://vx2-downloads.raspberrypi.org/ra ... e-lite.zip

Regarding the HDMI cable, I have used it elsewhere without issues, including with the RemixOS box.
I have another cable packed away in a box somewhere, will try that.

EDIT:
Er, no, Raspbian Lite is commandline only.
Here is the full Raspbian (1.3GB):

wget http://vx2-downloads.raspberrypi.org/ra ... jessie.zip

sha1sum: 64c7ed611929ea5178fbb69b5a5f29cc9cc7c157
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#26 Post by BarryK »

Running Raspbian, bluetooth and wireless "just works".

I am using my new Bluetooth mouse, and Internet access via my Mlais M52 phone wireless tethering.

EDIT
Bluetooth is flakey. Both keyboard and mouse just decided to stop working. Kept trying them, suddenly they started to work again.

My bluetooth keyboard is standard US layout, which I chose in the Raspbian Preferences. However, they got one key wrong, the backslash and shift-vertical-bar key.

Hmmm, mouse has gone again. Fortunately, I have the USB-cable mouse plugged in.

It seems, if you don't use them continuously, they die.

Nup, can't get mouse to come back.

So much for @just works@ --- they were supposed to be quote characters - it seems to have forgotten that it was set to US layout.
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don570
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#27 Post by don570 »

Question to Barry ...

Are you able to play ogg or wma music files on your install?

ffmpeg just ignores these two formats on my machine.

However I installed a lot of new multimedia libraries to make omxplayer work,
so I'm not sure if I damaged my install.

I am able to play ogg and wma music files with my omxplayer.


_________________________________________________
I noticed a strange font bug in terminal. I described it here
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 831#922831


________________________________________________

The newest version of pmusic will play 2barks.wav file in alarms

____________________________
Attachments
pmusic-v7-5.1.3.pet
newest version of pmusic
(160.76 KiB) Downloaded 529 times

eowens2
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#28 Post by eowens2 »

BarryK said
Bluetooth is flakey. Both keyboard and mouse just decided to stop working. Kept trying them, suddenly they started to work again.

My bluetooth keyboard is standard US layout, which I chose in the Raspbian Preferences. However, they got one key wrong, the backslash and shift-vertical-bar key.
Your post made me wonder about the stability of the bluetooth on my Raspberry Pi.

I am posting this using Raspbian and a 75-key Freedom Pro bluetooth keyboard on an Rpi 3. Raspbian keyboard Preferences are Country=US and Variant=English (US).

I tested all of the keys (unshifted and shifted) and the output was as expected. Specifically the quotation mark key output ' “ ',the vertical bar key output ' | ', and the backslash key output ' \ '.

The bluetooth on my Rpi 3 seemed pretty stable, at least during the 35-40 minutes I was using it and no dropouts occurred.

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don570
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#29 Post by don570 »

ogg and wma music files are now working with pmusic.

I suspect that there was a strange permissions problem. I have found that
clicking on files in a windows server location don't open and that the open
dialog in applications doesn't show the windows server location, yet rox
file manager shows the location and let's me drag files from it.

__________________________________________

I still haven't been successful in connecting my usb wifi stick.

____________________________________________

For people who install omxplayer here are the the key bindings

Key bindings
Key Action
1 Increase Speed
2 Decrease Speed
j Previous Audio stream
k Next Audio stream
i Previous Chapter
o Next Chapter
n Previous Subtitle stream
m Next Subtitle stream
s Toggle subtitles
q Exit OMXPlayer
Space or p Pause/Resume
- Decrease Volume
+ Increase Volume
Left Seek -30
Right Seek +30
Down Seek -600
Up Seek +600

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#30 Post by ttuuxxx »

