Quirky Xerus 8.1.4 for Raspberry Pi2 and 3

[jopervasco]

Thank you very much
I will try the last release on my PI2

[jamesbond]

"Fine, however, if I type "rox" in the terminal session, it opens the filesystem of my laptop. Wrong, wrong, wrong!"

That's because 1) rox is already running in x86 Quirky, and 2) rox likes to re-use existing instance. This doesn't happen in MobaXterm because there is no Rox running there.
To "fix" this, when you're running Quirky, all you need to do is launch "rox -n" from your Pi3.

[don570]

Bug report:

Look in the folder /usr/local/apps/
and there should be a file (or folder) spellt 'Pfind'
note spelling ---> capital P and small f
_________________________________________________

to barryK
If you want to see whole rox desktop use x11vnc and linux not windows.

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 936#933253

____________________

[don570]

I made a right click menu utility

It has uextract inside and Pfind ----> Search with Pfind
and some small apps like puppy units, pupmd5sum and graphpaper.
I will continue to improve it.

_________________________________________________________

[recobayu]

Can this run on laptop?

[BarryK]

"Fine, however, if I type "rox" in the terminal session, it opens the filesystem of my laptop. Wrong, wrong, wrong!"

That's because 1) rox is already running in x86 Quirky, and 2) rox likes to re-use existing instance. This doesn't happen in MobaXterm because there is no Rox running there.
To "fix" this, when you're running Quirky, all you need to do is launch "rox -n" from your Pi3.

Ah, of course, obvious in retrospect. I have posted your answer to my blog:

http://barryk.org/news/?viewDetailed=00478

[BarryK]

Bug report:

Look in the folder /usr/local/apps/
and there should be a file (or folder) spellt 'Pfind'
note spelling ---> capital P and small f

Zigbert named the application "pFind".

Look in /usr/local/pfind/pfind, and you will see "pFind".

And here:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=15136

[BarryK]

to barryK
If you want to see whole rox desktop use x11vnc and linux not windows.

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 936#933253

____________________

I have started learning about this, dropbear running on my Pi, remote ssh login, works.

gcmartin has sent me emails urging me to consider xrdp. I just now took a quick look at goingnuts xrdp PET package, here:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=90129

The PET contains xrdp, also rdesktop and x11vnc. At this stage, I am not sure how those three fit together.

Anyway, one step at a time. You are saying that all I need to display the entire Pi3 desktop is dropbear on my Pi, and x11vnc and tightvnc on my laptop? OK, will give that a go.

I notice that goingnuts has compiled x11vnc statically, that is nice, quite small too.

[BarryK]

Ah ha, this looks like a better choice than Tightvnc:

http://www.karlrunge.com/x11vnc/ssvnc.html

[don570]

Anyway, one step at a time. You are saying that all I need to display the entire Pi3 desktop is dropbear on my Pi, and x11vnc and tightvnc on my laptop? OK, will give that a go.

If I understand fatdogarm correctly tightvnc is all that needs to installed
in fatdogarm (as well as dropbear which is installed by default)

EDIT: I may have installed James' turbovnc package to make a vnc server on my raspberry pi
or perhaps I compiled x11vnc myself (I forget )

ftp://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/arm/pac ... rmhf-1.tbz


James wrote about compiling this package
http://www.lightofdawn.org/blog/?viewDetailed=00068
http://www.lightofdawn.org/wiki/wiki.cgi/Patches


_________________________________________________

Then your linux laptop computer will need some vnc viewer program.
I believe there are a lot out there . James seems to like ssvnc

ftp://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/arm/pac ... rmhf-1.tbz

___________________________________________________

[don570]

Running Quirky linux on the same baby laptop, not quite so simple. I used a little commandline utility called 'multiscan', and it reported this IP address:

> multiscan -t 192.168.0.100 -s 22 -e 22
192.168.0.100:22 (ssh) is open

Then to run a session:

> ssh -X 192.168.0.100 -l root -p 22

I don't believe that additional software is needed to find a router
assigned address as long as dropbear is running at the address.
mpscan is already installed , so you can use it!

