Pi4, Bookworm and blank screen with a cursor

[bobburgers7]

Hi everyone,

I tried following Wolfgang's guide here:

https://www.thedigitalpictureframe.com/how-to-build-a-gorgeous-digital-photo-frame-with-a-raspberry-pi-based-on-2023-bookworm/

I did all the steps but when I get to the part on where I should be seeing "No pictures select, have a break" and see a coffee mug, I just see a blank screen with a mouse cursor in the middle.

If I run: "systemctl --user stop picframe.service"

I get back to terminal and see the comments about how I auto-login.

I installed Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit) on a Raspberry Pi 4

I'm not sure what I'm missing since I followed the instructions and didnt skip anything...

[paddywwoof]

That blank screen with mouse arrow is wayfire starting, but picframe not doing, for some reason.

Starting using sytemd is convenient insofar as you can stop it again quite easily, but the output on the terminal is hidden away. Try running journalctl on the command line and scroll to the bottom to see if there were any error messages. Q to quit. Wayfire produces lots of lines so you will have to ignore much of it.

The other way to see output is to start manually from a terminal.

source /home/pi/venv_picframe/bin/activate
picframe

But now the terminal is blocked. To free it, start a new terminal (if using a keyboard plugged into the Pi itself rather than SSH, you can do that with with Ctrl-Alt-F2) log in then find and kill the wayfire process

pidof wayfire
# 1233 say
kill 1234

Go back to first session (if using keyborad Ctrl-Alt-F1)

[bobburgers7]

Hi Paddy,

thanks for the tip! I tried both SSH and logging in directly w/ a keyboard plugged into the Pi.

I get this error when starting picframe:

INFO:start.py:starting ['/home/pi/venv_picframe/bin/picframe']
INFO:model.Model:Open config file: /home/pi/picframe_data/config/configuration.yaml:
gl_id b'GL' b'3.1 Mesa 23.2.1-0+rpt2'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/pi/venv_picframe/bin/picframe", line 8, in
sys.exit(main())
^^^^^^
File "/home/pi/venv_picframe/lib/python3.11/site-packages/picframe/start.py", line 135, in main
c.start()
File "/home/pi/venv_picframe/lib/python3.11/site-packages/picframe/controller.py", line 338, in start
self.__viewer.slideshow_start()
File "/home/pi/venv_picframe/lib/python3.11/site-packages/picframe/viewer_display.py", line 453, in slideshow_start
self.__display.disable_screensaver() # screen will stay on
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
AttributeError: 'Display' object has no attribute 'disable_screensaver'

[paddywwoof]

Arg, that's crept into picframe sdl2 branch but I've diverted the matching change in pi3d to the new video branch. I will try to fix this tonight.

The whole screensaver experiment came to nothing anyway so probably should come out for the time being!

[paddywwoof]

I've made sure the new functions in pi3d.Display are now all in the master branch. You should be able to overwrite the existing installation if you enable the venv and python3 -m pip install git+https://github.com/tipam/pi3d --no-dependencies --force which should avoid reinstalling all the dependency modules you already have. Sorry about this.

Paddy

[bobburgers7]

thanks for the fix!

[sapnho]

I just did a fresh install and it works.