Has anyone had any luck developing for info-beamer in a virtual machine? There is an x86 build of Raspbian, though I’m having a hard time getting it to boot in VirtualBox. Is that even a possibility?
We’re using full licenses on our players, but I built my app to be backwards compatible with the open source version just because being able to develop locally has been very convenient. Unfortunately, the open source version is getting pretty tough to build, and now on Linux Mint 19 I’m getting library conflicts. I might be able to fight through them, but there’s probably a better approach. Hopefully I’m not petting the dog too far backwards.
There have been a few attempts at running the old open source version running info-beamer. I wouldn’t recommend that today though as it’s quite outdated and I never had the time to backport some of the features found in info-beamer pi.
If you want a faster development cycle, have a look at the dev-mode feature instead: It allows you to set up a device so you can instantly sync a package from your local development machine to it: Hit save in your editor and you’ll see the changes instantly on your Pi.
Unfortunately, do to some poor prior planning on my part, I’m trying to bring on some other hobbyist developers that don’t have physical Raspberry Pis. I’m trying to figure out how to get them some systems, but I was trying to find a temporary solution in the near term.
I actually already have a tool to push packages quickly to the Pis (I’m that guy who made the asinine controller/target solution because our convention network doesn’t have a reliable internet connection). If there’s no way to run in a VM or build for Linux any more, I guess I just need to get them hardware.
I’m pretty sure you can still build the open source version for a current Linux distribution, but some of the dependencies might have to be updated for that. Last I tried was Ubuntu 16.04 IIRC.
Regardless of that: I would suggest using a real Pi, as it’s always better to see eventual performance issues early.
I was able to build it and run on Linux Mint 19.1 with some small changes to handle a newer ffmpeg version. I’m going to recommend that the team gets real hardware as soon as possible, though.