Archived Forum

Hi Paul, 

Thanks for looking into this, yes it's important we stay current and support Jessie. Do you know if there are any performance improvements? Do you think we should bite the bullet sooner rather than later and release the new pre-built SD card we're currently working on with Emoncms V9 with Jessie built from fresh?         

Reading the RasPi blog (https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspbian-jessie-is-here/) it seems Jessie will boot into GUI by default. We will want to turn this off and remove all unwanted packages. I started making a script to remove unwanted packages from Wheezy https://github.com/openenergymonitor/emonpi/blob/master/raspbian_slimdown.sh. 

We might also need to increase our SD card size, I'm guessing jessie will be large than wheezy. A 4GB might be pushing it if we want to keep a reasonable sized data partition.

I won't comment on the distributions as I am not in the loop WRT RPi stuff, but SD cards are so cheap now that the price differential between 2/4/8/16GB are minimal. Even 32GB is reasonable in a non-manufacturing volume context and most of us can easily pay the £12 retail for those.

I would suggest jumping to an upper bound based on the price point you need to attain.

It seems the "getty" part of the serial console configuration previously handled by inittab is now  handled by a service automatically depending on the cmdline.txt so the original instruction stands for the cmdline.txt part and it would seem no further action is required beyond a reboot, so possible a "not required for Jessie" label to the inittab part would suffice.

Personally I have to question jessie's stability at the moment as it has been a very long time coming (suggests issues) and the raspberry pi foundation are not embracing the jump yet, they are still offering both wheezy and jessie. I have had a problem with an intermittent booting issue, in my debugging I have worked my way back to a bare jessie image (downloaded more than once), tried different Pi's and SDcards, via shh and screen/keyboard with no difference so it must be an issue within the image.

Most of the changes relate to the desktop/gui etc (and games) there are new graphical java and python tools and office applications which will not be of use if you strip out the gui stuff, The main under the cover changes seem to be systemd which doesn't have a huge impact, so unless you keep the gui stuff it would seem little to gain and may better to wait until the wrinkles are ironed out abit.

Paul

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/page/2/?fish#raspbian-jessie-is-here

We might also need to increase our SD card size, I'm guessing jessie will be large than wheezy. A 4GB might be pushing it if we want to keep a reasonable sized data partition.

We will want to turn this off and remove all unwanted packages.

Hi Glyn,

Yes, definitely. I installed Debian Jessie last night, and had to put it on an 8 GB card, as the distro from the Raspbery Pi site woudln't fit on a 4 GB card.

I tend to think that users will probably want to start off with the latest operating system, to future proof their installation (especially as updating from Wheezy to Jessie is not recommended), and hope that any OS bugs will be addressed in due course. Hopefully with the number of RP's out there, the pressure will be on to resolve any issues swiftly.

Thinking for a way forward, does this approach sound reasonable;

1) Make it clear in the RPi 'git' installation guide that it applies to Wheezy (and not Jessie), and that Wheezy is the current stable recommended OS for emoncms.

2) Anyone however wishing to install emoncms in Jessie can do so via the guide - here, which is a work in progress and where we can address any issues reported in the forum. In it's current form, I have two RPi's installed - one full-write & one low-write - both working well.

3) You may consider putting the v9.0 image on ice for a few weeks until we get further feedback about Jessie, and then release a v9.0 Jessie image instead of two changes in quick succession.

As regards SD card size; a standard full Jessie installation + emoncms (no data) on a 8Gb card;

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root       7.0G  3.3G  3.4G  50% /
devtmpfs      214M     0   214M   0% /dev
tmpfs           218M     0   218M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           218M  4.5M  213M   3% /run
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           218M     0   218M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1   56M    20M   37M  36% /boot
tmpfs            44M     0    44M   0% /run/user/1000

@Paul - Thanks re the inittab advice

Paul

That sounds reasonable to me. It's never a good idea to jump immediately, but there's a tricky decision when judging where the crossover is between the new version being stable enough and being seen to be left behind.

the raspberry pi foundation are not embracing the jump yet, they are still offering both wheezy and jessie.

I wonder how much of that might be because of systemd.

A search reveals a lot of users on both sides of the systemd/sysvinit fence.

