A few days ago I’ve (finally) received my first C.H.I.P.. This is the first 9 dollars microcomputer with a 1Gzh R8 ARM CPU, 512Mb of RAM, 4Gb of on-board space and it includes Wireless B/G/N and Bluetooth 4.0.
All in all for that price, I have to admit that it’s a good, all purpose machine that you can easily use for your experiments and to learn new possibilities in computing.
So the first thing I wanted to test is how this little machine would be able to stream GTK applications over the network using the Broadway back-end available in GTK+.
After flashing Debian Jessie on it (that comes without and window manager), I had to compile GTK+ with the Broadway backend enabled (this is now standard in most i386 and amd64 distribution, but not in ARM ones), following the compiling instructions on the GTK+ page.
So after logging into your C.H.I.P. you need to install the dependencies – some of them are already packaged in the right version, while you will have to compile others:
sudo apt-get install pkg-config make autoconf2.13 libtool zlib1g-dev libffi-dev gettext libfam-dev libpackagekit-glib2-dev libgtk2.0-dev python2.7-dev gtk-doc-tools libglib2.0-dev gir1.2-glib-2.0 libtiff5-dev flex bison python-dev libcairo2-dev libepoxy-dev libatk-bridge2.0-dev vim libgirepository1.0-dev unzip
then you will need to install GLIB:
cd ~
wget http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/glib/2.46/glib-2.46.2.tar.xz
tar xvfJ glib-2.46.2.tar.xz
cd glib-2.46.2
./autogen.sh
./configure
Now you need to find the path for giving the CFLAGS to make:
pkg-config --cflags glib-2.0
the path that will be shown will have to be used as the example below:
make CFLAGS='-I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/glib-2.0/include'
make install
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib/:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig"
Now it’s time to compile pango, gobject-introspection, gdk-pixbuf, atk and finally GTK+
cd ~
wget http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/pango/1.38/pango-1.38.1.tar.xz
tar xvfJ pango-1.38.1.tar.xz
cd pango-1.38.1
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install
cd ~
wget http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gobject-introspection/1.46/gobject-introspection-1.46.0.tar.xz
tar xvfJ gobject-introspection-1.46.0.tar.xz
cd gobject-introspection-1.46.0
./configure
make
make install
cd ~
wget http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gdk-pixbuf/2.32/gdk-pixbuf-2.32.3.tar.xz
tar xvfJ gdk-pixbuf-2.32.3.tar.xz
cd gdk-pixbuf-2.32.3
./configure
make
make install
cd ~
wget http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/atk/2.18/atk-2.18.0.tar.xz
tar xvfJ atk-2.18.0.tar.xz
cd atk-2.18.0
./configure
make
make install
cd ~
wget http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gtk+/3.18/gtk+-3.18.6.tar.xz
tar xvfJ gtk+-3.18.6.tar.xz
cd gtk+-3.18.6
./autogen.sh --enable-broadway-backend --enable-x11-backend
./configure --enable-broadway-backend --enable-x11-backend
make
make install
The time to test the result of our creature has come:
first of all enable the broadwayd deamon server and choose the port and screen to use:
broadwayd -p 8080 :2 &
export GDK_BACKEND=broadway
export BROADWAY_DISPLAY=:2
Finally, install a GTK application like shotwell, gedit or galculator
sudo apt-get install gedit galculator shotwell
and launch one of them…
gedit
From another machine, now you can fire your browser and point to the address http://ipofyourc.h.i.p:8080
and use your application running remotely from your browser.
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