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BB VIEW 4.3": Debian desktop is a lonely cursor

Former Member

After two days of trying to follow obsolete and/or incomplete and/or ambiguous instructions on this and other forums, I managed to get the BB VIEW cape going with a 4.3" LCD. And by going, I mean that after the touch calibration, which completes uneventfully, I get a black screen with a lonely cursor. The cursor tracks smoothly and precisely, I am not getting poor touchscreen tracking that some have reported.

 

If I hit Crtl+Alt+Fx (0 < x < 7), I get a terminal with a login prompt, if I then hit Ctrl+Alt+F7, I recover the empty screen with a cursor.

 

Linux version is Wheezy, Linux beaglebone 3.8.13-bone79 #1 SMP Tue Oct 13 20:44:55 UTC 2015 armv7l GNU/Linux, hardware of BeagleBone Black is Rev. C.

 

So,

 

(a) have I done something wrong? or

 

(b) is this the expected behavior, the 4.3" screen is deemed by (parts of) Linux to be insufficient to display desktop constituents other than the cursor?

 

Many thanks!

 

Vladimir

  • 0

    Correction:

     

    Before patching, Linux version was Linux beaglebone 3.8.13-bone79 #1 SMP Tue Oct 13 20:44:55 UTC 2015 armv7l GNU/Linux

     

    After patching, Linux version is Linux beaglebone 3.8.13 #1 SMP Mon Apr 21 11:45:02 CST 2014 armv7l GNU/Linux

     

    It is under the latter version that I observe the behavior described above. The cape does not work under the former version.

  • 0

    under Linux, you have 7 different terminals that you can switch using Ctrl+Alt+Fx keys. These are pre built for your use. For instance I may use the F1 for root access and F2 for a normal user account at the same time. Linux can handle many users logged into the system at the same time through multi tasking. Once you login, you can start a window with STARTX if Windows-X is loaded and configured correctly.

    Clem

  • 0 in reply to clem57

    Yes, the Ctrl+Alt+Fx terminals work, however there is no GUI desktop under Ctrl+Alt+F7. Only a lonely cursor. No other graphical elements of a desktop appear. startx doesn't work with some error messages, which I am not eager now to reproduce.

     

    And that's why: Folks over at the BeagleBoard community informed me that Debian 7.9 is no longer supported and is actively dissuaded from use. BB-View is supported under Debian 8.4 directly, without kernel patching. Instructions (that contradict the obsolete, incorrect, and incomplete documentation provided by element14) are here: https://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-65082?#comment-86248

     

    I've been happily running Debian 8.4 and making use of its desktop.

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member

    vgusiatnikov - So now that your issue is resolved, what will the LCD be used for?

  • 0 in reply to Former Member

    We use BeagleBone with the attached cape and display for a rudimentary prototype of a user interface. Were hoping to get Android going, but it appears that there is no Android distribution available that would work with BB-View. So, the UI is running in Chromium browser.

     

    The UI is for a collection of other boards that do not have UI-capable processors on them. The connection from one of these boards to BeagleBone is over UART. A simple script running on BeagleBone receives data from UART and makes it available to BeagleBone's Apache web server, which then sends data to Chromium on the same board. In reverse, user button presses and configuration changes are sent by the browser to the server, processed, and corresponding commands are issued to the UI-less boards over UART. A bit complicated, but it works.

     

    This configuration is almost certainly not what we will use in the finished product, but is sufficient for a demo.