Picframe on something else than a raspberry pi

[ArthurHuyghe]

Would it be possible to run PicFrame on an laptop running ubuntu or any other linux distro?

[paddywwoof]

Hi, it certainly did in the past. I will check it out on this, recently acquired, one. I will let you know any dependencies needed and any other quirks.

[paddywwoof]

Arthur, I've just done a quick test here. In many ways it's easier on a laptop as there's a whole lot of stuff already installed and you're not having to mess around getting the display to start automatically without mouse or keyboard there. I basically:

1. I already had a folder for my hacking, so I did all this in /home/patrick/python
2. Created a new venv with python3 -m venv /home/patrick/python/venv_picframe
3. Switched to the new venv with source /home/patrick/python/venv_picframe/bin/activate
4. Installed picframe with python -m pip install picframe
5. NB this next is something we will probably have to fix as distutils has been deprecated from python3.10 and removed from python3.12 @helgeerbe , edit the 6th line of /home/patrick/python/venv_picframe/lib/python3.12/site-packages/picframe/start.py to read from shutil import copytree and the 18th line to copytree(fullpath, destination)
6. Run picframe setup with picframe -i /home/patrick/python and answer the questions with return or to suit your setup
7. Start picframe with picframe /home/patrick/python/picframe_data/config/configuration.yaml

Obviously you should change the path I used in the above to be appropriate for you and you might want to edit the configuration.yaml as per the other instructions on Helge or Wolfgang's web pages.

To run pi3d generally (see github.com/pi3d/pi3d_demos) or if you want mouse and keyboard functionality on picframe, you will find that the input won't work unless you're su. To get round this follow the instructions on the FAQ

[ArthurHuyghe]

Thank you very much for the fast and detailed response, really appreciate it! I installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS and followed your instructions, however at step 5 I only have a folder called site-packages instead of dist-packages. But site-packages did contain the rest of the folders and file you refer to. Everything went smooth but when I started picframe, it got stuck at WARNING:pi3d.Display:Do you need to install sdl2?. Even ctrl +c didn't work to stop the command, but ctrl + z did the job.

Did I do something wrong?
Thanks in advance for your help.

[paddywwoof]

Hi, site-packages that's my stupid typo, which I will correct. I'm not sure why SDL2 isn't being found. This is a relatively new install of ubuntu 24.04.1 too so I don't think I've installed something in the past that I've forgotten. The only thing it might be is that I install pi3d on its own before installing picframe.

I'm not sure if it matters but I wouldn't start picframe while still in the venv_picframe/lib/... directory. python will try to import things from the local file system which can confuse things.

You could try something like to see if that will bring in the SDL2 libraries.

cd /home/aurthur/python/
source venv_picframe/bin/activate
python -m pip install pysdl2-dll

which might somehow get called when pysdl2 is installed as a dependency (but I can't see how, looking at their code).

If that still doesn't work you could try installing the whole chunk of sdl2 binaries. This is what I used to do on the raspberry pi or if using pi3d_rust but pysdl2 seemed to get round that. i.e. sudo apt install libsdl2-dev

Even if you don't set up keyboard input the SDL2 based pi3d.Display will check for ESC and close down straight away. Of course that only works if you manage to get the Display started!

Paddy

[paddywwoof]

Arthur, alternatively you could simply set use_sdl2: False in the configuration.yaml file. All the X11 stuff should still work with most linux desktops

Paddy

PS you might have difficulty similar to your experience above, when trying to close the application. In the past I've managed it by opening another session by Ctrl+Alt+F3 (or F4, F5 etc) then log in as yourself then top -u arthur and kill the process number, usually without mercy using -9 i.e. kill -9 4566 . If you can't find picframe or python using top you can also do pidof python

PPS then get back to your original session with Ctrl+Alt+F2 (or F1 maybe)

[ArthurHuyghe]

Installing pysdl2-dll solved the issue, Pic frame now works like a charm! Thank you very much for your help Paddy. Are there any things I should watch out for when I further configure pic frame because it is not running on a raspberry pi? Otherwise I think changing the documentation to make it clear that this doesn't need to run on a raspberry pi per se, would be a good idea. So others can find/use it more easily cause this really looks like an amazing piece of software!

[paddywwoof]

Ah, that's good. It might have been a dependency of something I previously installed. Or something else... It's a strength and weakness of the 'nix philosophy that everything uses a morass of small applications, each, theoretically, doing just one thing well!!

Running picframe on other things than RPi might run into issues with the default user not having sudo powers (i.e. with the mouse input as mentioned above) I'm just fixing various things with the mouse and keyboard that will (hopefully) improve things with picframe if you enable these in the configuration.yaml file. And that might be useful if you run picframe on a normal computer with keyboard and mouse or touchpad already there.