Nature is healing: Shhh. It's a lesser spotted Pi Bork nesting behind the bushes at IKEA
- Reference: 1621943053
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/05/25/bork/
- Source link:
[1]
Lo! The Flat Pack Of My West Midlands Homeland
Spotted by a Register reader in the Wednesbury branch of the flatpack fetishist, the screen tucked away behind the inexplicable fake foliage looks to be showing signs of a Raspberry Pi in distress.
We'll leave it to better brains than ours to work out the version of the software and hardware on show, but it looks like the diminutive computer has tumbled into emergency mode.
[2]
Close-up
We're not completely sure what has caused the borkage; certainly our experience with emergency mode occurred when our Pi took great exception to the removal of an external storage device. It required [3]some tinkering with the fstab on the SD card to remove the offending bit of kit (arguably our fault for fiddling with it in the first place.) A swift bit of commenting later, and all was well in the Pi world.
[4]Déjà bork: BSOD fairy pays key-cutting kiosk another visit
[5]Another platform on which Java will not run – platform 1 of Newcastle's Central Station
[6]For the marketeer that has everything – except a CPU fan
[7]Börk returns to its spiritual home of Sweden as duff disks take down Stockholm signage
[8]Half-metre pizza or an upgrade from Windows 7? We know what we'd choose
[9]We've finally hit Peak Bork: Microsoft man reveals home-grown welcome back BSOD at Redmond HQ
[10]Nestled between donuts and gingerbread creations lurks the Windows 7 EOS fairy
This may be at the root of the IKEA borkage, although quite why the furniture and household gubbins vendor would need more than a standard SD card is beyond us. Those with better eyes than us are welcome to deposit their thoughts in the comments section below.
Still, after seeing digital signage being run on ridiculously over-specified hardware, we're happy to note this is a more sensible bit of kit serving up ads for meatballs and Daim bars. We imagine that pretty much anything one wants to do in digital signage using Windows can be done equally well on the Linux-based Pi.
Including, we're sad to say, falling over in a very public place. ®
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[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/05/24/bork6.jpg
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/05/24/ikea_pi_closeup.jpg
[3] https://www.clarkle.com/notes/emergecy-mode-bad-fstab/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/18/bork/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/11/bork/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/14/bork/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/30/bork/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/27/bork/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/23/bork/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/07/bork/
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
You mean with the dual video outputs on the Pi4?
Or you mean driving a video wall?
I imagine that's pretty niche for any OS... and isn't really digital signage any more.
Given the bulk of digital signage will be one computer driving one screen, a RPi should be perfect.
Once you get to big (multi screen) or large pixel for the side of a building, then these setups are so expensive that the cost of the computer driving it is not a factor any more.
My wife uses tons of Pi 3 running screenly for digital signage.
The only failures they tend to have are
1)SD card failure (eventually they all succumb)
2)Overheating die to some stupid installation spots
3)Cables getting pulled by cleaners etc.
The great thing is that they are cheap enough to have spares and you can be back up and running in 15 minutes
Not quite screenage, I use them for security cams and the SD card failure can be completely avoided by booting into a read-only system. Its a bit of a faff but she might want to consider it if it is becoming an issue.
I have a tutorial for OpenBSD here: http://thamessoftware.co.uk/openbsd_readonly.html
I use OpenBSD on the Pi because I am more familiar with it but I am sure similar can be done with Raspbian / Pi OS.
As for overheating, perhaps just polling the temperature, set a flag, reboot and sleep for a bit before resuming if it gets above a threshold.
Though a Raspberry Pi 1 or 2 could help with the heat issues and for signage could still be fast enough.
That's a good shout BUT the paid for version has got a black box approach to the OS. Entirely managed via a webUI so I am not sure if this is an option - I'll look into it. There is a free version where you have more control but no support but, as I recall, her employer preferred the paid for version. Pi 3b only supported version at the time
The overheating was one sitting on top of a polystyrene floor tile with some type of insulation blanket over the top. In free air they are fine :-)
Can you black box the OS off either the network or a USB drive for the more recent versions which support said boot modes directly?
Read-only f/s on a Pi with Linux
It used to be more of a faff to set up, but Adafruit have made a script to make the Pi's filesystem read-only:
https://learn.adafruit.com/read-only-raspberry-pi/
which should hopefully reduce the risk of card corruption on surprise power removal.
Börkäge
If you are going to write fake Swedish, remember the only non-seven-bit-ASCII characters it uses are ä, ö and å. The æ and ø appear only in Danish and Norwegian (in them they substitute for ä and ö, respectively).
Bork
Presumably, whoever installed it, never looked at the instructions and had some bits left over that were thrown away.
Re: Bork
Surely said bits were put in a drawer to never be thrown away no matter how many times SWMBO asks you to even though their purpose is long forgotten and the original item they came with was disposed of ages ago.
Halp, I am stück în ëmërgëncy mødë
Hälp, I am stuck in emörgäncy måde
TFIFY
Halp, I am stück în ëmërgëncy mødë
Reminds me [1]that one
[1] http://www.yoxi.net/anitya/asterix-vikings.jpg
That looks like Fädöra
From what I can read:
- Starting File System Check on /dev/disk/bla-bla-bla
- Starting Flash Journal to Persistent Storage ...
- Started Show Plymouth Boot Screen ...
[ ... ]
- Reached Target Local File System ...
[ ... ]
- Reached Target Network ...
And something about type journalctl -xb to view system logs ...
I see systemd is fully in control ...
Re: That looks like Fädöra
Looks like you have too much time on your hands :)
Minimal model....
With 4 Raspberries at the top, it's at least a Pi2B, though a Pi3A+ is also possible.
There was a time that Pi A+ boards practically disappeared because the East Asian "smart display" makers discovered that an A+ was adequaute to the task and really cheap ($20).
"We imagine that pretty much anything one wants to do in digital signage using Windows can be done equally well on the Linux-based Pi."
Until you want to run multiscreen video. But your point is valid in most cases.