Raspberry Pi

[mimosa]

Mine has finally arrived, together with various bits and pieces (powered USB hub, HDMI to VGA converter). There are a lot of messy wires when it's all plugged in!

I mean to try out ARMed Slack (and see how much of Salix I can add to it), but for now I am using the recommended "Raspbian", aka Debian Wheezy. The Pi is supposed to punch above its weight in the multimedia department, but Debian being Debian, there are no non-free codecs. My initial research suggested the thing to do was add this repo:

http://deb-multimedia.org/

which is even cautiously recommended by the official Debian wiki, but it just broke lots of things.

It is not a snappy little machine, but it's pretty impressive for 256 MB RAM (subsequently doubled). I'm sure it's excellent just as it is for the educational purposes it is meant for. Apart from the multimedia question, I am also hugely impressed by the Debian ARM repo. For instance, when I looked for xmonad, there it was, but also everything under the Haskell sun. There is also Ratpoison ... next thing on my list is to work out how to change the WM. Debian seems to have a completely different path to launch X; no .xinitrc, nor anything else familiar. The default browser is Dillo, which is too spare for my liking, or there is midori, which may be a bit heavy. Maybe I'll try building vimprobable for it (this is *not* in the repo).

Do those of you with ARM devices have any tips to share, or for that matter, repos? Has anyone else actually got a Raspberry Pi?

[jayseye]

Just curious about how much work has been done to "port" ARMed Slack to Rpi?

[mimosa]

Last time I looked, Alien Bob was just waiting to receive his to get started, but someone beat him to it. That was several months ago. So I'd say probably quite a lot.

[thenktor]

Just curious about how much work has been done to "port" ARMed Slack to Rpi?

There is no need for a "port". You just need the right kernel (and actually it should be possible to use the kernel of another distribution if you don't want to build one on your own).

[mimosa]

A browser search shows some promising-looking sites. The Slack image I downloaded didn't work (neither did the official Arch one), but there must be others, and it's probably more likely to be successful if you do it yourself - as well as being more in the spirit of the thing However, that way is it seems quite slow.

For now, I'm sticking with Raspbian However, if I can solve the codecs problem, the Pi is fit for ordinary everyday use. In that case, while I am doing my bit to preserve the environment, I will tinker to make the SalixPi

Long live Salix!

[laprjns]

I'm travelling so I'm trying to punchout this reply on my kindle fire. Here's a link to the slackware rpi image.
http://www.daves-collective.co.uk/raspi/.
Ive already got around 450 salix 14.0 packages built for arm including all the salkx tools. I will pm you when I get back home

[mimosa]

Thanks laprjns - gosh, that is some prolific packaging you've been doing!

The image I tried is linked to from the page you posted (missing an 'i' at the end of the URL, btw):

http://stanleygarvey.com/Slackberry/Sla ... 121201.zip

I think that led to a kernel panic early in the boot process. Could be a bad download or copy, or maybe there has been some change in the Pi hardware meaning a different kernel is needed. I didn't investigate, I just put Raspbian back on the SD card. The Arch image, linked to from the Raspberry Pi website underneath Raspbian/Wheezy, also failed to boot. Next step the codecs, then the WM - and indeed, console apps. Thenktor told me a while back about Mplayer's "ASCII art" video output ...

[laprjns]

Thanks laprjns - gosh, that is some prolific packaging you've been doing!

I've got a script from Thenktor a few years back that cycles through a Salix source tree and builds and installs all the packages using slkbuild. The majority of the packages will build without modifications to the SLKBUILD, but is some case they require changes, especially if there is logic to change CFLAGS or select patches based on ARCH. Most packagers forget that slkbuild and slackbuild are setup to compile for the arm architecture also. It takes many iterations, but eventually i was able to work out all the problems with only a handful of packages not building.
Here's list of packages: http://pastebin.com/X21zR0bX.
Included in this list are spkg, slkbuild, slapt-get, slapt-src which means that I can fully support my arm systems ( 3 dockstars and 2 pogoplugs) using a slapt-get compliant repo (with dependancy checking) and slapt-src! Although I was able to build and install many X packages, my arm devices really are not capable of running X so I really don't know it the packages work or not.

The image I tried is linked to from the page you posted (missing an 'i' at the end of the URL, btw):

I did warned you that I was posting from my kindle fire tablet. I can't type on a normal keyboard never mind a virtual touch screen.

http://stanleygarvey.com/Slackberry/Sla ... 121201.zip

I think that led to a kernel panic early in the boot process. Could be a bad download or copy, or maybe there has been some change in the Pi hardware meaning a different kernel is needed. I didn't investigate, I just put Raspbian back on the SD card. The Arch image, linked to from the Raspberry Pi website underneath Raspbian/Wheezy, also failed to boot. Next step the codecs, then the WM - and indeed, console apps. Thenktor told me a while back about Mplayer's "ASCII art" video output ...

I don't have a rpi, so I can't help you directly but I would suggest, if you haven't already done so, that you start with the Slackwarearm website http://www.armedslack.org/ and subscribe to their mailing list. Although the rpi is not officially supported, there have been several email threads on it recently. Also visit the Slackwarearm irc channel, #armedslack. There's not a lot of active discussion going on there, but if you post a question, someone (usually MoZes, who is the primary developer of Slackwarearm) will eventually reply.
I did find this site also, http://rpi.fatdog.eu/?p=home which is linked from an email on the Slackwarearm mail list. It provides instruction for installing Slackwarearm on a rpi using the Slackware installer, which is my opinion is preferable over a image install. But that's up to you

[mimosa]

Thanks for your post, laprjns; I'll digest it at my leisure. I suspected the Slackware installer route might be more likely to succeed, and that has to be the next step. If all goes well there, I'll get back to you to ask about Thenktor's script!

It strikes me that the result of your work on this must be a repo with the potential to be included among the official Salix repos without too much more work.

Indeed, the exciting thing about the Pi is that it can run X. I haven't had any success yet on the multimedia front, but that is supposed to work, too. It's fine for browsing, text editing, and software development (well, IDLE). I thoroughly recommend anyone who's interested to order one (note that memory is now 512 MB, not 256). It's worth getting an externally powered USB hub and also *externally powered* HDMI to VGA converter if you don't have an HDMI monitor. The latter is more expensive than the Pi itself ($35, I believe.)

[laprjns]

Another link and possibility to consider:
https://github.com/idlemoor/raspi-slackbuild