Chrome Browser, Mac OS and LaTeX

Oh dear, something's awry with the interaction of LaTeX with the Chrome browser. The latter is not rendering variables in italics as it should. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of part of a post I made to my Mathematics blog. It was taken using the Safari browser and everthing looks fine.

Figure 1

Here's the same screenshot but this time taken within the Chrome browser.

Figure 2

It's not a major issue and everything else still works fine but it's a little annoying as I much prefer the italicised rendering of variables. It only has to do with Chrome on a device running the Mac operating system. The variables display properly on Chrome running on my Raspberry Pi 400 and even on Chrome running on iOS. Hopefully future updates will address this issue.

Chromium Problems on Raspberry Pi OS After Update

After updating my Raspberry Pi OS on my Raspberry Pi 4, I now find that YouTube and YouTubeMusic on Chromium both cause the browser to crash. The Chromium browser is a far cry from the Chrome browser. The former has multiple deficiencies and this latest disaster is further proof of this. Firefox has no such problems so I have been using that browser to launch both programs.

The solution however, proved simple enough following a recommendation from an online forum. Simply reinstall Chromium! A logical enough first step in troubleshooting software problems. Overall the Raspberry Pi 4 that I bought earlier in the year is working well enough for what I need to do. I recently purchases an M1 MacBook Pro 14" for my granddaughter who needed a computer for her University studies. I'd much prefer to be using that of course.

Such a computer does not come cheap however, and in terms of value for money, the Pi wins hands down. The Bluetooth still doesn't work but I have my wired earbuds working despite the inexplicable lack of a direct earphone jack (see earlier post).

Charging Issues

It's been a while since my last post but I was out of town for quite some time and did not take my laptop with me. On return however, I noticed that charging cable for my beloved MacBook Pro 2013 was playing up again. After the original, I've replaced the 60W charger twice and the current one is proving troublesome with the little green light not always lighting up unless it's tweaked.

I've ordered and received a new one which I'll keep in reserve as the current one is not too annoying just yet. It will fail eventually of course. It's worth forking out for new chargers as my laptop with Mint LInux installed is running just fine and doing everything that I want it to do. Likewise my Raspberry Pi is fully operational. The advantages of USB C charging are obvious but of course my old laptop does not have such a port and so I'm stuck. The quality of the chargers I'm buying is clearly suspect but they're cheap and work for a while at least. 

Speaking of my Raspberry Pi, I've discovered that I can listen to music via headphone jack to a USB C and then to USB 3.1 as shown in Figure 1. It's a necessary workaround because I can't get Bluetooth to function and there is no headphone jack, for some mysterious reason. Previously I'd been using the headphone jack on a USB C hub but I've given that to my granddaughter so I had to come up with a workaround.

Figure 1

I still can't get WINE to run and that's something that I'll have to keep working on if I ever want to get my astrology program, Astrolog, to work again.

Raspberry Pi 400 Mouse and Bardi Smart Outdoor Static IP Camera

I've had to abandon the mouse that came with the Raspberry Pi 400 that I purchased some months ago. It was never quite right, especially when it came to copying and pasting, and proved absolutely hopeless when playing online chess because it led to frequent mouse slips. I guess they added the cheapest mouse available to the package. "DESIGNED BY XIAOMI" is printed on the top cover of the mouse, not that it means anything.

It not a big deal as a wireless mouse, especially with its own proprietary dongle, can be bought very cheaply nowadays. Overall, I'm quite happy so far with the performance of this particular Raspberry Pi model. My only complaints have been directed at the deficiencies of the Chromium web browser.

Yesterday a package arrived containing a SMART OUTDOOR STATIC IP CAMERA. It had sent by relatives and today I set it up and have it running, the sound and video feed being accessible via an iPhone app. The feed can be accessed from remotely and data can be stored to an SD card although I haven't set that up yet. The maximum card size is 128 GB. The camera connects to the local WiFi network using the 2.4 GHz wavelength.

Here is a description of the product taken from the manufacturer's website:

This camera is now the only device that makes the home router accessible to the outside world. This is something to ponder and it raises security issues as the IP address is indeed static. It doesn't change, allocated presumably by the BARDI company during the registration process and built into the price of the device.

Raspberry Pi WiFi Problems

Knowing that I’d be travelling to Bali, I naturally brought my laptop with me but decided to also include my Raspberry Pi 400 so that I could test it out using the villa’s television set as a monitor. The set up for WiFi is that you first connect to a local IP address and, once connected, you then log in using the supplied user name and password. This is the same as what happens at Starbucks and McDonalds back in Jakarta.

There was no problem connecting with the laptop via the full fledged Chrome browser that is running under Mint Linux but the Raspberry Pi, running the default operating system, struggled mightily. The problem seems to be with the browsers. I tried both Chromium and Firefox ESR (which is not the full-fledged version of the browser) and each had problems with security. What should happen is that a login screen pops up and you can enter the user name and password. This did happen initially but then the connection dropped and I wasn’t able to get that login screen to come up again.

