Browser support

[gavinmc42]

Been playing around with latest Raspbian, Lubuntu etc to see if they make suitable Desktop replacements on a Pi3.
Surprisingly they are not bad now. You could use a Pi3 as a desktop PC.

So I did tce-load -wi TC.tcz  to get a desktop on a piCore Pi3.
Works fine, nice and fast etc.

Then I started checking what else I need to make a development desktop, editor, file manager, browser, pdf viewer.
Got as far as Dillo3, ok with text based pages, JS ones, forget it.
Any others in the repo?
And I found same problem with pcmanfm as beerstein did, no icon..

Why are JS browsers so big and clunky? rhetorical
I did search for browsers on the forum, not much out there for piCore yet.

Is there a pdf viewer?

Will piCore 9 be 4.8.x kernel based?

[bmarkus]

WEB browsers: I'm just testing midori which works fine on RPi3 including JS. Need some more testing and packing but will land in the repo soon. Just a site note, webkitgtk the rendering engine builds cca. one day on RPi3

PCManFM lacks few dependencies will be added shortly, like hi-color icon theme, shared-mime-info and a GTK2 icon theme.

PiCore-9.0 no plan at the moment. Mainly it depends on what Raspbian is choosing and when. We need a custom version of the official Raspbian kernel to support RPi specific HW stuff which are missing in other kernel versions. 4.4 is an LTS version, so at the moment it is safe to stay with it.

[gavinmc42]

Thanks Bela, will look out for Midori in the repo.

I don't need Arm6(Pi B+) or Pi2 browser support, as the new ver Pi2 has the same 64bit chip as the Pi3.

Have not been keeping up with browsers but a comment Eric Arnholt made got me googling.
He was playing with Servo which is a browser made from Rust.
Rust is multicore cpu aware, so it should run fast on a Pi3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q9vIMXSTzc

https://github.com/warricksothr/RustBuild

The is also a Rust based OS
https://www.redox-os.org/

Wonder if Rust compiler is multicore?

In a few years multicore 64 bit CPUs will be everywhere, no need to support single core 32bit boxes.
At least for the Desktop.
32bit single core Pi's are still useful for IoT;)


1 day webkitgtk compiles? ouch.
These days I use Ultibo for B+ gadgets, 10sec compiles
Well, cross compiling on Windows, still waiting on native Pi support.
Pascal was always much faster than C.

[gavinmc42]

Just compiled the Servo browser on a Linux box, following instruction here.
http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_Trunk

Very basic at this stage, no search, no tabs but it did work and it seemed fast.
I also suspect Rust compiles faster than C/C++.
Would it be a useful browser for piCore on the Pi3 in full 64bit Aarch64 mode?
I suspect it would not be bad, popping up lots of script errors etc form pages, so still a work in progress.

I have no idea how to port it to piCore.
1) get the Rust compiler to work?
2) Get Cairo (Rust package management)?
3) Compile Servo?

Toy browser in Rust
https://limpet.net/mbrubeck/2014/08/08/toy-layout-engine-1.html

It also seems browsers won't get faster until they use the multi core cpus, which is happening.
Limitations now are also the single stream JS code, which has led to ParallelJS.

Anyway it will be interesting to try Midori on a Pi3, been a long time since I tried X11 stuff on a Pi, ie before Pi 2 and 3.

Wonder if Lazarus/FPC will work in PiCore?

[bmarkus]

There are no 64-bit kernel for Pi3 yet, so 64-bit is not an option. Also, do not expect a big boost just running a 64-bit system.

For sure Lazarus/FPC can be ported to piCore but it is not on my todo list. But user contribution welcome, if someone makes it, I will be happy to add to the repo.

Current webkitgtk is significantly faster than previous versions but I had issue to build and the one day build time is paonful. So at the moment I use a stable previous release of webkitgtk to get browser working and later will try the latest again. As above, user contribution welcome.

Cairo is in the repo, it is used by many other programs.

No idea what is Rust, never seen. As it is in GitHub, most likely can be used on RPi. See comments above

[bmarkus]

Hm.....

Rust won the first place for Most Loved Programming Language of 2016 in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey.

Will try it

[bmarkus]

And I found same problem with pcmanfm as beerstein did, no icon..

pcmanfm.tcz updated, please try.

[gavinmc42]

Thanks Bela, will try pcmanfm will I get home.

Editors, file manager and browser are important for a development box.
Cannot do stuff with dependencies at work due to firewall

Rust compiled Servo pretty quick on old Linux box and Servo is much smaller than Midori.
Think it is a different Cairo, but it comes when you install rustc.
Servo it still a toy browser, Mozilla guys are playing with it still.
But if Samsung are looking at it as well then it should be good becuase they are porting to Android and ARM which means it should be optimized for 64bit multicore ARM+NEON.
Which just happens to be the new rev Pi2 and Pi3

Not worried about 64bit kernel yet, but want to use the NEON/SIMD stuff in the future on the Pi 3 for Neural networks, machine learning, vision etc.
I think these registers are easier to use in 64bit mode, ie ARM8/Aarch64.
Using a 32bit kernel is like a sprint race where you are only allowed to use one foot

[gavinmc42]

https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Building-on-ARM-desktop-Linux

Could be a problem if it needs 2GBs of RAM to compile

Maybe they will do builds for Pi's?
https://download.servo.org/

[bmarkus]

Rust / Servo looks interested, but at the moment it is a low priority interest as there are many other thing to do with piCore. If you can build and submit it, I will be happy to add to repo

[gavinmc42]

Will learn Rust first and see if I can get that working.
rustc is the compiler.

Servo can wait, it's still a work in progress.
I want at least a search bar and tabs
It looks like Mozilla are adding bits of Rust compiled stuff slowly to Mozilla anyway.

Got pcmanfm to work, had to manually add pcmanfm.tcz to onboot list.

Is there any colour syntax editors in the Repo? MC is a bit clunky for coding.
Geany is my preferred, but it's lot lots of dependencies?

[bmarkus]

Is there any colour syntax editors in the Repo? MC is a bit clunky for coding.
Geany is my preferred, but it's lot lots of dependencies?

Try bluefish

[gavinmc42]

Haha, did not even notice it.
Been doing SSH and CLI too long.

Thanks Bela.

[bmarkus]

Is there any colour syntax editors in the Repo? MC is a bit clunky for coding.
Geany is my preferred, but it's lot lots of dependencies?

geany added to repo.

[gavinmc42]

Thanks again Bela,

Could not get Bluefish working but Geany works fine and is also rustc code aware

Rust seems to be the "in" language at the moment, found Leaf which is a Deep Learning AI that is Rust based.
http://autumnai.com/
For hackers not boffins

Got Rust going on my Linux Mint PC and Raspbian Pi3, did not actually take long to compile.
Still trying to figure out rust/cairo/crates etc.

Currently installing OpenCV on Mint box, more bloatware, knew there was a reason I stayed away from it.
VC Pi camera stuff works, tested it previously

Is there a USB webcam app that would allow me to take images to do vision stuff on?
V4L is very old piCore 3?
Got plenty of Sony PS3 eyecams for $2 each.