7.1 desktop GUI/VNC log in issue

[weaver]

Firstly - I am well aware that this is outside of a standard install and as such is not necessarily within the scope of this forum but am posting it in case anyone has experienced anything similar or knows of a likely reason why this should happen.

I have always used moOde headless but with a desktop installed which I use via VNC - basically to give me access to a browser on the Pi and the ability to play catch up services (eg BBC Sounds) and sites such as Bandcamp directly from the Pi, and this has worked well on a couple of 3B+ units and an Allo USBridge Sig. up to moOde 7.

Having tried both in place updates and a couple of clean installs of 7.1 there is a point at which proceeding with this set-up stops the moOde UI from working, ie. won't load at all or stays frozen.

Having gone through a step by step process the sticking point appears to be trying to auto-login to a Pi desktop GUI. If I revert to boot to desktop with a login prompt then both the desktop and the moOde UI on iOS and Android are fine. If I switch to auto-login on boot the Pi side is fine (and I can SSH into moOde) but the mobile UI doesn't load.

I'm hoping there is a relatively simple answer like it just being a security conflict and don't expect anyone to spend any time trying to trouble shoot it for me. If it simply means that I now need to manually log-in on start up then that's fine; much of the time I don't use the desktop at all so if the mobile side will carry on regardless and it is one more step on start up to get the desktop to work then so be it, it's probably more secure that way in any case.

Thanks for reading, please ignore if too far off topic.

[TheOldPresbyope]

@weaver

Aside: There's nothing particularly secure about moOde, just so you know.

The thought of trying to install a desktop environment on a moOde player (or to want to!) has never crossed my mind. I have no idea how what you call auto-login might interfere with various parts of moOde.

What do your logs say? Anything interesting in /var/log/syslog and /var/log/moode.log (and, maybe, /var/log/mpd/log)?
Regards,
Kent

[weaver]

@weaver

Aside: There's nothing particularly secure about moOde, just so you know.

The thought of trying to install a desktop environment on a moOde player (or to want to!) has never crossed my mind. I have no idea how what you call auto-login might interfere with various parts of moOde.

What do your logs say? Anything interesting in /var/log/syslog and /var/log/moode.log (and, maybe, /var/log/mpd/log)?
Regards,
Kent

Thank you for the reply, I did make a start on the logs after your message but quickly realised that the first is rather large and as I have no idea what I would be looking for that browsing 1000s of lines wasn't likely to yield an answer.

As to why, I am currently sat at a PC using a browser. I can go to a catch-up radio page and find a program from the weekend that I want to listen to and play it via the optical out from the PC to an audio set-up. However, my preferred listening is via a Pi based system which I can control either with a phone or a moOde window on the PC. The PC does PC things and the Pi does audio things. What would be nice is if I could select the Pi as an output device for Windows; I can do this in some programs (eg. JRiver) via DLNA/UPnP but I can't from a browser. There are additional programs that will facilitate this by capturing the audio output I believe, but whenever I have looked in the past the online comments are that they are clunky and/or not as seamless as we might hope. I could do it from a phone using the Pi as a renderer via Bluetooth/Airplay, but prefer not to.
The simplest solution (for me, so far, and AFAIK about what is possible) is to have a browser run on the Pi with VNC control from the PC. Then I simply open whatever service I want to use on the Pi and play directly from there. There have been wrinkles, a previous version of Chromium wouldn't play mixcloud for example, but generally it works well.
There is a second scenario that I run where there is no PC/server involved at all, the Pi does everything. Again the mobile to Pi as renderer system works, but having everything run on the Pi is what I find simplest.

[vinnn]

Firstly - I am well aware that this is outside of a standard install and as such is not necessarily within the scope of this forum but am posting it in case anyone has experienced anything similar or knows of a likely reason why this should happen.

I have always used moOde headless but with a desktop installed which I use via VNC - basically to give me access to a browser on the Pi and the ability to play catch up services (eg BBC Sounds) and sites such as Bandcamp directly from the Pi, and this has worked well on a couple of 3B+ units and an Allo USBridge Sig. up to moOde 7.