I checked by doing the following

Code: Select all

# mpscan -p 22 192.168.1.1 - 192.168.1.255
ip: 192.168.1.102 22 OK service:ssh protocol:tcp
ip: 192.168.1.100 22 OK service:ssh protocol:tcp

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Then I made sure that dropbear wasn't running at the address 192.168.1.102
and sure enough ' mpscan' couldn't detect the address!!!

Code: Select all

# mpscan -p 22 192.168.1.1 - 192.168.1.255
ip: 192.168.1.100 22 OK service:ssh protocol:tcp

___________________________________________________

mpscan apparently looks for tcp protocol which dropbear supports

_______________________________________

[don570]

I continued to add more right click items like

pmusic , pupzip , viewnior , mhwaveedit, mtpaint ,evince , composer

It's now quite useful

[BarryK]

Anyway, one step at a time. You are saying that all I need to display the entire Pi3 desktop is dropbear on my Pi, and x11vnc and tightvnc on my laptop? OK, will give that a go.

If I understand fatdogarm correctly tightvnc is all that needs to installed
in fatdogarm (as well as dropbear which is installed by default)

EDIT: I may have installed James' turbovnc package to make a vnc server on my raspberry pi
or perhaps I compiled x11vnc myself (I forget )

ftp://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/arm/pac ... rmhf-1.tbz


James wrote about compiling this package
http://www.lightofdawn.org/blog/?viewDetailed=00068
http://www.lightofdawn.org/wiki/wiki.cgi/Patches


_________________________________________________

Then your linux laptop computer will need some vnc viewer program.
I believe there are a lot out there . James seems to like ssvnc

ftp://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/arm/pac ... rmhf-1.tbz

___________________________________________________

I got stuck into this, looking at what is the absolute minimum packages required. To control my Pi3 remotely from my laptop, all I needed was x11vnc on the Pi3, and gtk-vnc on the laptop. No ssh server.

I compiled x11vnc and gtk-vnc and PETs are also posted, as well as steps to get it all going:

http://barryk.org/news/?viewDetailed=00480

This is strictly for a local network, where security is not a concern.

Thanks to goingnuts for a simple way to compile an old x11vnc.
The gtk-vnc that I found, is written in C, for gtk2 or gtk3, I compiled it for gtk2.

[Olle]

[quote="Thanks to goingnuts [/quote]
I got a 404 from http://www.goingnuts.dk/linux.asp
BK, could you persuade him to think about a NutPi?

Olle

[don570]

Tip to speed up X11VNC

Use a smaller desktop size (e.g. 1024x768 instead of 1280x1024)
Make sure the desktop background is a solid color (the background is resent every time it is re-exposed.) Consider using the -solid [color] option to try to do this automatically.

I use hdmi_group=1 hdmi_mode=4 in my config.txt to make my screen smaller


The viewer is important as well.

__________________________________________________

[don570]

I checked and I did compile latest x11vnc along with libvncserver
and made a pet package
https://www.mydrive.ch/download/3524533 ... 0.9.13.pet
user: porteus@don570
password: porteus
______________________________________

[amj]

Visited the forum yesterday for the first time in a while and stumbled into this thread.

Today, 8.1.4 up and running on my RPi3. Very Nice. Thank you Barry. I'm delighted.

[don570]

Speed tip...
I am running the latest x11vnc 0.9.13 and the instructions say...

******************************************************************************
Have you tried the x11vnc '-ncache' VNC client-side pixel caching feature yet?

The scheme stores pixel data offscreen on the VNC viewer side for faster
retrieval. It should work with any VNC viewer. Try it by running:

x11vnc -ncache 10 ...

One can also add -ncache_cr for smooth 'copyrect' window motion.
More info: http://www.karlrunge.com/x11vnc/faq.htm ... nt-caching

I tried 'x11vnc -ncache 10' and it did work but I did notice that
the led light on my ethernet cable blinked vigorously
which would indicate a lot of updating was happening.
_______________________________________________

[amj]

After spending large parts of the last six days finding my way around QX814 I've decided it's time I gave some feedback.

It's nice. I like it. The theme is soothing (somewhat different to the garish green of one of the early versions of April I used for a while).

Installation

Installation could not have been easier. Just squirt the image onto a card, pop the card in the Pi and turn the power on. My first RPi was a model B so both alpha4 and zap6 were already 'out of date' in the sense that they needed a kernel upgrade in order to run at all.

