Latest posts for tag debian
This is part of a series of posts on the design and technical steps of creating Himblick, a digital signage box based on the Raspberry Pi 4.
One day after the first deploy, we went to check how the system was doing, and noticed some fine tuning to do, some pretty much urgent.
This is part of a series of posts on the design and technical steps of creating Himblick, a digital signage box based on the Raspberry Pi 4.
Another surprise hits us at the last moment: if the system boots without an
HDMI monitor plugged in, no framebuffer device is ever created,
and X will not start, lightdm will give up after some tries, and even if one
plugs in a monitor afterwards, it will stay blank until a reboot or some kind
of manual intervention.
As a workaround, one can configure the bootloader to force a specific HDMI configuration. This post documents how we did it.
This is part of a series of posts on the design and technical steps of creating Himblick, a digital signage box based on the Raspberry Pi 4.
Provisioning a SD card starting from the official raspbian-lite is getting quite slow, since there are a lot of packages to install.
It would be significantly faster if we could take a SD card, partition it from scratch, then untar the boot and rootfs partition contents into them.
Here's how.
This is part of a series of posts on the design and technical steps of creating Himblick, a digital signage box based on the Raspberry Pi 4.
A month later, we tried building an himblick image and it stopped playing video with vlc, only showing a black screen.
Although we're working with Rasbian Buster, and Debian Buster is stable, it looks like Raspbian Buster is not stable at all.
Time to learn how to freeze a partial raspbian mirror.
Inspired by this post about documentation1 I started a systemd/documentation page in the Debian wiki.
Systemd has an excellent reference documentation in its manpages, but it does a lot of things, and a reference documentation isn't the best starting point for getting introduced to them.
I would like to see a bit more documentation of the kind that
sits between a systemctl start|stop|status and the reference manpages.
Things like simple HOWTO posts on how to get a simple job done, or high-level
explanations of how some specific feature works.
I put some of what I know and used (or wrote) into systemd/documentation, I'll try to add to it when I find more, and I encourage you to do the same.
If you remember an article that has been useful to you and it is missing from the page, link it.
If you found a systemd feature useful to get a task done, write a little HOWTO to the wiki or your blog, and link it.
If you don't use systemd, go ahead and start a similar index for the init system that you use, and link it, too.
I'd love it if each init system we have in Debian had an excellent documentation index in the wiki!
There is a quote that goes around allegedly attributed to Albert Einstein:
Let’s not pretend that things will change if we keep doing the same things. A crisis can be a real blessing to any person, to any nation. For all crises bring progress.
Creativity is born from anguish, just like the day is born form the dark night. It’s in crisis that inventiveness is born, as well as discoveries made and big strategies. He who overcomes crisis, overcomes himself, without getting overcome. He who blames his failure to a crisis neglects his own talent and is more interested in problems than in solutions. Incompetence is the true crisis. The greatest inconvenience of people and nations is the laziness with which they attempt to find the solutions to their problems.
There’s no challenge without a crisis. Without challenges, life becomes a routine, a slow agony.
There’s no merit without crisis. It’s in the crisis where we can show the very best in us. Without a crisis, any wind becomes a tender touch. To speak about a crisis is to promote it. Not to speak about it is to exalt conformism. Let us work hard instead. Let us stop, once and for all, the menacing crisis that represents the tragedy of not being willing to overcome it.
I like the idea of considering more valuable how a group overcomes a crisis, rather than how a group avoids it.
This is part of a series of posts on the design and technical steps of creating Himblick, a digital signage box based on the Raspberry Pi 4.
We've started implementing reloading of the media player when media on disk changes.
One challenge when doing that, is that libreoffice doesn't always stop. Try this and you will see that the presentation keeps going:
$ loimpress --nodefault --norestore --nologo --nolockcheck --show example.odp $ pkill -TERM loimpress
It turns out that loimpress forks various processes. After killing it, these processes will still be running:
/usr/lib/libreoffice/program/oosplash --impress --nodefault --norestore --nologo --nolockcheck --show talk.odp /usr/lib/libreoffice/program/soffice.bin --impress --nodefault --norestore --nologo --nolockcheck --show talk.odp
Is there a way to run the media players in such a way that, if needed, they can easily be killed, together with any other process they might have spawned meanwhile?
systemd-run
Yes there is: systemd provides a systemd-run command to run simple commands under systemd's supervision:
$ systemd-run --scope --slice=player --user \ loimpress --nodefault --norestore --nologo --nolockcheck --show media/talk.odp
This will run the player contained in a cgroup with a custom name, and we can simply use that name to stop all the things:
$ systemctl --user stop player.slice
Resulting python code
The result is this patch which simplifies the code, and isolates and easily kills all subprocesses run as players.
This is part of a series of posts on the design and technical steps of creating Himblick, a digital signage box based on the Raspberry Pi 4.
Another nice to have in a system like Himblick is the root filesystem mounted readonly, with a volatile tempfs overlay on top. This would kind of always guarantee a clean boot without leftovers from a previous run, especially in a system where the most likely mode of shutdown is going to be pulling the plug.
This won't be a guarantee about SD issues developing over time in such a scenario, but it should at least cover the software side of things.
This is part of a series of posts on the design and technical steps of creating Himblick, a digital signage box based on the Raspberry Pi 4.
After seeing lots of automatic mount/umount notifications during provisioning, we wondered if it would be possibile to temporarily disable them while we're working on the SD card.
It turns out that it's possible, and here's a convenient python context manager
to do it cleanly, based on /usr/lib/udisks2/udisks2-inhibit, but adding the
possibility of inhibiting automounting only on one specific device:
This is part of a series of posts on the design and technical steps of creating Himblick, a digital signage box based on the Raspberry Pi 4.
Finally, we have enough pieces to start working on the media player. It's been way more work that expected getting to this point, and I hope that this series of posts could help others getting a faster start.
To begin with, we'd like to be able to show:
- PDF files automatically looping through the pages
- Image galleries automatically looping
- Looping videos
- ODP presentations