Having tried both in place updates and a couple of clean installs of 7.1 there is a point at which proceeding with this set-up stops the moOde UI from working, ie. won't load at all or stays frozen.

Having gone through a step by step process the sticking point appears to be trying to auto-login to a Pi desktop GUI. If I revert to boot to desktop with a login prompt then both the desktop and the moOde UI on iOS and Android are fine. If I switch to auto-login on boot the Pi side is fine (and I can SSH into moOde) but the mobile UI doesn't load.

I'm hoping there is a relatively simple answer like it just being a security conflict and don't expect anyone to spend any time trying to trouble shoot it for me. If it simply means that I now need to manually log-in on start up then that's fine; much of the time I don't use the desktop at all so if the mobile side will carry on regardless and it is one more step on start up to get the desktop to work then so be it, it's probably more secure that way in any case.

Thanks for reading, please ignore if too far off topic.

Heh yes no idea why you'd want to do this.
I suspect your Pi may be running out of memory, there was some talk on the forum that Chromium has been using a lot more memory on the later builds when enabled for a local display which would be a Chromium issue that may or may not be ongoing. Running a DE as well maybe too much.

Still there's no reason to be running a DE on Moode, usually as soon as someone says they're using VNC to access something not on MS Windows it's a sign that we're entering an XY Problem, an overcomplicated approach to a simple problem.
For example you could use Moode's Bluetooth renderer for sending BBC Sounds and Bandcamp, it's not as if these are high quality sources so you're not gaining anything by avoiding Bluetooth.

[weaver]

Firstly - I am well aware that this is outside of a standard install and as such is not necessarily within the scope of this forum but am posting it in case anyone has experienced anything similar or knows of a likely reason why this should happen.

I have always used moOde headless but with a desktop installed which I use via VNC - basically to give me access to a browser on the Pi and the ability to play catch up services (eg BBC Sounds) and sites such as Bandcamp directly from the Pi, and this has worked well on a couple of 3B+ units and an Allo USBridge Sig. up to moOde 7.

Having tried both in place updates and a couple of clean installs of 7.1 there is a point at which proceeding with this set-up stops the moOde UI from working, ie. won't load at all or stays frozen.

Having gone through a step by step process the sticking point appears to be trying to auto-login to a Pi desktop GUI. If I revert to boot to desktop with a login prompt then both the desktop and the moOde UI on iOS and Android are fine. If I switch to auto-login on boot the Pi side is fine (and I can SSH into moOde) but the mobile UI doesn't load.

I'm hoping there is a relatively simple answer like it just being a security conflict and don't expect anyone to spend any time trying to trouble shoot it for me. If it simply means that I now need to manually log-in on start up then that's fine; much of the time I don't use the desktop at all so if the mobile side will carry on regardless and it is one more step on start up to get the desktop to work then so be it, it's probably more secure that way in any case.

Thanks for reading, please ignore if too far off topic.

Heh yes no idea why you'd want to do this.
I suspect your Pi may be running out of memory, there was some talk on the forum that Chromium has been using a lot more memory on the later builds when enabled for a local display which would be a Chromium issue that may or may not be ongoing. Running a DE as well maybe too much.

Still there's no reason to be running a DE on Moode, usually as soon as someone says they're using VNC to access something not on MS Windows it's a sign that we're entering an XY Problem, an overcomplicated approach to a simple problem.
For example you could use Moode's Bluetooth renderer for sending BBC Sounds and Bandcamp, it's not as if these are high quality sources so you're not gaining anything by avoiding Bluetooth.

Thank you. I have read of the memory issues and that may yet be the case, I found it odd that logging on to the DE manually worked whereas letting the Pi do it automatically didn't.
As to Bluetooth, yes I have used this function (though off the top of my head I can't remember whether the USBridge Sig has Bluetooth, I know it needs an extra dongle for wifi) however, I find BBC Sounds and even more so Bandcamp much easier to use in a full size browser window (on PC) rather than their respective apps.
It may also just be an age thing and what I find most comfortable to interact with based on past usage.