One of my early thoughts was is Barry getting too good at this ... where are the 'special features' that require creative thinking to figure out work-arounds?. But I need not have worried. The special feature was provided by the laggards at Ubuntu who have not, as far as I can tell, bothered to build/release any armhf packages for 16.04. The armhf section of the repository appears to be empty!

Being a quintesentially lazy person, the thought of having to download source code and compile applications in order to enhance the system was deeply unappealing. So my second thought was ... well since 16.04 is based on Debian, will Debian Jessie armhf packages work on QX814? The folks at Debian may not crack the world's best jokes but they are commendably dilligent. We would be lost without them.

Applications

I have several 'preferred applications' that I have installed on a wide range puppies. So to experiment I visited the Debian Jessie armhf repository and started with two simple ones, XFE file manager and Geeqie picture viewer. Both installed OK and proved to be fully functional. So far so good. Later I added in Sylpheed mail client and Converseen graphics converter, again without the slightest problem.

Two more applications I added were Transmission bit torrent client and Audacious audio player. Both were fully operational but both had the same cosmetic issue. These are programs that use standard Gnome icons - and those icons were not available to them, so they looked a little odd. I decided to try installing the standard Gnome icon theme (a package called adwaita-icon-theme_3.14.0-2_all.deb) and that did the trick. Audacious and Transmission found their icons and all was well.

I've been using all these applications and have yet to find any issues with them, though it's still early days. However I had one oddity: When I attempted to install Pan newsreader the Package Manager told me the package was already installed and that I could not install it twice. It's not installed. We have a Pam and a Pango but no Pan.

SimpleVP

SimpleVP is a work in progress - so just a few thoughts: On zap6 I ran a full VLC. I installed the standard Debian wheezy armel VLC (about 30 packages), made the two byte hack that allows it to run as root, and used it mainly as an audio player. It could play old-fashioned h.263 SD video at original size, but could not manage h.264 or full screen because it had no access to the hardware acceleration in the RPi.

The VLC people added support for RPi hardware acceleration over a year ago (you compile with a -omxil switch, apparently) so it should now be possible to generate a full VLC that will run on a system like QX814. Of course it's a big piece of software, but so is Libreoffice. Once you make one exception ... what then is the criteria for being 'too big'.

From a strictly personal viewpoint, going from a full VLC on zap6 to a command-line VLC-nox on QX814 feels almost like regression.

Issues

What's the point of writing feedback if you can't find something to grumble about. OK, let's lower our fault tolerance level and complain about that which is not yet prefect.

Since RPi is a small device, making optimal use of it's resources makes sense. When I set up an RPi system I go to the Wizard Wizard and use the tab that allows unnecessary services to be removed from the start-up sequence. I have no Bluetooth devices attached to my QX814 system so I de-selected the 'bluetooth-raspberrypi' service.

But the bluetooth icon in the tray did not disappear. It just sits there with a big red cross through it. Later I noticed that the TOP information for running processes showed that the applet behind the icon was still running even though I had requested deactivation. Bluepup was (I hope) asleep but bluetooth_tray was hogging 17k of RAM and soaking up processor time to no purpose. Humpf!

I noticed that the 'prename' function we had in alpha4 and zap6 did not get carried over to QX814. It's 16k, I guess it had to go to make room for Libreoffice. Of course it was easy enough to copy the script across. Despite the fairly limited options, it's a function that I have found useful. Now I'm agonising over whether it needs to be renamed 'qrename'?

My first Puppy was Lucid 520. As a newbie I was grateful to the forum member who produced a 'no blank screen' pet. That solved an irritating problem. Later I learned to use the 'set the properties of X' tab to deactivate the screensaver and hence avoid any screen blanking. But it does not work on QX814! Help! I hope I'm not going to be reduced to making experimental acts of violence on system configuration files in the hope of finding a trick that keeps the screen alight.

That's it. After a week I've only found three fairly trivial issues. So where are the quirks hiding in this Quirky?

[cthisbear]

amj:

Nice feedback mate.

I don't have a Raspberry myself but I enjoy Uncle Barry
still spreading the largesse despite being retired...ha!..ha!

Chris.