Linux Problem

[Phil Deakins]

8 hours ago, JeromFranzic said:

I bought my Pi 3's and 4 4GB model from a store in NYC called Tinkersphere. Just looked them up and the 8 GB currently sells for $180 USD. Yipes... that one used to sell for about $70-75 from that place IIRC.

Somebody said that they can be bought on Amazon, so I just looked at the UK Amazon - and they can be bought through there.... at twice the normal price and higher. When production can start again, they'll be sold at their normal prices. Anyone with any stock now is trying to take advantage of the halted production.

[animats]

If someone has Ubuntu on ARM, and can compile Rust, you might try building my UI mockup program: https://github.com/John-Nagle/ui-mock

This is a portability test for the UI for my experimental viewer. All the low-level 3D systems, Rend3, WGPU, and Vulkan, are used. Those are all supposed to work cross platform. This is a way to wring out platform problems of the graphics stack in a simple program rather than a viewer. WGPU is supposed to take care of the differences between Vulkan and Apple's Metal.

You just get some menus that do very little, and a picture of a cube. When the program starts up, you get a dummy login screen. You can't actually log into anything; it has no networking. Click on the "replay" option, and you get a file dialog. Give it some .json file. File contents don't matter. That should bring up the cube.

It will run on Ubuntu on x86-64, and on Windows on x86-64. It even cross-compiles to Windows; I build it on LInux. It should run on ARM, but I haven't tried. It may run on Macs. If someone wants to try, I'd appreciate the feedback. You can file issues on Github if there are problems. Thanks.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Phil Deakins said:

It was, and is.

Since presumably both the US and UK can get the Chinese version, and the US Amazon store has them but not the UK store, why do you suppose they are not available in the UK but are available in the US? On Amazon at least.

[Phil Deakins]

2 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Since presumably both the US and UK can get the Chinese version, and the US Amazon store has them but not the UK store, why do you suppose they are not available in the UK but are available in the US? On Amazon at least.

They are not being made anywhere. Any new ones that are on sale anywhere are old stock and are being priced at least double the normal price.

I don't think there is a Chinese versions. There's only the UK one. The company has them made by outside firms. For instance, one of mine was manufactured by Sony UK, and others are made by other manufacturers, but they are still products of the same UK company.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

I don't want to dampen all the enthusiasm, but there are some limitations with the System-on chip technology used by not only the Raspberry Pi but most of the other Single-board -computers. It is very unlikely that in that small a size they are even going to get close to the early Intel Integrated Graphics capability. But even that standard should do for something like Radegast.

However...

There are two people who have posted a lot of interesting things about them on Youtube channels, Explaining Computers, and Jeff Geerling are the two who have delved the deepest into what you can and can't do with them.

Jeff Gerling in particular spent a long time trying to attach graphics cards to the Pi and get them recognised by the software, having to add to the OS in order to properly detect a card, but even then he was unsuccessful mainly because there was no OpenGL support to actually do anything with the GPU he had finally got the Pi to recognise in the list of attached devices. That was a year and a bit ago, but I haven't seen any further experiments.

What I tried myself was to use VNC to run the display, keyboard and mouse on a Pi400 looking at a tower PC running SecondLife, in order to see if the onboard HDMI graphics were even capable of displaying it. They were, which does make sense when you consider the Pis can handle full HDMI video. (However, throwing that much information across a wireless network to the Pi was obviously slowing things down as well).

I have tried quite a few other apps, even building from source, to see what graphical displays will run on the Pis, especially for the CNCs and laser cutting controllers, and the success rate is not exciting, two out of eight programs I tried would run on the Pi, and then, with limited results. For example, a controller for the small CNC milling machine would display the GUI, accept and stream commands, but wouldn't update the isometric view showing the tool position in realtime. All attempts to get slicing software for the 3D-printers to even load failed. Most of those programs do rely extensively on OpenGL and so it wasn't surprising where I couldn't get a result.

[Henri Beauchamp]

32 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

I don't want to dampen all the enthusiasm .../...