It's gone so far as a fork of Debian that eschews systemd for sysvinit. (Devuan - pronounced DevOne)

https://devuan.org/

I agree it would be wise to stick with "wheezy" being the currently recommended OS, I know there is always an eagerness to get the latest, "wheezy" is going to be around for a long time yet and there is no rush to make the jump since it offers very little gain (with disabled gui/desktop) and there is a potential that an issue or "jessie" specific dev will detract from the current moves to reunite all emoncms users to a single version.

Whilst the emoncms dev is active it would seem a good idea to continue that momentum on wheezy and maybe some keen "jessie" fans could test the water before updating a v9 image down the line, if the v9 on wheezy dev and rollout has gone well the "jessie only" rollout at any time could/should be just a new SDcard image with a copy of the existing data partition, which could be backed up to a usb stick before overwriting the SDcard or copied directly from the old SDcard in a usb card reader.

The "switch" to jessie should be painless if everything is tried and tested on wheezy 1st, there are many changes involved so staggering is the wiser option, the emoncms changes are needed, wanted and in progress so it could make more sense to put jessie "on ice for now" and not force users into the un-chartered waters of jessie, either because that's the only/latest image or to bring features & fixes to pre v9 emoncms's.

Paul

Hi guys, 

I've been giving Jessie a twirl here today. 

All seems to be going well so far, I've created the third /data partition and enabled read-only mode. I'm about to inistall emoncms (I'll follow your guide paul :-) )Couple of things I found so far I can contriburte.

Stop X booting (frees 85,396KiB RAM)
$ sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target

Fix "Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain" errors in dmesg caused by WIFi adapter (https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=122067)
$ sudo apt-get install wireless-regdb iw crda

Enable /dev/ttyAMA0 serial port by disabling serial getty service (https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=123081)
$ sudo systemctl stop serial-getty@ttyAMA0.service
$ sudo systemctl disable serial-getty@ttyAMA0.service

edit /boot/cmdline.txt to remove /dev/ttyAMA0

$ sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt

@Glyn
The git 'pull request' that I made yesterday contains an edit to the mqtt_input init script which needs to be used with Jessie, otherwise MQTT will not run.

Paul

The Raspbian Jessie installation guide has now been merged into the emoncms git repo, together with a few updates and additional guides.

Rapbian Wheezy is still the tried & tested recommended operating system for emoncms, but anyone wishing to check out Jessie can do so from this guide.

Any feedback about Jessie installations would be appreciated.

Paul

Hi Paul,

I am new to OEM but have been lurking for a while.

I spent all of last weekend trying to get emoncms working on Jessie and had not realised that I should have been using wheezy, until I saw this thread late last week.  I don't think my time was lost as I learnt heaps about emoncms and linux in the process.

I will try to make some time to make a fresh start tomorrow with Jessie following your instructions and then give you some feedback.

Cheers,

Mike

. 

Paul, the link in your last post gives a 404 page not found from github. Assume you have moved something.

The link url was dead due to branch changes in github. I've updated it now.

Paul

Cheers.

Paul,

I had this error when cloning into emoncms

Cloning into 'emoncms'...
fatal: unable to access 'https://github.com/emoncms/emoncms.git/': Could not resolve host: github.com.

Ran it again and it worked. Maybe a network glitch on my side ??

The URL is correct, must have been a network issue.

Paul

And then I get to 

cd /var/www/emoncms/
 

and emoncms doesn't exist!!

Can't see where it might have been created either. Will keep digging  :-)

I successfully installed emoncms into a fresh minimal install of Jessie following the readme.md that is along with emoncms (plus a couple of commands that I have mentioned elsewhere), so I think the documentation work was successful (only found this thread afterwards!).

Brian

Hi Brian, I'm just following the installation guide Paul linked to above.

Guess I'll have to go back to Go!!

Simon

Brian, Did you use Jessie Lite or Minibian Jessie?
Either way, it's good to hear that the guide is compatible with another version of Jessie.

Paul

Paul, Neither :) I used the https://github.com/debian-pi/raspbian-ua-netinst as it allowed me to install directly to an HDD with a fixed IP address out of the box as it were.

I suggested 2 additional commands in the other thread (that you helped with).

Cheers, Brian

Simon, try;

sudo find / -name "emoncms"

Paul

/var/lib/mysql/emoncms

Assume you'll update the guide.

In that case, you haven't installed emoncms yet.

cd /var/www && git clone https://github.com/emoncms/emoncms.git

'Setting up feeds & processes' needs to be a separate guide, linked within the installation guide - any volunteers?

