Review and planning session

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am laying out my plans for the near future. Let’s get started!

I’m still figuring out the new setup with Derpy. The VNC client I set up on my main desktop isn’t sending keyboard shortcuts when remoting into Derpy, but my laptop does and I cannot find the setting to change it. It also seemed to prefer opening up programs for a local login (if present) if the remote server requested anything be open. I upgraded it to Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS after trying to get some tech support over Discord.

In my last post, I believe I said I was now using GNOME 3. That was wrong. I’m on the Xfce desktop environment and I couldn’t tell the difference, especially while trying to elicit help. I’m willing to work with this desktop environment, as I hear it is supposed to be pretty stable, and it’s the only one I have to work with at the moment. Yes, I don’t have a way to switch desktop environments remotely. I tried logging out remotely, and the VNC session became unusable with that complex black and white “gray” pattern, replacing the desktop picture as I dragged lingering windows around. A reboot fixed the symptoms, but I still want to see about getting the root cause addressed sometime.

I have a few things I want to finish before going on with programming the Pi to detect and deter cats. Mostly the more intermediate Linux literacy skills, like getting WINE to run things reliably, or forcing a piece of hardware to work when it shouldn’t.

During my miscellaneous research this week, I found Rasbian is only a 32 bit operating system and the Raspberry Pi 3 family is all 64 bit based. I would like to explore benefits and drawbacks to finding a lightweight version of Linux to run on the Pi and running that for my cat program instead of just programming it for the board’s default OS.

Final Question: It’s hard to know what version of an otherwise identical product to go with, especially if you’ve never needed it before, especially software. I find a good word from someone I know goes a long way. How do you decide what version to use?


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