The Cool VL Viewer has been proven to be able to at least run on a PI4B (with and ARMv8 and 64 bits Linux distro) and on a RockPro64, with, citation:

Quote

Anyhow, I'd say performance on my RockPro64 is similar to an early Core i5, changing window size to 720 and lowering graphics gives an overall performance of 10-25 fps.

So...

[Phil Deakins]

The story so far

I have 4 Raspberry Pi4Bs, but all have an ARMv7l processor which is 32 bit. Henri was assuming the processor to be an ARMv8 which is 64 bit, but he realised it isn't when I posted some stuff in his forum. I was getting nowhere. He suggested installing the 64 bit OS, which I did, and it made a big difference. The installation of the CoolVLViewer kept going and going. When it stopped, there were some error messages at he end and no viewer. I'm a complete novice with Linux so I have to wait until Henri has seen them before I know whether or not I've reached the end of the line.

It may be better with a RPi4B that has an ARMv8 processor, but I can't try that.

[Coffee Pancake]

5 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

Jeff Gerling in particular spent a long time trying to attach graphics cards to the Pi and get them recognised by the software, having to add to the OS in order to properly detect a card, but even then he was unsuccessful mainly because there was no OpenGL support to actually do anything with the GPU he had finally got the Pi to recognise in the list of attached devices. That was a year and a bit ago, but I haven't seen any further experiments.

Bought a PI4 with the intent of exactly this kind of project, and then watched Jeff crash into a wall over and over.

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Phil Deakins said:

The installation of the CoolVLViewer kept going and going. When it stopped, there were some error messages at he end and no viewer. I'm a complete novice with Linux so I have to wait until Henri has seen them before I know whether or not I've reached the end of the line.

You were trying to build it from source (and there's an error in a MD5 sum for a pre-built library, thus the interruption). The installation of the existing build would have been simpler. 😜

Please, see my reply on the Cool VL Viewer forum, with the fixed install.xml file for building the current release from sources.

[Phil Deakins]

1 hour ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

The installation of the existing build would have been simpler. 😜

I would gladly do that if I knew where it is. I must have seen it, but with Linux, I don't even know what I'm looking at. Anyway, I did as you asked, and I've replied to the post in your forum

 

[Gavin Hird]

3 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

The story so far

I have 4 Raspberry Pi4Bs, but all have an ARMv7l processor

If you have Raspberry Pi 4B with ARMv7l  you have been conned.

The Raspberry Foundation has only issued Pi 4B with 64-bit processors. 

Install neofetch and see what it reports. A real 4B will report something like this (this one has a 32-bit system running on the 64-bit kernel because there is no reliable 64-bit mono for Raspian OS that will compile opensim):

• OS: Raspbian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye) aarc
• Host: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.4
• Kernel: 5.15.33-v8+ 
• CPU: BCM2835 (4) @ 1.800GHz
• Memory: 641MiB / 7811MiB 

Edited September 27, 2022 by Gavin Hird

[Phil Deakins]

I believe that you are mistaken. All of the Pi4Bs were bought from top Pi dealers, such as The Pi Hut and Pimoroni.

[Gavin Hird]

17 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

I believe that you are mistaken. All of the Pi4Bs were bought from top Pi dealers, such as The Pi Hut and Pimoroni.

If they have that processor and are only 32-bit they are fake!

Official spec here:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/specifications/

Edited September 27, 2022 by Gavin Hird

[Phil Deakins]

@Gavin Hird I promise you, they are not fake. Pi4Bs came out before the page you pointed to was published. There were no 8G Pis when mine were bought and no 64 bit OS for them when ARMv8 started to be used. I'm not interested in this thread being sidetracked in this way. What you are saying is your opinion and it has nothing to do with the actual topic. The topic is not Raspberry Pi4s. It is logging into SL with one.

[JeromFranzic]

19 hours ago, Gavin Hird said:

If they have that processor and are only 32-bit they are fake!

