Beware of Ubuntu 22

[Harai-o-goshi]

I had the picframe successfully running for several years on an Ubuntu 20LTS platform. A recent upgrade to 22LTS rendered the whole installation useless.
The script started as expected but no pictures were shown. Process is runnings, logging came up with nothing.

Because I was unable to pin the problem down, I had to roll back to the older version 20.

If you have any ideas about this specific problem, it would be much appreciated.

[paddywwoof]

I'm using ubuntu 22LTS on my laptop and pi3d works OK there t(hough I haven't tried picframe). I will make an SD card with Ubuntu 22 for a Pi and see if I can see what the problem was.

[Harai-o-goshi]

Thanks very much. Unfortunately it's beyond my capabilities to get picframe to work with 22. Did they change the displaymanager?
I forget to mention that I simply used the stock installation of Ubuntu with gnome as desktop.

[paddywwoof]

Hi, I've just muddled my way through getting it running on this laptop and it seems OK; both using the 'new' SDL2 option and with that turned off. However I am aware of a few things that have needed to be fixed with the latest version of python imaging library, though I think that only rolled out with later versions of ubuntu. I will have a go with a 'stock' ubuntu SD card for the Raspberry Pi later on.

[paddywwoof]

OK I managed to get pi3d rendering on the full desktop ubuntu 22LTS image on the RPi 4 but it took a long time to burn the SD, a long time to setup the SD and a long time to update all the software bundled with it. So I re-tried with the slightly lighter 'server' image but it was also reasonably long winded. The end result ran very slowly (FPS) compared with the raspberry pi OS.

I ran into slightly different problems on the desktop setup from the server but they are probably related. First off, I installed (the latest) pi3d and git cloned the pi3d_demos repo. In a terminal:

python3 -m pip install git+https://github.com/tipam/pi3d
git clone https://github/pi3d/pi3d_demos

*NB pip install using the git option. The normal pypi version is out of date and I can't update it!!!

When I tried python3 Minimal.py in the pi3d_demos directory it just hung with no rendering. I tried using the SDL2 back end and it worked but ran slowly

sudo apt install libsdl2-dev

and edit Minimal.py to enable SDL2 for the display pi3d.Display.creat(..., use_sdl2=True)

On the server version there were more things needed sudo apt install python3-numpy python3-pil python3-sdl2 libsdl2-dev and to get it to run without the desktop sudo apt install xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-legacy xinit and started it using sudo xinit /usr/bin/python3 /home/pi/pi3d_demos/Minimal.py However this still didn't work and the reason was that pi3d was finding the Broadcom shared library libbcm_host.so and defaulting to the old Raspberry Pi setup rather than the newer X11 one. When I stopped it doing that it loaded OK but at a similar very slow speed.

So I'm unsure of the exact details, and the 20LTS desktop doesn't seem to be available on the installer any longer. It seems as though the GL driver isn't running in hardware accelerated mode which could be fixed in raspbian OS by setting it to use glamor in raspi-config.

[Harai-o-goshi]

Thanks very much for your help and the work you spend into this topic. It's much appreciated. I should check if there is any problem with the hardware acceleration and if the drivers are installed properly.

[paddywwoof]

@Harai-o-goshi No problem. There's a bit of hacking going on around the move to bookworm (for Raspbian) with wayland instead of X11, and also with the new RPi5. So I would hold off doing anything short term (especially if you picframe is working at the moment), come back and check in a week or two. ;)