Adventures in Pi Land Part Two

In the first part of this blog we looked at the initial setup of the Raspberry Pi. In this one we'll look first at building and running Fuse Fabric, followed by vert.x. So first Fabric and before I go on it's worth mentioning that this is still not complete and I need to check with the team in the new year to figure get more details on the problems, which could very well be due to my setup on the Pi.

Initially we had 256 Meg of swap and with maven2 installed the Fabric build docs tell us to use the m2 profile option (and the right MAVEN_OPTS). Unfortunately the initial build attempt failed with maven2, so I installed maven 3.0.4 which gets us a little further:


[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-surefire-plugin:2.12:test (default-test) on project archetype-builder: Error while executing forked tests.; nested exception is java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "/bin/sh" (in directory "/home/pi/fusesource/fuse/tooling/archetype-builder"): java.io.IOException: error=12, Cannot allocate memory -> [Help 1]

So we increase swap to 1024 Meg by again editing the /etc/dphys-swapfile as mentioned before. This helped, but even with these options, the Pi crashed after about 6 hours of building. (Yes, the Pi crashed!) And as you can see from the screen shot, prior to this Java was taking up a lot of the processor time.

And if not Java, then writing to swap:

After playing with more configuration parameters (with failures 6+ hours later) and ordering a faster SD card (which has not turned up at the time of writing), I decided to try the the latest official binary of Fabric from the download site (fuse-fabric-7.0.1.fuse-084) - no point struggling to get it to build if it won't run anyway. Working through the Getting Started tutorial did not produce the expected output, which needs investigation once I get back to work and can talk with the team. For instance, when trying to use camel ...

And over 7 minutes later the same command gave:

And running top showed the processes were fairly idle:

I spent a few more hours trying other options, but nothing really seemed to make a difference or indicate whether the issues were with the Pi or elsewhere. But I still consider this a success, since I learnt a few things more about the capabilities and limitations of the Pi that I hadn't before, as well as about Fabric (which was the original project I had set myself). And I will return to this and see it through the completion soon.

So onwards to vert.x. Initially I decided not to build the latest source, but to just see if the official binary would run. Now vert.x requires JDK 7, so we need to download and that from Oracle. Next, downloading and installing vert.x-1.3.0.final and following the installation guide brings us to:

Success! It took over a minute for the server.js example to initialise (since I'm connecting remotely to the Pi, I changed localhost to the actual IP address). But HelloWorld eventually worked.

We're on a roll here! Next we moved on to the JavaScript Web Application Tutorial - I want to test as much of vert.x as possible and implicitly the Raspberry Pi's boundaries. This tutorial needs MongoDB. Unfortunately you can't just install the Linux distribution version as it's not suitable for the Pi. I looked around to see if there was a build I could get elsewhere and found one, but unfortunately that needs the hardware floating point version of Wheezy, which we can't use if we are using Java 6 or 7.

Someone said that you can build an older version of MongoDB from source which I tried. To do this I made sure we were still working with 1024 Meg of swap. But unfortunately after about 10 hours, the build failed:

Fortunately a little digging around found a couple of other options and I went with the first, i.e., http://mongopi.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/installation/. Still with 1024 Meg of swap, after 12 hours of building and similarly for installation, I ended up with a running version of MongoDB on the Raspberry Pi!

I was then able to progress through the example, but still had a few failures due to incorrect module versions mentioned in the walkthrough. Thanks to Tim for giving the right numbers and he's going to update the pages asap. There are still a few niggles with the example failing during authentication, but I can live with them for now and will get to the bottom of them eventually.

But what about building vert.x from scratch on the Pi? Well that was a lot easier than I had thought given everything else that's happened so far. Building vert.x head from source and getting Jython 2.5.2,  we initially get an error:

But if you use the nightly build of gradle:

Which eventually results in ...

Success again!

So what does all of this mean? Well apart from the obvious areas where I still need to see success, I think it's been a great exercise in learning more about the Pi. I've also learnt a lot more about the various projects I wanted to play with this festive season. I'm happy, even if it did take quite a few more days to do than I expected originally!

Adventures in Pi Land Part One

Over this Christmas vacation I set myself a number of pet projects that I'd normally not have time to do during the rest of the year. Over the last 6 months or so I've been playing with the Raspberry Pi, but not really pushing it a lot - more a case of playing around with it. So I decided that I'd try and make all of my projects over Christmas relate to the Pi in one way or another. This blog and the follow up, will relate what happened.

OK, so before we really get going it's worth looking at the Pi setup. In keeping with its background, setting up the Pi is pretty simple and you can find details in a number of places including the official Pi site. But I'll include my configuration here for completeness. First, I've been using one of the original Model B instances, i.e., one with 256 Meg of memory and not the newly updated version with 512 Meg. As a result, if you've got a newer version then you may be able to tweak a few settings, such as the swap space.