Official spec here:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/specifications/

Sorry, Phil. Gavin pointed to the original specs. I own this with the 4GB of system RAM. Looking to add a 8GB later for better multitasking.

[JeromFranzic]

On 9/27/2022 at 6:32 AM, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

 

Ugh... blasted fire tablet keyboard... my bad. 

Edited September 28, 2022 by JeromFranzic
My error, wanted to post another blurb but bad fire keyboard moves deleted it

[Gavin Hird]

1 hour ago, JeromFranzic said:

Sorry, Phil. Gavin pointed to the original specs. I own this with the 4GB of system RAM. Looking to add a 8GB later for better multitasking.

I have both 2, 4 and 8 GB Model 4B purchased between since it was immediately launched and up to last year, and the base spec and processor has not changed during those years. The only change has been small revisions, one of which cause the processor to default to running at 1.8 GHz rather than 1.5 GHz on the 5.1.x kernel.

For the entire lifetime of the 4B models you have been able to load a 64-bit kernel. Raspbian OS 64-bit version was in beta for almost 2 years, but it could be loaded on all 4B models ever sold by the RPI foundation.

[Phil Deakins]

2 hours ago, JeromFranzic said:

Sorry, Phil. Gavin pointed to the original specs. I own this with the 4GB of system RAM. Looking to add a 8GB later for better multitasking.

No he didn't. He pointed to newer specs than the Pi4Bs. He pointed to specs that included an 8G model, which didn't exist when the Pi4Bs came out.

But this is sidetracking, and I'd appreciate it if the sidetrack stopped.

[Phil Deakins]

@Gavin Hird

Can you stop this please? Your sidetrack has nothing to do with the topic of this thread. And you're mistaken, anyway.

Edited September 28, 2022 by Phil Deakins

[Phil Deakins]

Final update

I've tried and tried, but I can't get a viewer to even fully build on my Pi4B. The idea of using a Pi for SL isn't dead though, but it is for me. Sorry it wasn't more positive. I have to settle for doing most of my computing on the Pi, and fire up the tower if I need to log into SL.

Edited September 28, 2022 by Phil Deakins

[Phil Deakins]

I'll see if I can put the sidetrack to bed. It seems that we were all wrong. 

1. My Pi4Bs are genuine and not fake (I was right, someone else was wrong)

2. All Pi4Bs, including mine, have ARMv8 CPUs (I was wrong)

3. The systems in the Pi4Bs are reported wrongly (explanation here on Raspberry Pi's own website) which is why I said they were ARMv7ls.

Incidentally, all Pi4s are Pi4Bs. They never made an A model for the Pi4s.

I hope that that satisfies everyone in the sidetrack.

 

Edited September 28, 2022 by Phil Deakins

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Phil Deakins said:

I hope that that satisfies everyone in the sidetrack.

I'd be more satisfied if you succeeded! Was rooting for you!

[Phil Deakins]

24 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I'd be more satisfied if you succeeded! Was rooting for you!

I would have been too - only more so lol.

Henri was helping on every step. In fact, me being a complete dummy with linux, he was telling me each step to take. I would have been delighted to do all my internet stuff on the Pi but it's not to be. Maybe someone like @Coffee Pancake (who bought a Pi4 for this very purpose) can manage it and post about it.

It's not been the best of days. First we gave up on getting this working, then my phone fell in the toilet and it now continually tries and fails to boot up every 10 seconds and I can't stop it, and my TV service suddenly won't produce watchable TV programmes. They start and then stop a few seconds later. 😟

Edited September 28, 2022 by Phil Deakins

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

It's not been the best of days. First we gave up on getting this working, then my phone fell in the toilet and it now continually tries and fails to boot up every 10 seconds and I can't stop it, and my service suddenly won't produce watchable TV programmes. They start and stop a few seconds later. 😟

If it makes you feel better, we have a massive Category 4 Hurricane here today! 

[Phil Deakins]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

If it makes you feel better, we have a massive Category 4 Hurricane here today! 

Florida? You're right. My problems fade into insignificance compared to what's happening there. All the very best with it.