First off, to “introduce myself and where I’m coming from”: I’m entirely new to Raspberry Pi and “direct Linux” computing. My background in computing is growing up with both Mac and PC - I predominantly use MacOS family at home (Mac Mini, iPhone, Watch, iPad; Homekit) and PC (Windoze) at work (Automotive Product Engineer). I had “programming” experience in my university studies (Aero Engineering) with MATLAB and a “digital” version of FORTRAN 77. (For a time, I had MATLAB running on my MBP during college - and it required X11 to run it on OS X!) I started “learning” Python during the COVID shutdowns in the US, and I starting picking that back up again this past spring. I see potential for it in my work, and figured I would benefit from having some ways to “practice” at home.
How did I arrive at Raspberry Pi? In short, I blame Jeff G on YouTube for striking the itch. I wanted a small display in my master bath to show the time, the weather forecast, and the temperature / humidity from a few sensors around my living space (inside & out). My “LaCrosse” weather station is becoming fidgety and it was time for it to go. I’d looked at things like. pixel displays - but I didn’t like that they couldn’t communicate with my Apple Home setup - which is about 75% Matter devices - the rest being either Apple or Nest. Apple STILL does not have a device - unless I buy an iPad mini. I’d known about Homebridge, and was considering a Pi to run it. Then I heard about Home Assistant - built on Python with the ability to give me a dashboard in a web browser. HAOS can sit between my varied Smart Home devices and bridge into Homekit; and I can still use Homekit to control while not home.
So… I purchased earlier this month (August 2024) at first just a single Pi 5 along with a 7” official display (with case kit) Only to realize within a day or so that with my skills, I wasn’t so sure about doing a “supervised” HAOS install so I could still access a headed display on the same Pi! So I bought a second Pi 5 - 4GB to install HAOS and run it headless. The original Pi 5 is connected to the 7” display - running Raspberry Pi OS - Full - 64 bit - Bookworm.
What brings me to the forum to actually write a post? I want to be able to NOT run the RPi 5 8G in full kiosk mode, because I still want to play with the Pi some on the side. (Hence running in full desktop). For the HA Dash display, I want to put the Chromium browser in full screen (F11), and then be able to come out of it when I want (also F11). I would need an onscreen keyboard for this. Naturally, I have found the documentation here: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentati ... n-keyboard
Since I’m running Full Desktop Bookworm 64 bit on a RPi5, it was clear that I was using from the original image Wayland with Wayfire. A second issue here on the 7” - which is somewhat already known in the forum and in GitHub discussions - is that Wayfire does a HORRIBLE job correcting window size to fit the 7” screen. In these cases, it is impossible for a NOOB to move the window around - and the stubborn thing refuses to be resized from what edges can be grabbed. I learned Alt+F4 would quit the menu (thanks - USB Keyboard). Great - another thing to resolve before I can start using my setup as intended. I considered for a time to rotate the display from landscape to portrait (I’m using a flat bottom VESA stand mount).
I picked up somewhere that labwc would solve the window fit issue. And also saw this further down the 7” display doc page https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentat ... ouch-input about switching over from Wayfire to labwc. From the very limited instructions, this fixed the window sizing issue.
For a beginner, the instructions on the base documentation page for anything to do with the 7” display — these could be so much better! For example, the instructions to setup a functioning virtual keyboard under wvkbd (Wayland virtual keyboard) are not the greatest. I found on the forum some guidance from user terribleted: viewtopic.php?t=358147 and similar instructions from https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-on ... -keyboard/ — the latter of which are not complete between X and Wayland!!! (BEWARE!). Did these work? Yes and no. The button on the panel (also known as a Taskbar) for activating wvkbd through a shell script - that did not show an image - I ended up removing it.
