[Cuis] Cuis on Raspberry Pi

[Juan Vuletich]

On 12/16/2013 10:43 AM, nacho wrote:
> Hannes:
>
> Cuis 4.2 works well in the Raspberry Pi. There are, however, a number of
> things that you have to bear in mind.
> The first one is the OS. I've tried several of them. Here is a little
> digression:
> 1) Raspbian: Though it's the recommended OS. I wouldn't recommend it. The
> problem is that it comes with LXDE as DE and it's very RAM consuming.
> 2) RISC OS: Love it. But it's not good for Cuis.

why? Tim Rowledge has been working on this, and I guess he could use 
your input.

> 3) Arch Linux: Good one. You have to install Xorg and a DE (I tried Open
> Motif, TWM) and they work well. It's one of the choices.
> 4) PiBang: A fork of Crunchbang linux, based on the Openbox WM. Debian
> based, and fast. I ended up using this one. But unloaded a lot of stuff
> (tint2, nitrogen, conky, clipman).
>
> The second one is the split between the ram devoted to the GPU and the OS. I
> found that the best balance is to have 128 MB dedicated to the GPU and the
> rest to the OS.
>
> The third, you may want to have a pendrive of at least 1GB to be used as
> swap area. I did that: sudo swapon /dev/sda1
>
> The Squeak VM has benn already ported to the ARM platform. However there's
> no COG VM yet. This would make a lot of difference.
>
> Squeak 3.0 with no TTF or bitmaped ones, works really good.
> Cuis 4.2 works well but I have yet to find a way to change fonts. It seems
> that Cuis uses DejaVu fonts and I don't exactly know how to change system
> fonts to no bitmapped or TTF. I tried several things at the Preferences
> class but for now that's a bottle neck.

The fonts in Squeak 3.0 are bitmap fonts, like the ones in Cuis. The 
difference is that in Squeak 3.0 they are 1 bit depth, and in Cuis they 
are antialiased. If the anti aliased fonts are a problem, try:

     StrikeFont saveSpace

to limit them to 4 bit depth. Or you can limit them to 1 bit doing:

     StrikeFont allInstances do: [ :f | f setGlyphsDepthAtMost: 1 ]

This should be as fast as the old 1bpp fonts, but will look uglier :)

You can also limit display depth to 16, 8 or even 4 bits, to try to make 
it go faster. (World / Preferences / Set display depth...)

Something else you can try is installing the Theme-Themes package and 
selecting the Classic theme (World / Preferences / Themes...)

> Also I have to work something out with sound. It's not working. Neither in
> squeak nor in cuis.

Most likely a VM issue.

> Finally, I overclocked the Pi and overvolted it. But mainly using PiBang's
> default settings. (check the config.txt in /boot).
>
> Please, let me know if I can help you out or if you want some pics.
>
> Best!
> Nacho
>

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich