💾 Archived View for sdf.org › stug › phlog › 2022 › 20220331.txt captured on 2023-01-29 at 05:04:51.
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31st March 2022 - VNC Tinkerings ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Listening to an old Tob recording seeing as he is otherwise occupied. The past few days have been spent giving Manjaro on Raspberry Pi a go. I have had a Raspberry Pi 4 kicking around mostly acting as a noiseless bridge between my PC and Icom IC-705 for digi-modes. It feels like a waste for all those times I am not playing with amateur radio. I also had a strange idea.... I have a HP Pavillion x2 which has 2 GB RAM and so struggles with most browsers. It has a nice life as my SDF machine but what if I could use it as an intelligent terminal... As much as Raspian/Raspberry Pi OS is functional, I have a special place in my heart for Manjaro. It is my distro of choice as it gives a lot of freedom with default set ups and the shiny rolling release without too many headaches thing. I know it is Arch for babies who like green too much but still. There was also a nagging thought that a USB boot would be preferable too. For a challenge, I tried to do this without connecting a screen etc or using another computer. With the use of wget and a fresh USB stick, I got manjaro sway installed. Then I had to connect the pi to a screen, keyboard and mouse. I forgot there would have to be first time set up. Sigh. Sway seemed to struggle to work out which half of the DE should be on the left and on the right. I ended up with some weird effect where the time appeared in the middle and the menu button was to the right of that. A swath of the middle was missing for some reason. A reboot and it worked for a bit. Another reboot and it returned to being confused. So I resorted to good old trusty XFCE. That installed fine. With the pi, I wanted it to act as a headless computer which I could VNC into. Manjaro does not make this easy. I can see why RealVNC is installed from the off in Raspberry Pi OS. After playing with tigervnc and x11vnc, following the good old Arch wiki pages, I hit a strange snag. I was able to connect to a session but not click on anything. After much harumphing and searching the manjaro forums, I found I have to enable the systemd service everytime the pi reboots and then I can actually click on things. Why? Who knows. I have a script to ensure I never forget that step now. Now the challenge was whether I could get this working from outside the LAN, something I had never really played with other than using pagekite. Port forwarding over SSH was also something I had not tried but obviously wanted for security reasons. Well that all happened fairly easily. Other than much mucking around with the router settings and some scary moments where I managed to stop the sshf service through an out of range port. This would be simple to remedy if I had not forgotten to start the service again. I instead kept wondering why enable would not work. Sigh. Stupidity. Anyhow, I am now able to use VNC to connect to the PI securly from outside the network. My SDF machine can go on the road now and be useful for more than text. This HP x2 was a purchase I regretted for a long time. It has 32 GB of memory as was typical of these cheap pieces of crap to lure the daft with at the time. This was no good for windows. However, there was also an added trick to make alternative OS' a problem. The bootloader is 32 bit while the processor is 64 bit. Why? WHO KNOWS?!?!? It took a long time for linux distros to resolve this matter and make me happy again. Some would wonder why I bothered. The hardware is spot on. It is a 10 inch screen with a surprisingly nice keyboard. It uses USB C for the charger. It has a reasonable battery. The bootloader and RAM are the only issues really and they are mostly solved. There is the lack of sound due to Intel processor madness too but I have bluetooth working for sound. Yet for all of the issues, I am glad that I can still use this machine. I have learned a lot from it over the years and hopefully can keep it going for many more.