I feel like Alice in Wonderland: OK - so what’s going on with the different windowing methods, and why does my panel still make references to X when I should be using Wayland? Why does the panel config file make reference to what I assume is Wayfire? That is, wf-panel-pi.config Why won’t it let me set the virtual keyboard toggle to the right side widgets? I’m clearly missing something - yet the documentation landscape is lacking. The information I gain from vast web searches is that RPi OS still cobbles together various packages to build the DE (Desktop Environment). It’s difficult for me to say whether PiXEL was adapted this way for labwc, or if it is still stuck as Wayfire, or even X for that matter. I’m strongly tempted to take a stab at just doing a clean install of labwc using THEIR config files. Why? I don’t think RPi distro of labwc package utilized this. Oh, I’m already aware that I should probably use Lite to do this - but…. I want to also be able to use Pi Connect, so that’s a no for now. Looking directly at labwc’s Getting Started and base template files — the contents of those are NOT what I’m seeing on my Pi (mentally removing the # comment outs in the script!).
Some of this “motivation for self clean up” of config files is because of this mismatch in Wayland compositors that I have found (from the forums, it seems I’m not alone):
XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP=LXDE-pi-labwc
DESKTOP_SESSION=LXDE-pi-wayfire
Where do I think DESKTOP_SESSION environment variable is coming from? I cannot “find it” in my ~/.config/labwc/environment file — it only has XKB settings (model and layout are defined). I can find it in my /etc/xdg/labwc/environment file — where the variable is set to LXDE-pi-wayfire. (I say “think” because I’m still working around learning the workings of Unix-like / Linux systems).
My understanding is that the etc config / environment files are the masters, which could sometimes override user config files if the variables are not defined by the user. For example here - the etc env file has XKB_DEFAULT_MODEL=pc105 and XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT=gb; whereas my user file has these respectively set to pc86 and us,us.
My questions:
1) is it possible that Raspberry Pi distro to optionally enable labwc in raspi-config does not yet have all of the default configuration files setup correctly? Could there be some better instructions provided here for a “clean” enablement?
2) is this something that I could do under a “learn by doing” to keep moving instead of waiting for a non-experienced beginner “fix”?
For info:
PRETTY_NAME=“Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)”
Kernel: Linux 6.6.31+rpt-rpi-2721; from uname -a, it gives also (2024-05-29)
Original first boot date = 8/11 - using what ever Raspberry Pi OS Full (64 bit) image was available in the imager v1.8.5 — currently (8/22) it shows the release from July 4. It’s not clear if I’m running that image given the May 29 date above!
MANY thanks in advance for guidance!
How did I arrive at Raspberry Pi? In short, I blame Jeff G on YouTube for striking the itch. I wanted a small display in my master bath to show the time, the weather forecast, and the temperature / humidity from a few sensors around my living space (inside & out). My “LaCrosse” weather station is becoming fidgety and it was time for it to go. I’d looked at things like. pixel displays - but I didn’t like that they couldn’t communicate with my Apple Home setup - which is about 75% Matter devices - the rest being either Apple or Nest. Apple STILL does not have a device - unless I buy an iPad mini. I’d known about Homebridge, and was considering a Pi to run it. Then I heard about Home Assistant - built on Python with the ability to give me a dashboard in a web browser. HAOS can sit between my varied Smart Home devices and bridge into Homekit; and I can still use Homekit to control while not home.
So… I purchased earlier this month (August 2024) at first just a single Pi 5 along with a 7” official display (with case kit) Only to realize within a day or so that with my skills, I wasn’t so sure about doing a “supervised” HAOS install so I could still access a headed display on the same Pi! So I bought a second Pi 5 - 4GB to install HAOS and run it headless. The original Pi 5 is connected to the 7” display - running Raspberry Pi OS - Full - 64 bit - Bookworm.
