Nico Brailovsky's thought repository

With my homeboard booting up, it's time to make it show something. Some day I'll build a net-boot capable system, but until then I'd like to have it do something, even if it's by installing a few services by hand.

OS

Starting with a base Raspbian Bookworm for Rpi Zero (32 bit), with no GUI:

• Debug why the system doesn't boot, as with any new install
• UART into the system, then enable SSH (because the USB ports are hard to reach to connect a keyboard)
• Disconnect UART, reconnect sensors, login over SSH
• apt-get update, upgrade, etc...

Prepare Wayland

Raspbian Bookworm 32bit doesn't have support for Wayland out of the box. To enable:

• Add this magic to /boot/firmware/config.txt

dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d
gpu_mem=128

• /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt needs to have wayland=on
• sudo apt-get install mesa-utils-bin wayfire
• reboot
• After booting up, it should be possible to run wayfire in a terminal; an empty Wayland screen (with a cursor) should show up

Screen rotation

Because of the way the flex cable is fed to the HDMI-to-eDP board, the screen may end up rotated 180 degrees. You may also want a portrait picture frame, instead of a landscape one. To rotate Wayland:

1. Do kmsprint or kmsprint -m
2. Look for the name of the screen, eg HDMI-A-1
3. Look for the mode, eg 1920x1080@60.00
4. Create this in ~/.config/wayfire.ini, replacing the values found above for your setup

[output:HDMI-A-1]
mode = 1920X1080@60.00
position = 0,0
transform = 90

No need to reboot Wayfire, it should pick up the changes and fix itself immediately. I think.

swayimg

With a GUI, it's time to show a picture. I hacked swayimg to load pictures from a local server, plus a few other useful features to make it more usable in a RpiW, like consuming less memory than default, and porting to 32 bits. To install dependencies:

sudo apt-get install libcurl git ninja-build meson
sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev
sudo apt-get install libwayland-dev wayland-protocols
sudo apt-get install libjson-c-dev libxkbcommon-dev libfontconfig-dev libjpeg-dev

To build: [Yes, this is building swayimg in our target. This is horrible and will take a long time, so be prepared for a long coffee break. Some day I'll setup a crosscompiler].

git clone https://github.com/nicolasbrailo/swayimg.git
meson setup [build|--wipe build]
ninja -C build

To start:

• Launch Wayfire in a terminal
• In another terminal:
• WAYLAND_DISPLAY="wayland-1" DISPLAY="" /home/batman/swayimg/build/swayimg

Check that nothing crashes too much.

P0 picture frame

With everything "working", we can make Wayfire and swayimg a system service, so they'll start at boot:

Add this to /etc/systemd/system/wayfire.service (change the user name):

[Unit]
Description=wayfire
After=multi-user.target
[Service]
Environment=XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000
ExecStart=wayfire
StandardOutput=inherit
StandardError=inherit
Restart=always
RestartSec=10s
User=batman
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Also this to /etc/systemd/system/ambience.service (also change the user name. Or make a new user):

[Unit]
Description=ambience
After=multi-user.target
[Service]
Environment=XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000 WAYLAND_DISPLAY="wayland-1" DISPLAY=""
ExecStart=/home/batman/swayimg/build/swayimg
StandardOutput=inherit
StandardError=inherit
Restart=always
RestartSec=3s
User=batman
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then:

• sudo systemctl daemon-reload
• In a terminal: journalctl --follow --unit wayfire --unit ambience
• In another terminal:

sudo systemctl enable wayfire
sudo systemctl enable ambiene
sudo systemctl restart wayfire
sudo systemctl restart ambience

Next time you boot up, the Stonebaked Margherita P0 frame should behave like a picture frame.

Make sure the meson step finds curl and libjpeg, otherwise it won't be a very useful LAN picture frame.