Add support for other OSes

[nebrius]

I think that Raspbian is the only OS raspi-io works on, although I'm not certain. We should confirm and make sure it does work on others, especially pidora.

[derekwheee]

Installing Ubuntu on my Pi 2 now. Will report back soon!

[wadtech]

Ubuntu Core aside, we were going to use Ubuntu Mate to get easier access to a newer version of chromium.

Did you have any success with this @Frxnz ?

[derekwheee]

@wadtech This was a few months ago, but I had pretty bad luck with Ubuntu. Hopefully things have gotten better since then.

[wadtech]

Cheers, I'll let you know how I get on then

[cardimajs]

please make rasp-io work on Arch Linux

[wadtech]

Just for an update: it went really badly. Although it seemed that copying the vendor folder over from raspbian actually worked fine, it's just the install itself that wasn't right.

ymmv obviously.

[nebrius]

@wadtech thanks for checking that out. If I were to guess, I would say it's because of https://github.com/nebrius/raspi-i2c/blob/master/script/enable_i2c.js

We'll probably need a different version of that script for each OS 😖

[andrewn]

I tried to install an app using rapsi-io on a Raspberry Pi using the Resin platform.

I think this script caused the install to hang and then fail because it waits for user input.

It would be great to have a way to optionally disable these scripts from running, perhaps by setting an environment variable on install? The user would then be responsible for ensuring I2C is enabled on their platform.

[nebrius]

Good idea @andrewn, I like it.

Is this something you need asap? I'm really swamped, and don't really have time to work on raspi-io at the moment, sadly.

Would you be willing to implement it? It should be pretty straightfoward. Just add a process.exit call towards the top of the enable_i2c script linked above

[ekryski]

I had the same issue. There are potentially 2 problems with the i2c post install work:

1. If you are not installing using sudo or are not root then you will be prompted for your password

2. It assumes that /boot/config.txt is present. When running inside docker it won't be. I hacked around this by touch /boot/config.txt inside the container.

I'm going to check out resin.io right now but I might be able to get a PR in tomorrow, doing pretty much what you suggested @nebrius.

[nebrius]

Ubuntu support is in!

[ekryski]

Woooot! 🎉

[philraj]

Got it running beautifully in Arch ARM, for future reference.

[Swizz]

Hi @philraj,
It will work out of the box ?

[philraj]

@Swizz I guess it depends on your definition of 'out of the box'. :)

I had some weird issues with the build process (npm was installing modules into the wrong folders), but running rm -rf node_modules and reinstalling raspi-io fixed it.

[Swizz]

@philraj I tried it.

Something weird happened. All gyp packages have needed to be build separately.
It is truly blocking in a push-to-deploy philosophy.

[nebrius]

This issue has been open for a long time now, and I haven't made any progress on adding other OS's. Sorry, but it's not a priority for me.

That said, raspi-io has been reworked so that it has a much more modular architecture now. If someone needs a new OS supported that isn't supported out of the box, you can roll your own a lot more easily now. Take a look at https://github.com/nebrius/raspi-io/blob/master/src/index.js to see how to inject the OS-specific dependencies into raspi-io-core.

I'm closing this issue now, thank you everyone who participated and left feedback!

[WebReflection]

In case anyone uses ArchLinux, I've written up a little how to:
https://medium.com/@WebReflection/how-to-raspi-io-on-archlinux-5d59229e5763

[bot2fa]

use it make Last few GCs