[vinnn]

OK, however even if you don't have Bluetooth and you really feel the need to run a web browser on the Pi and access it from a PC you don't need to run a DE or use VNC to that.
You can use X11 forwarding to ssh in and run the pre-installed browser as if it's on your PC's desktop. You haven't said what OS is on your PC so I'm guessing Windows, thus you could use PuTTY and XMing to do this. No DE needed.
But I will say using Bluetooth would be a more convenient way to acheive what you're trying to do.

[weaver]

OK, however even if you don't have Bluetooth and you really feel the need to run a web browser on the Pi and access it from a PC you don't need to run a DE or use VNC to that.
You can use X11 forwarding to ssh in and run the pre-installed browser as if it's on your PC's desktop. You haven't said what OS is on your PC so I'm guessing Windows, thus you could use PuTTY and XMing to do this. No DE needed.
But I will say using Bluetooth would be a more convenient way to acheive what you're trying to do.

Didn't know that, thank you. Use PuTTY already but not XMing. Yes PC is W10.

Is it fairly obvious how XMing works in this context? I will have a look later but just want an idea of what the learning curve will be. I found PuTTy straightforward having never known of its existence before.

Edit: Just to add that my PC does not have Bluetooth, yes I could add it (hardware), but that is why I refer to Bluetooth having to be from a phone.

[vinnn]

Yes so the X display server is how most Linux (and Unix) systems handle graphical displays, a graphical application renders to the display server which outputs to a display driver/device.
XMing is an X server for Windows, so you can run a X graphical application and it'll render on your Windows desktop.

X11 forwarding is generally when you run a graphical application and have it send it's X11 protocol to a remote X server over a network, but in this case we can tunnel X11 through SSH.
So for example you can use PuTTY to SSH to to your Pi, run a graphical application in the terminal and it'll pop up on your Windows desktop.
You can also use XMing's Xlaunch program to create a launcher without using the terminal but I've never used that successfully.

... but an example for you, here's a screenshot of running the chromium browser on the Pi from a PuTTY terminal, rendering to the X server on a Windows desktop.
   
... and xeyes for good measure...
   

Once XMing is running on your PC and you enable X11 forwarding in your PuTTY session you should be OK.
       

No DE and no VNC required.

[weaver]

Yes so the X display server is how most Linux (and Unix) systems handle graphical displays, a graphical application renders to the display server which outputs to a display driver/device.
XMing is an X server for Windows, so you can run a X graphical application and it'll render on your Windows desktop.

X11 forwarding is generally when you run a graphical application and have it send it's X11 protocol to a remote X server over a network, but in this case we can tunnel X11 through SSH.
So for example you can use PuTTY to SSH to to your Pi, run a graphical application in the terminal and it'll pop up on your Windows desktop.
You can also use XMing's Xlaunch program to create a launcher without using the terminal but I've never used that successfully.

... but an example for you, here's a screenshot of running the chromium browser on the Pi from a PuTTY terminal, rendering to the X server on a Windows desktop.

... and xeyes for good measure...


Once XMing is running on your PC and you enable X11 forwarding in your PuTTY session you should be OK.



No DE and no VLC required.

Thanks for that, got it all working (on a Pi that does also have a DE installed). Next thing to try will be a bare moOde install with just PuTTY/XMing. So far so good.

[weaver]

Update: have now updated two separate Pi systems so have a bit more on what works.
Over the years I have ended up with fairly full-featured desktop environments on a moOde install - RPD, LXDE & PIXEL, I think it was RPD on the Pi that was stopping the moOde UI from working after the 7.1 update. Although the XMing/PuTTY option works fine it is a little more prone to freezing and a bit less responsive than the VNC option so I wanted to have another go at that.

On a fresh install of 7.1 instead of going down the bigger desktop environment route I enabled VNC and for 'boot into GUI' went with the Pi suggestion (LightDM I think) - and it works fine.
This gives me the option of running JRiver as well as moOde so that for editing tasks: tags, cover art, artist name edits etc. I can do everything on the Pi rather than having to use a separate machine for this purpose. (The music files are on an SSD attached to the Pi so it is a totally self-contained player).

A further question though: sound played from a browser on the Pi isn't routed via moOde/MPD as far as I can tell, using ALSA I guess. Is it possible to change this, to use moOde for other sounds originating on the Pi?