Hi Barry, I was on Facebook on the RetroPie Group and this guy posted a Commodore 64 that he gutted and purchased a C-64 usb adapter, basically turning a C-64 keyboard into a regular USB keyboard, then he tossed in Raspberry Pi and ran linux on it. A few years back in Sydney I purchased a C-64 for like $20 on ebay. That could of been a good candidate, But really I don't think I could destroy a working C-64 for any reason. Anyways here's a link to the Keyboard adapter, it isn't cheap but I guess it does the job really good if you like retro things. http://www.vesalia.de/
ttuuxxx
http://audio.online-convert.com/ <-- excellent site
http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/ <-- Codec Test Files
http://html5games.com/ <-- excellent HTML5 games :)

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#31 Post by Sage »

don't think I could destroy a working C-64
Generally, agree with your sentiment, t. However, one still occasionally encounters retro kit that is physically broken, eg keyboards, for which a super glue repair can be very acceptable, missing keys also fixable with ingenuity in some cases, or have electrical issues, eg leads pulled out, also fixable with a soldering iron. Some of these may be ideal candidates for an RPi transplant. Slightly off topic, there are community FIXIT groups springing up around the globe where folks bring their bent and broken commodities to a volunteer team of experts for advice and repair. Much of this is electrical/electronic goods. The throw-away society has left us without the knowledge, skills and, most importantly, the incentive to stop planet violation. Incumbent on all of us to stop landfill - now!

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BarryK
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#32 Post by BarryK »

A little progress report.

I got Abiword to run, after adding lots of dependencies.

This is using the official Abiword DEB, but it needs GTK3, as does Gnumeric.

I am thinking that I should compile Abiword and Gnumeric for GTK2, can eliminate a heap of deps, and won't need the gtk3 libs at all. As I have done in past x86(_64) Quirkies.

What I am trying to fix, before doing another upload, is the keyboard layout. So far, it has me baffled.

At the commandline, X not running, the arrow keys work. You can type something, then use the left-arrow and right-arrow.
However, start X, then the arrow keys cease to work.

The package selection, and all the infrastructure, is identical to my x86_64 Quirky Xerus, so why the keyboard layout is broken is a total mystery to me.

I have of course been trying various things to identify the cause of the problem, to no avail yet.

I looked at Jame's Fatdogarm, the arrow keys are working.

One other thing that I have done, is compile Busybox statically. This is required for the recovery snapshot mechanism. I posted about it here:
http://barryk.org/news/?viewDetailed=00403
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#33 Post by BarryK »

Another little progress report.

I have got the arrow keys to work.

Well, kind of. The left, right and down keys work, but the up-arrow key launches 01micko's "Screeny" screen capture app.

Up until now, I have stuck with the old 'mouse' and 'keyboard' xorg drivers, instead of 'evdev'.

The reason is, 'evdev' requires udev. the xorg-server uses udev to determine input devices.
However, by using the old mouse and keyboard drivers, these can be "hardcoded" into /etc/X11/xorg.conf or in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/, and udev is not needed.

This is if I wanted to build a distro without udev. Which has become just about impossible to do these days.

So, I should go with the flow. 01micko with Slacko Puppy, and jamesbond with Fatdog, have gone over to using evdev for input, and udev for providing all the input info.

So, with Quirky running in my Pi2, I made the required changes. The difference is, as I mentioned above, the arrow keys now work, with that one caveat.

Tomorrow, I will probably put this change permanently into woofQ.

Note, I am still intending to keep a skeleton /etc/X11/xorg.conf, but mouse and keyboard setup will now be in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf

Scripts that need to modify the mouse or keyboard, such as the keyboard country layout, will operate on the latter file.

I will probably rethink this tomorrow morning.
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#34 Post by greengeek »

BarryK wrote:but the up-arrow key launches 01micko's "Screeny" screen capture app..
I had a similar issue on a recent slacko (the 32bit one which runs without xorgwizard) and found that the screenshot app was bound to key 111 instead of key 107. I guess this is machine /keyboard specific.

