Failed to start on Raspberry Pi

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timRowledge
Posts: 6
Joined: Jul 3rd, '17, 01:02

Failed to start on Raspberry Pi

Post by timRowledge » Jul 3rd, '17, 01:05

Stops at runtime/lib/morphicFramework.gp:597 attempting to open a window.

Is this perhaps an issue with openGL or similar? Like many people I run my Pi's via xrpd (or seem use realVNC) rather than with a directly attached monitor. There simply isn't enough room on my desk to have that many monitors!

SimpleSi
Posts: 330
Joined: Jul 2nd, '17, 13:47

Re: Failed to start on Raspberry Pi

Post by SimpleSi » Jul 3rd, '17, 07:37

Hi Tim
It works for me on Pi3 and I'm using VNC
unzipped and just did
cd GP-beta-068
./GP_RaspberryPi

Simon

JohnM
Posts: 379
Joined: Sep 11th, '15, 14:42

Re: Failed to start on Raspberry Pi

Post by JohnM » Jul 3rd, '17, 09:35

It works for me with a monitor plugged into the Pi and it works for Simple Si display remotely over VNC. It doesn't work for Tim displaying over xrpd.

On the Raspberry Pi, GP uses SDL2 for graphics, so maybe SDL2 does not work over xrpd? As a work-around, perhaps you could use VNC instead.

Let me know if you learn anything more about this issue.

timRowledge
Posts: 6
Joined: Jul 3rd, '17, 01:02

Re: Failed to start on Raspberry Pi

Post by timRowledge » Jul 4th, '17, 00:28

It would appear to be an issue with xrdp. Finding that out sent me on a more than slightly annoying path of frustration and idiocy that has wasted an entire day.

There have been many annoying issue with the mix of Pi/xrdp/vnc/process permissions/kernel version/CogVM and so on over there last four years. For example, to run the cogvm for NuScratch on the Pi you may, or may not, have to use sudo, depending on inc vs xrdp and quite possibly when you last ate chocolate during a full moon. Many hours and a lot of bytes of email have been expended. It looks like this is yet another related problem. We'd all be a lot better off if RISC OS had become the standard OS.

Anyway, I can, finally, get gp to operate under realvnc. I won't say run because it drags pretty badly, just like Scratch used to.

JohnM
Posts: 379
Joined: Sep 11th, '15, 14:42

Re: Failed to start on Raspberry Pi

Post by JohnM » Jul 4th, '17, 03:44

Thanks for figuring this out and letting me know.

Sorry you spent a frustrating day on this. You have company in your misery; I spent about half a day messing with my own Raspberry Pi. I tried to incrementally update to Jessie using apt-get and managed to get my system into a state where neither the keyboard nor the graphical UI worked (although ssh still worked). What's worse, I could no longer build GP on it. I ended up doing a clean install of Jessie and installing and building all the packages GP depends on. Tedious, but it's done now.

I did get GP working remotely over tightvnc, which can talk to the build-in Mac VNC client. I also tried RealVNC but couldn't connect. I'm guessing it was something trivial, such as a wrong port number. (What *is* the default port number for RealVNC? tightvnc uses 5901.)

In any case, GP's performance on my RPi 2 is pretty sluggish, both over VNC and even drawing on the native display. Still, it does work, which is much better than not working. :-)

-- John

timRowledge
Posts: 6
Joined: Jul 3rd, '17, 01:02

Re: Failed to start on Raspberry Pi

Post by timRowledge » Jul 4th, '17, 19:50

Yes, working is much better than not; I think I've spent most of the last 30 years trying to convince people to
a) make it work
b) make it work *right*
c) make it work right and *fast*
in that order. Hardly any person/company/project even gets close to passing a)

Anyway, for realVNC I think the key is to set up your Pi as if it had a monitor, which means setting the resolution in the rasps-config applet. It's annoying because it impacts any time you do attach a direct screen, but that's just How They Made It. Once you have that you can enable VNC in the same applet and reboot. With a download of their viewer for your machine (because they have extra security etc stuff) you then just use the IP of the Pi to connect and you get effectively a mirror of the hardware display buffer. NuScratch & GP work fine.

You *can* also use virtual connections and set the screen size BUT right now I can't find a way to make the apparent deamon do its job correctly; you have to be able to ssh to the Pi and manually run `vncserver` to get a virtual display setup; it gives you the display number (usually the complex and hard to remember code ':1') to append to the IP. It works, GP & NuScratch run, it may be a bit slower for GP since it appears to detect that it cannot use direct hardware acceleration. But without the automatic part work it isn't very useful anyway.

Two bits of advice here
1) get a Pi 3. So many things work better with the quad-core system.
2) Download the very latest Raspbian (2017-06-21) and add an empty file named 'ssh' to your sd card. That will activate ssh on the first boot, enabling you to ssh and run the command line rasps-config to get set up. Including enabling vnc of course. And setting the resolution (anything less than 1920x1080 is pointless in my view)

After that things get a it less tiresome.

And as for speed.. well you know I'm really quite good at that stuff, right? And my rates are fairly reasonable.

JohnM
Posts: 379
Joined: Sep 11th, '15, 14:42

Re: Failed to start on Raspberry Pi

Post by JohnM » Jul 5th, '17, 02:12

Wow, thanks for all these great tips!

I just did a clean install of the latest Raspbian (Jessie) from the image on the RPi website. Lots of improvements over Wheezy, including a full-featured web browser.

Is the Raspberry Pi 3 noticeably faster than the 2? The clock rate is only about 25% higher, but the extra cores probably help. If they improved the memory architecture ,that would really help with apps like Scratch and GP, which (as you know) do a lot of bit blitting and GC-ing.

-- John

timRowledge
Posts: 6
Joined: Jul 3rd, '17, 01:02

Re: Failed to start on Raspberry Pi

Post by timRowledge » Jul 5th, '17, 18:55

I actually managed to misunderstand a bit back there; the Pi2 is a quad-core ARMv7 cpu rather than the single core Pi b/B+ I thought you referred to.
The Pi3 is probably ~50% faster than a Pi2 for most average cases, partly because of the faster clock and party because the A53 cpu cores are better at pretending to be an ARMv7 core than the Pi2's actual ARMv7 cores. RPF are not making any use (yet) of the 64 bit-ness and likely won't for some time in order to avoid architecture spread confusion. The memory architecture is identical - actually the same components, since the new cores were 'merely' dropped into the SoC design without other changes. That's why it can only have 1Gb of ram - the SoC only has address lines for 1Gb and changing that is generally seen as a $15M job. My guess is that it is in progress since the Pi appears to be a phenomenon likely to last a few more years yet.

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