What brings me to the forum to actually write a post? I want to be able to NOT run the RPi 5 8G in full kiosk mode, because I still want to play with the Pi some on the side. (Hence running in full desktop). For the HA Dash display, I want to put the Chromium browser in full screen (F11), and then be able to come out of it when I want (also F11). I would need an onscreen keyboard for this. Naturally, I have found the documentation here: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentati ... n-keyboard
Since I’m running Full Desktop Bookworm 64 bit on a RPi5, it was clear that I was using from the original image Wayland with Wayfire. A second issue here on the 7” - which is somewhat already known in the forum and in GitHub discussions - is that Wayfire does a HORRIBLE job correcting window size to fit the 7” screen. In these cases, it is impossible for a NOOB to move the window around - and the stubborn thing refuses to be resized from what edges can be grabbed. I learned Alt+F4 would quit the menu (thanks - USB Keyboard). Great - another thing to resolve before I can start using my setup as intended. I considered for a time to rotate the display from landscape to portrait (I’m using a flat bottom VESA stand mount).
I picked up somewhere that labwc would solve the window fit issue. And also saw this further down the 7” display doc page https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentat ... ouch-input about switching over from Wayfire to labwc. From the very limited instructions, this fixed the window sizing issue.
For a beginner, the instructions on the base documentation page for anything to do with the 7” display — these could be so much better! For example, the instructions to setup a functioning virtual keyboard under wvkbd (Wayland virtual keyboard) are not the greatest. I found on the forum some guidance from user terribleted: viewtopic.php?t=358147 and similar instructions from https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-on ... -keyboard/ — the latter of which are not complete between X and Wayland!!! (BEWARE!). Did these work? Yes and no. The button on the panel (also known as a Taskbar) for activating wvkbd through a shell script - that did not show an image - I ended up removing it.
I feel like Alice in Wonderland: OK - so what’s going on with the different windowing methods, and why does my panel still make references to X when I should be using Wayland? Why does the panel config file make reference to what I assume is Wayfire? That is, wf-panel-pi.config Why won’t it let me set the virtual keyboard toggle to the right side widgets? I’m clearly missing something - yet the documentation landscape is lacking. The information I gain from vast web searches is that RPi OS still cobbles together various packages to build the DE (Desktop Environment). It’s difficult for me to say whether PiXEL was adapted this way for labwc, or if it is still stuck as Wayfire, or even X for that matter. I’m strongly tempted to take a stab at just doing a clean install of labwc using THEIR config files. Why? I don’t think RPi distro of labwc package utilized this. Oh, I’m already aware that I should probably use Lite to do this - but…. I want to also be able to use Pi Connect, so that’s a no for now. Looking directly at labwc’s Getting Started and base template files — the contents of those are NOT what I’m seeing on my Pi (mentally removing the # comment outs in the script!).
Some of this “motivation for self clean up” of config files is because of this mismatch in Wayland compositors that I have found (from the forums, it seems I’m not alone):
XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP=LXDE-pi-labwc
DESKTOP_SESSION=LXDE-pi-wayfire
Where do I think DESKTOP_SESSION environment variable is coming from? I cannot “find it” in my ~/.config/labwc/environment file — it only has XKB settings (model and layout are defined). I can find it in my /etc/xdg/labwc/environment file — where the variable is set to LXDE-pi-wayfire. (I say “think” because I’m still working around learning the workings of Unix-like / Linux systems).
My understanding is that the etc config / environment files are the masters, which could sometimes override user config files if the variables are not defined by the user. For example here - the etc env file has XKB_DEFAULT_MODEL=pc105 and XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT=gb; whereas my user file has these respectively set to pc86 and us,us.
My questions:
1) is it possible that Raspberry Pi distro to optionally enable labwc in raspi-config does not yet have all of the default configuration files setup correctly? Could there be some better instructions provided here for a “clean” enablement?
2) is this something that I could do under a “learn by doing” to keep moving instead of waiting for a non-experienced beginner “fix”?
For info:
PRETTY_NAME=“Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)”
Kernel: Linux 6.6.31+rpt-rpi-2721; from uname -a, it gives also (2024-05-29)
Original first boot date = 8/11 - using what ever Raspberry Pi OS Full (64 bit) image was available in the imager v1.8.5 — currently (8/22) it shows the release from July 4. It’s not clear if I’m running that image given the May 29 date above!
MANY thanks in advance for guidance!
Statistics: Posted by KriegAdlerAU — Thu Aug 22, 2024 11:55 am — Replies 0 — Views 9