Couldn't figure out why the up arrow key became keycode 111 but didn't look any further at that point - I just used xev to confirm the correct keycode then made the appropriate change to the keybinding in /root/.jwm/jwmrc-personal.

It was a touchscreen dell duo netbook which I havent used with other puppies yet so maybe I should do a bit more testing and see if it has a weird keyboard layout or whether this oddity is related to the fact there is no xorg.conf any more.

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don570
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#35 Post by don570 »

fonts-freefont-ttf_20120503-1_all.deb needs to be install if
omxplayer shows text subtitles on screen.

Easy to install

https://packages.debian.org/uk/wheezy/a ... f/download

___________________________________________

newest version of pmusic works well.

pmusic 5.2

___________________________________

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BarryK
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#36 Post by BarryK »

greengeek wrote:
BarryK wrote:but the up-arrow key launches 01micko's "Screeny" screen capture app..
I had a similar issue on a recent slacko (the 32bit one which runs without xorgwizard) and found that the screenshot app was bound to key 111 instead of key 107. I guess this is machine /keyboard specific.

Couldn't figure out why the up arrow key became keycode 111 but didn't look any further at that point - I just used xev to confirm the correct keycode then made the appropriate change to the keybinding in /root/.jwm/jwmrc-personal.

It was a touchscreen dell duo netbook which I havent used with other puppies yet so maybe I should do a bit more testing and see if it has a weird keyboard layout or whether this oddity is related to the fact there is no xorg.conf any more.
/root/.jwm/jwmrc-personal has this line:

Code: Select all

<Key keycode="111">exec:screeny</Key>
That file is in the 'jwmconfig2' PET.
So, I guess that I will just remove that line.
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#37 Post by don570 »

Bug report...

I reported this to Zigbert.
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 588#923588

When I tried to install the newest pmusic 5.2 in quirky alpha
I got a warning message that the install didn't succeed.
So I extracted the pet package with uextract and removed the pinstall.sh file
and made my own pet package (dir2pet). This package installed without complaint.

Zigbert says that Barry wrote the pinstall script. Very strange.
What is happening?
__________________________________

Here is the modified pet package that works....
Attachments
pmusic-v7-5.2.0.pet
My package works OK
(160.8 KiB) Downloaded 570 times

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#38 Post by BarryK »

don570 wrote:Bug report...

I reported this to Zigbert.
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 588#923588

When I tried to install the newest pmusic 5.2 in quirky alpha
I got a warning message that the install didn't succeed.
So I extracted the pet package with uextract and removed the pinstall.sh file
and made my own pet package (dir2pet). This package installed without complaint.

Zigbert says that Barry wrote the pinstall script. Very strange.
What is happening?
__________________________________

Here is the modified pet package that works....
Thanks for the report, I'm onto it.

Note, you can install a PET from the commandline. This might help discover any errors. For example:

# petget `pwd`/pmusic-5.2.0.pet

...assuming the terminal is open in same folder as the PET.
...this does exactly what ROX-Filer does, when you click on a PET.
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#39 Post by BarryK »

Version 8.0.11 pre-alpha is released, see my blog announcement:

http://barryk.org/news/?viewDetailed=00405
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don570
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#40 Post by don570 »

After investigating the bug further...
The error definitely is not the pinstall.sh script.

I came across a similar problem a couple of months ago and reported to
uextract developer

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... ced152f2d1

He said the problem was due to an old version of bash 3.0 that BarryK uses,
whereas 01micko and others have moved on to a newer version.
A simple change of a sed command solved the problem.

Code: Select all

petget pmusic-5.2.0.pet

gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
Here is another pet package that causes the same error message...
It was created in Slacko which is also used by Zigbert. That may be the the culprit
Attachments
wallmaker-1.8.9.3.pet
Causes error message during installation.
(10.26 KiB) Downloaded 570 times
Last edited by don570 on Sat 17 Sep 2016, 16:48, edited 3 times in total.

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