Paul

Aha - that's the missing step in the guide...

But it isn't - I thought I'd done that.

I'll go back to Go and start again.

EDIT

Here's the copy from my terminal window - seems I did it but no idea what went wrong. However I will start again!!

pi@raspberrypi:/var/www $ cd /var/www && git clone https://github.com/emoncms/emoncms.git
Cloning into 'emoncms'...
remote: Counting objects: 10364, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (17/17), done.
Receiving objects:  99% (10261/10364), 5.26 MiB | 155.00 KiB/s

OK done that.

So this time it obviously finished. Not sure why I got the command prompt back when I did it 1st time and it was only 99% done. I assumed because I had the prompt back that the command had completed. Is this something to do with what thet mention about Jessie and waiting for the network to complete - I think there is a setting for this in preferences. 

Thanks for the help.

pi@raspberrypi:/var/lib/mysql $ cd /var/www && git clone https://github.com/emoncms/emoncms.git
Cloning into 'emoncms'...
remote: Counting objects: 10364, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (17/17), done.
remote: Total 10364 (delta 5), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 10347
Receiving objects: 100% (10364/10364), 5.31 MiB | 156.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (6265/6265), done.
Checking connectivity... done.

Getting late now Paul, but you will be very happy when you re-log on.

I went back to Go and this time everything worked.

i think the issue may have been that emoncms pull that only went to 99%.

Only difference this time was that I selected the wait for network on boot or whatever it was called but that may be a complete red herring...

Anyway - great work - thanks for all your efforts I think I'm back in business!!    :-)

That's good to hear!

Paul

Paul,

Still rebuilding.... Think I'm about there.

One thing you need to do is to change the section about editing cmdline.

I would put the sudo nano /boot etc. above the text that needs to replace what's in the file. Just to keep consistency with the way you have set things out and to prevent people copying the line into the command prompt.

Simon

I'll have a look at that this evening.

Paul

The old V8 instructions also had a section on setting the php timezone.  These still work but they do not specifically say to remove the ';'. You'd have though it obvious but......

there is then a section on installing a logger.  Is that still relevant?

Cheers, Brian

Everything relevant is included in the v9 docs as far as I'm aware.
I'm currently preparing an update to improve low-write resilience, which will be followed by a section on security a short time later.

Paul

Hi Paul, do you mean the php timezone is not important?

Security would be great. I saw on ElReg today an item on free HTTPS certificates from Let's Encrypt. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/03/letsencrypt_public_beta/

I'm getting:

Raspberry Pi B, 32GB SDHC card, expanded partition. Built from 2016-02-09-raspbian-jessie.img following 
https://github.com/emoncms/emoncms/blob/master/docs/RaspberryPi/readme.md

"Cd into the www directory and git clone emoncms:

cd /var/www && git clone -b stable https://github.com/emoncms/emoncms.git"
produced:

pi@raspberrypi: /var/www $ git clone -b stable https://github.com/emoncms/emoncms.git

fatal: could not create work tree dir 'emoncms'.: Permission denied

No obvious typos (in the original) but perhaps someone here can spot what's wrong?

Thanks for reading.
Fred 

Hi Fred,

Did you follow the line above

"First, set the permissions for the www directory:" 

sudo chown $USER /var/www

It looks like you have a permissions error 

https://github.com/emoncms/emoncms/blob/master/docs/RaspberryPi/readme.m...

Thanks Glyn

Following your advice I worked through the code preceding sudo chown $USER /var/www again and succeeded in getting through to the end with emonhub installed on my old experimental Raspberry Pi B running on an external USB drive for data collection.

My error rate is decreasing as I relearn, though the 7 inch display is a trial for my elderly eyes! 

I can't test it of course because I don't have an RFM69Pi so I've ordered an RFM69Pi 433Mhz Raspberry Pi Base Station Receiver Board so that I can test for real. (I don't want to mess with the emonpi you supplied.)

Eventually I want this RPi to act as a data logger and display driver for the system.

Thanks again for your help.

Fred

Great, good to hear. We provide a pre-built Raspberry Pi SD card image with Emoncms pre installed with many optimizations which you are welcome to use to get going as easily as possible. 

You can SSH into the Pi to work on the setup via your main computer, no need to struggle using a small HDMI connected monitor.