Category: Arch Linux

i’ve resurrected my old sourceforge account

whbeebe

Back in 2000 I was writing a Java-based portable environment I called Portable Java Environment, or PJE. Catchy name, right? My goal back then was to use Java to replace the regular Unix desktop, using only the lowest level X libraries for displaying the graphics portion. When it wasn’t running on Unix (Solaris) or Linux, it would be running on Windows as a regular application, but with all the same tooling. Thus you could switch back and forth, be reasonably productive, and not worry about differences between desktop environments. Such were the dreams back then…

The main component of that environment was the desktop which I called J-Desktop. I started to share it online, and the name morphed into Jesktop (see here and here). I tried to keep it going, but the job pressures mounted and then 9/11 came along and I drifted away from the project.

Flash forward to 2014, and I’m in need of a place to put the Arch Linux ARM images I’ve been slowly piecing together for others to download. So today I create Project Rubus and uploaded both the base and base+twm 8GB images (compressed via zip) up to Sourceforge.

The circumstances between 2000 and now are very different. My girls are now in their mid-20s and out on their own, and my job responsibilities have changed drastically. Although, ironically, I’m back at the same facility I was working at in 2000, on the same program. But the circumstances are radically different, and the program has long since shipped, and is in use.

I’ve added my Sourceforge project link to the top menu. So if you don’t want to read my rants you can go straight there and see what I’ve added to the project. Note that I’ll always blog about it here, so it might be useful to read what I have to say about the code or tools before you grab you copy.

The project has a wiki, and I usually put small announcements there. I did this time for the Groundhog Day Image Release.

As for that PJE/J-Desktop tooling, I wonder now if it would run sufficiently well on the ARM-specific java that’s available from Oracle. It’s been fourteen years since I started that project, and Java has changed drastically, especially its performance (it’s increased drastically). I’m not too crazy about any of the desktop environments that are available to run on the Raspberry Pi. Sorta makes me wonder…

bringing up i2c on the raspberry pi with arch linux

whbeebe6 Comments


I finally figure out why i2c wasn’t working on my R-Pi. Not all the Arch Linux packages had been installed, and I needed to tweak yet another configuration file. Here’s the steps I followed to get i2c to work, as well as the i2cdetect utility.

  1. Install i2c-tools (already done earlier): sudo pacman -S i2c-tools
  2. Install lm_sensors (lower case ‘L’): sudo pacman -S lm_sensors
  3. Open /etc/modules-load.d/raspberrypi.conf in your editor of choice.
  4. Add “i2c-dev” at the bottom of the file, then save it.
  5. Reboot the Raspberry Pi.

You can see the results of this short amount of work in the screen capture at the top of this post. The utility i2cdetect now detects the i2c buss (with nothing on it at the moment). But at least it finds the devices. You can also see the devices under /dev with a simple file listing.

I found these little pearls of wisdom on this web page: DS1621 with Raspberry Pi/ArchLinuxARM

It would have been nice to have found them on the Arch Linux ARM Wiki. Believe me, I looked.

This was done on the twm file system. I’m going to update the bare Arch Linux file system, make a backup of that, and then put it out on the web for others to pick up. I’ve made my mind up that I’m going to put out a far more useful Arch Linux image for the Raspberry Pi. Arch Linux is good, and it’s powerful, but beginners wanting to use Arch Linux shouldn’t have to run the gauntlet I’ve been running to get the system to a reasonable level of operability. I’m going to put images of both my cards, one with twm and one without. They’ll be compressed 8GB images. I don’t know how far I can compress them, but believe me when I say that the compressed images will be at least 1GB in size.

I plan to make the images available via Github. When they are available I’ll post about it here. I intend to keep the images up to date with the latest Arch package releases (pacman -Syu), hopefully about every 60 days.

And for as long as I work with the R-Pi, I intend for this blog to be a resource for absolutely correct information about configuring and operating the R-Pi. I may wind up duplicating some work, but you can rest assured that I’ve tried everything I write about, and that it works reliably and consistently, at least with the hardware I own. And when I make a mistake (not if), it will be publicly corrected.

Update

I’ve updated i2c in both the base 8 GB and the base+twm 8 GB Arch Linux systems. I backed up the cards then zipped the resultant images. The base image shrank down to 653 MB and the base+twm image shrank down to 742 MB. Now I need to reach an understanding with Github about hosting the images for me. We shall see…

Update 28 February 2015

I no longer use Arch Linux. I’ve switched to Raspbian on the original Raspberry Pi, and will use a regular distribution on my Raspberry Pi 2. I do not recommend Arch Linux for either Raspberry.