Adding Linux desktop to ASL on a Pi

Asking for a friend (seriously!) as I haven’t personally tried it.

He wants the desktop available (hasn’t said KDE or GNOME or exactly which one) but I thought I’d ask here if anyone is running one on their ASL server

Then what? There’s no GUI component to AllStar.

He wants to run Supermon and some other graphic stuff from his server/node

Why try to display it local ?
To do even allmon/supermon local, you need to have a gui ie browser local.
Kinda breaks the whole point of the method that has been incorporated. Which is minimalist so it works.
However, I seem to remember a minimal browser that has some kinda converted text display if ya wanna chase that down.

Funny, this topic seems to come up every 2 years or so along with a few others.

Been plenty of others try something. Nobody ever came back with a success story.
The headroom for a gui I suspect will give to much jitter to any audio while in operation (very sensitive to delays in the millisecond level), but I don’t know that and I would not even try it without at least 2gb of ram+ and even more if you have many URI’s, so a Pi4 or PC

It would be my opinion it is a waste of time. But don’t let that stop anyone from trying. Would love to hear a sucess story.

Yea, I told him to just point his browser to the IP of the server (for Supermon) and be done with it but he wanted to use a local console.

I said I’d ask over here and I have :nerd_face:

Tell him we said don’t do it. Running a desktop on an AllStar node is not recommended.

I’ve done it and have good results. I use a Pi3 with the 7" touchscreen (official Rpi version) with my own customized version of Allmon as the front end. Completely touchscreen driven with no keyboard required. I leave this unit on 24x7 as my radioless node to monitor our two repeaters.

As far as performance, it is usually crystal clear. I will say though that on restart, I usually wait a minute or two for everything to settle out as transmitting immediately after startup I have heard some garbled audio. It is rare, but it has happened. I haven’t had the time to redo this on a Pi4, but my guess is that it would completely disappear on that hardware due to the upgraded processing power and memory.

There are two ways to get the gui: one is to add the Raspbian gui to the Raspbian lite install and the second is to do a fresh install of Raspbian and then add Allstar on top of it.

Here’s the basic steps to add it to Raspi Lite:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y raspberrypi-ui-mods rpi-chromium-mods
sudo apt-get install lightdm #(if not installed by the above command)
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser #(if not installed by the above command)
raspi-config #select gui on startup

You can also google instructions for changing Raspi Lite to Raspi w/ gui.



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That’s a nice outfit. I have been working on one like it, if I ever finish.
Was writing my own display for stats and control.
Might I ask what the onscreen keypad was derived from ?
Guessing it was packaged with the touch software.

There isn’t any special touchscreen software. Touch registers just like a mouse click. The code is just html & javascript. When you click on the node # field on the main screen, it activates the modal form which sets the node number.