PiBox

Fluxbox changes are integrated into the build. They will work with both the old and new Buildroot (2015.02 and 2016.05).

The new system does some munging of the skeleton in package/skeleton/skeleton.mk. When I do a buildroot-rebuild I remove my customizations, rerun the build and then copy those back in with the postbuild.sh. This now causes the skeleton.mk to fail on a missing /etc/hosts file.

The solution is probably to remove the old customization and then copy them back in immediately. I think I used to do this but moved it to postbuild.sh because or earlier changes to Buildroot. I do the remove/reinstall on rebuilds to pick up changes in the custom skeleton.

I got everything built, including the opkgs. Everything boots and runs as expected with 2016.05.

I also included surf. It builds fine and runs on the hardware. I tested it against the PiBox web server and that run okay. However, it doesn't play the webcam. I don't get any video. So I tried loading youtube.com. That loads (very slowly) but no videos play. So it looks like I may need to configure a video player for surf/webkitgtk24.

I can find no specific documentation on surf or webkitgtk24 on setting the video player. There is a script for surf that will play youtube videos using mpv which could be changed to play videos with omxplayer. But mjpeg playback doesn't work at all and that shouldn't require omxplayer. It should just play in surf via webkit and the libav codecs. But it doesn't.

This may be a configuration issue in my build. However, given that it doesn't "just work", the build of webkitgtk24 and dependencies adds a large time increase to the rootfs build, and the benefit of using javascript to build a UI seems like too much work. It shouldn't be that hard or dependency-riddled. After all, we're just looking for a nice layout of images with text - no 3D and no motion required (motion might be nice for the slideshow effect but is not required).

This is probably the same conclusion I came to with surf/webkit a long time back. What I really want is a cairo-based display with a custom scripting capability that allows layout of screen content based on block-types (images, text, etc.).

I'll save the 2016.05 bump in the mjhammel/br-2016-05 repo and revisit later. As of now, I see now advantage to using it. I just need to flesh out my user-space design to be more UI friendly.

Closing issue.