Because I'm playing with JDK 6 and 7, I used the soft-float variant of Wheezy. After burning that to an SD card, remember to use rasp-config to get back the entire disk space, or you'll find an 8Gig SD card only appears to have a few hundred Meg free! And don't forget to use the right kind of SD card - faster is better. I run my Pi headless (no free monitor or keyboard these days), so initially I had it connected to my router via an ethernet cable and then immediately configured wifi. How you do this will depend upon the wifi adapter you use, but I'm happy with the Edimax EW-7811Un and you can get information about how to update the kernel with the right driver from a number of places.

Once wifi was up and going, I changed swap size for the Pi. In the past this wasn't an issue, but then I hadn't been about to build Arjuna, Fuse, vert.x and MongoDb! You can modify swap by editing /etc/dphys-swapfile and then running /etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile stop followed by /etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile start. Initially I started off with 256 Meg of swap, but as you'll see later, this wasn't always sufficient! Finally let's start by adding openjdk 6 (sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jdk) followed by git and maven (sudo apt-get install maven2 git).

So this brings us to a base from which we can proceed with the real projects. The first one, which was building Arjuna/JBossTS/Narayana, was pretty straightforward compared to the others and has been documented elsewhere. Which means in the next instalment we'll look Fuse Fabric, vert.x and because of that project, MongoDB.

Thunderbirds are go!

Over the year a number of people who were influential in my life have died. So it's with great sadness that I just heard that Gerry Andersen passed away today! Growing up in the later 60's and early 70's, programs such as Space 1999, Thunderbirds, Joe 90, Stingray and Captain Scarlet were the height of TV watching for kids. Each episode was an event, probably on the same scale as blockbuster films are today for kids. Having two children growing up over the past 2 decades, I can say that I've had to watch quite a lot of children's TV in the 90's and beyond, and yet none of them seem to have been as influential on my kids or their friends as Gerry Andersen's various efforts had on us.

Some kids watching them today may laugh at the special effects or the "wooden" acting, but I think that's due to the expectations that films like Lord of the Rings or Avatar have set. But relatively speaking, Gerry was the king of his era and those programs will live on in the memories of many people, myself included. It's truly a sad day. And I can't think of a more fitting way to say thank you and honour that memory than to watch my boxset of Stingray!

A busy busy year

I'm on holiday and for the first time in about 6 months I have some time to reflect on the past year. And one word sums it up: busy. One way or another work has been tying me up, flying me around, or just consuming my energy. Fortunately I love my work, or I'm sure I'd have suffered a lot more stress than I have. Most of the time work presents problems that I have to solve, and throughout my life I've loved problem solving! And the people I work with are great and friendly too, which helps a lot.

Now what got me to reflecting on the past year was simply when I took a look at what I've blogged about here over the last 12 months. It's not a lot, compared to previous years and yet I had thought it was much more. However, when you take into account the blogs I write on JBoss.org and other articles I write, such as for InfoQ, it starts to make sense. And of course there's twitter: despite my initial reservations about using it, I think this year has been the one where I've really put a lot more effort into being there and tracking what others are saying and doing. I believe there's a correlation between the amount I've tweeted and the reducing in the blogging I've done, at least here.

So what about 2013? Well I've deliberately tried not to think that far ahead, but I already know it promises to be as busy as 2012. Bring it on!

Farewell Kohei

I was shocked earlier this week when I found out that Kohei Honda passed away suddenly. I've known Kohei personally for a few years but longer in terms of his influence on the field of distributed systems. The work that we've been doing around Savara, WS-Choreography, Pi Calculus and beyond, has been better for his involvement. We were talking about new bodies of collaborative work only in the last few weeks, which makes his death even more shocking and personal. He will be missed and my best wishes go out to his family and his other friends and colleagues.

Farewell Sir Patrick Moore

I haven't blogged for a while because I haven't really had time or the inclination to do so. However, when I saw that Sir Patrick Moore has just died I couldn't help put fingers to keyboard! As a child growing up in the 70's, The Sky At Night was a wonderful program to follow. Not only was this the Space Age, but science fiction was rich and influential as a result, as well as the fact that in the UK we had just 2 TV channels to choose from (both of which started in the morning and ended in the late evenings). Way before Star Wars, Close Encounters etc. this small program hidden away at night on the BBC was my view screen into the much larger universe beyond my four walled world. And Patrick Moore was the epitome of the scientists who were pushing back the curtain to reveal the secrets beyond.

To say that The Sky At Night and it's presenter influenced me would be a bit like saying that the air around us influences us: both were pivotal when I was in my most formative years and I know many people who were similarly impacted by them. So it is with great sadness that I heard of his death; my condolences go out to his family and friends. And maybe tonight I'll get my telescope out and think of him and that time over 35 years ago when he captured my attention and helped shape me in some small way. Thank you Sir Patrick, you will be sorely missed!