So, i just got enough time to experiment with uConsole, and built this.
Pre-installed apps:
box86/64 (and wine stable 8.0.0.0)
retroarch (and tutorial how to add cores)
waydroid (with google play)
pi-apps
minecraft pi
Other things:
overclock (disabled by default)
chromium dark theme
more ram app from pi-apps
Also, i tried installing wayfire config manager, but it breaks system packages and kills the system
LINK: Google Drive
If you find bugs to fix or ideas to implement, write them below
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I thought I’d give this a shot.
Using Raspberry Pi imager, it didn’t want to flash the .gz this time but did when I extracted it to the .img. I tried to use the Raspberry Pi Imager customization settings but that didn’t work. It just powers up, turns on the backlight for the LCD seconds, then powers down.
The second successful boot drew the desktop and added some icons before rebooting again but I am accustomed to a Pi rebooting repeatedly before giving me a desktop. Yay!
SSH and VNC aren’t enabled on default, but that was as simple as a raspi-config. VNC has the same annoying “image is correct but mouse is rotated” bug that has been part of Raspberry Pi OS for a while and has something to do with wayland.
I am absolutely going to try some retro emulation and do more poking around and provide feedback. Thanks!
There’s a fix for the VNC rotation thing. You’re correct, it’s a problem with wayland. I was annoyed with it enough that I went down a deep rabbit hole of research a while back, and found there’s a fix for it. There’s not much useful info out there about it, except plenty of other people encountering the same problem and hoping for a fix. Even more frustrating, it’s known by the maintainers and it’s not even considered an issue, so it’s unlikely it will ever be fixed officially. On a positive note, all it takes is a simple config file edit.
Details and links in this post:
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You are my hero, and you’re right that the rabbit holes are deep! I tried so many things and never found this VNC solution. We need to fix the SEO on this one:
adcockm fixed the screen rotation VNC thing on raspberry pi!
VNC rotation for 720x1280 fix!
Fix for weyland VNC rotation problem on clockwork pi devterm and uconsole!
I hope more people find this and save themselves from having to dig up a second mouse like I did.
As for the image: It’s lightweight but the preinstalled stuff is fun.Retroarch launches to an unusably small UI but, with reading glasses, I can find my way to make it fullscreen. Sadly that doesn’t persist through reboots. Other normal things can be fixed on one raspi-config run: network, password, remote access, locales, time zone, etc.
I am going to dig deeper in box86 because I want to play some of the first games I ever played as a young child: Sierra games, Wizardry, Eye of the Beholder, Bard’s Tale, and OG SimCity and Civilization. I have them through an eXoDOS collection but never figured out how to get that to work.
Thanks, both of you.
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I updated the image, now it has ssh on by default and that vnc fix. Link from root post now leads to new version (didn’t update changelogs because i can edit my posts once, which i did yesterday). Anything else to add/fix?
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Thanks! I JUST installed it again and appreciate that it gave the security warning that the pi user and password default were enabled.
I love that the VNC fix works out of the box, and I hope everyone who does a new image incorporates it. The screen is too small for my initial setup tasks, but VNC allows me to do anything I need.
I’ll play with it and come back with a review. My first goal is to get my old DOS games working.
Thanks to you for giving feedback! To make retroarch start in fullscreen, do these:
start retroarch
press these buttons:
right - down - enter - down - enter - enter
For DOS games, i recommend using DosBox. I’ll include it in next update on google drive in 20 hours - it’s night time in my country
I am still playing around but before I forget:
Editing retroarch.desktop to include this line defaults it to fullscreen so it’s readable:
Exec=retroarch -f
Update: added DosBox and now retroarch starts in fullscreen by default
I feel like you’re making an image tailored to me (or that I am your beta customer!)
Can I do anything to help you in return?
I’m just trying to create an image that can be just flashed to cm4, connected to wifi and start working/gaming/whatever, without fixing bugs and compiling software. Also, i want the image to have all the apps people ask for, and it’s tailored to all of these people. But for now, you are the only one to give feedback and feature requests, so i think it is tailored to you? Anyway, no need to do anything in return, i just like creating this image and making people happy
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Some notes on your image to help make it better.
- compress the image using xz so you can flash the image without decompressing
- change the name to relay more info of what the image is
- since it’s built off my bookworm image you should clone the pi-gen repo from my GitHub and build the image from scratch with the apps you wanna add
- image will be cleaner and have first boot user/local setup
- don’t have ssh turned on by default if using the default pi username/password
All in all good start. If you need any help, if you wanna go the pi-gen route feel free to ask.
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Wow, thanks for the ideas! I can’t edit my posts more then once for now, so i don’t think i can replace current link with link to .xz version for now. I’ve never heard about pi-gen before, so i’ll try to learn how to use it next week (not sure if it’s possible to create waydroid instance that works from the box this way, but i’ll try)
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You can run scripts and add files during the build process. Should be trivial to add waydroid and everything else to the build.
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Still enjoying this as my default daily build, btw. I got SDR++ running last week and I’ll try to get my old DOS/earlyWindows games emulated soon.
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Seems like things have changed again. I haven’t updated, and I’m not planning to until the Raspberry Pi folks figure it out and things settle down. But I’m assuming since they dropped wayfire and switched to labwc, the VNC rotation fix will no longer be needed. Since I haven’t updated, I’m not sure if labwc will just work for VNC or if some other fix is needed. Rex’s image will be configured properly for general use, but there’s at least a small chance VNC might have issues since I don’t know whether labwc works well with it or not. The “few small problems with the new compositor” is the reason I’m waiting to update. Hopefully it just means everything works and no VNC fix is needed, but for the moment I’m not going to update to find out. 
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I saw that. I ran an apt upgrade and the first instant result was a rotated image on my main display. 
I just switched back to Wayfire for now.
Well, i failed to create a new version using pi-gen. Just couldn’t get box86/64 to compile, pi-apps won’t install and i haven’t even tried installing waydroid. I’ll try more, but this is gonna take a lot of time