Setting up my iPhone as a hotspot, I was able to connect the Internet without any problems because all that’s required is the password, there is no intermediate step as with the villa’s WiFi. I’ve tinkered around and there’s no obvious solution: Firefox ESR and Chromium just aren’t keen on connecting to what they see as an insecure Internet connection. I don’t travel much these days and so this is not a deal breaker for me. When I return home to Jakarta, my Raspberry Pi will be working fine again but, for someone who spends a good deal of time on the road and wants to make use of hotel WiFi, this would be a major problem.

Twister OS

The problem with WINE running on a 64-bit operating system, such as I have installed on my Raspberry Pi 400, is that it cannot run 32-bit software like Astrolog without additional software. I successfully installed WINE on my Raspberry Pi OS, or so I thought, but soon discovered there were still many more steps required before I could ever hope to run Astrolog.

Twister OS is 32-bit and seems to include WINE out of the box, so I'm keen to test it out on the Raspberry Pi. All I need is another SD card and was curious to know how much the card currently in my Pi cost. It is a 16GB SanDisk Ultra and can be bought online for under Rp40,000 or about A$4. Not a huge expense!

If I buy several then I can run a variety of operating systems including Ubuntu, UbuntuMate, Twister and Manjaro. The only problem is that the cards are so tiny, it would be easy to misplace them. There is a version designed especially for the Raspberry Pi 4.

I will attempt to install it tomorrow if I can acquire an SD card from the corner shop. It seems that BerryBoot OS will allow me to include multiple operating systems on a single SD card.

As this site explains:

For people short on SD cards: Berryboot is a simple boot selection screen for ARM computers like the Raspberry Pi, that allows you to put multiple Linux distributions on a single SD card. In addition it allows you to put the operating system files on an external USB hard drive instead of on the SD card itself.

ADDENDUM:

You need to accept that anything you try in Linux will fail on the first attempt and probably the second and may ultimately fail completely. Such was the case with the much hyped Berryboot. Even though I managed to get it running on an SD card, it would not display the operating system that I wanted, namely Twister. So, useless.

What I did was download the image from the Twister website and then I used Balena Etcher to install it on a newly acquired 16GB SD card. My Raspberry Pi 400 booted into the Twister OS without any problems. My initial reaction to this new operating system was quite positive. Google Chrome came pre-installed and, after some tinkering, I managed to pipe good quality music to my Bluetooth earbuds. Following a reboot however, I could not get any sound out of either wired or unwired earbuds. Finally, the mouse froze up and I gave up. I'm back to the Raspberry Pi operating system. 

I really don't want to waste time tinkering with other operating systems just for the sake of it. I want an OS that works. On my laptop, I've got that now with Linux Mint and I'm sticking to it. With the Raspberry Pi, I'll be sticking to its native operating system. That's it. For now.

Raspberry Pi: Blogger and Netflix

There is definitely something weird about the Raspberry Pi and Blogger. Using Chromium, I tried to access my Pedagogical Posturing blog on Blogger but all attempts failed. I checked if Blogger was down and it wasn't. I checked on my Staying Healthy blog on Wordpress (that I haven't used since August 2020) and it opened instantly. So did the BBC website. I opened Firefox and things were exactly the same. 

It's not the browser then, it's to do with the interaction between the Raspberry Pi OS and Blogger. I recently created a post titled From Blogger to WordPress? in which I discussed the possibility of switching from the former to the latter. This current experience has only strengthened my resolve. I don't think Google is properly supporting its blogging platform and that may be the reason for my difficulties.

Figure 1

Anyway, I switched to my 2013 MacBook Pro running Linux Mint and tried to access my Pedagogical Posturing blog using Chrome. It opened instantly. This means that for the moment I'll be doing my blogging on the laptop and not the Raspberry Pi. To be honest, the monitor to which the Pi is attached is ready to be replaced. It's very hard on the eye and there are no speakers for the HDMI connection to take advantage of. There are some good monitors out there for about A$200 so that is a likely purchase in the not to distant future. Figure 1 shows a Raspberry Pi 400 running dual monitors.

As for getting Netflix to run on the Raspberry Pi, it's not easy. There's a lot of help out there but all of my efforts failed using the Chromium browser. I then switched to Firefox and encountered the same problems. In the end I gave up. I can run Netflix on my iPhone, my laptop and TV so it's not a big deal. However, it was frustrating to not be able to get it running. 

Testing Out The Raspberry Pi 400

 

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows the ports on my newly acquired Raspberry Pi 400 with the following specifications:

• Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.8GHz
• 4GB LPDDR4-3200
• Dual-band (2.4GHz and 5.0GHz) IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ac wireless LAN
• Bluetooth 5.0, BLE
• Gigabit Ethernet
• 2 × USB 3.0 and 1 × USB 2.0 ports
• Horizontal 40-pin GPIO header
• 2 × micro HDMI ports (supports up to 4Kp60)
• H.265 (4Kp60 decode); H.264 (1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode); OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.0
• MicroSD card slot for operating system and data storage
• 78- or 79-key compact keyboard (depending on regional variant)
• 5V DC via USB connector
• Operating temperature: 0°C to +50°C ambient
• Maximum dimensions 286 mm × 122 mm × 23 mm

Figure 2 shows its actual appearance.

Figure 2

I bought it on a whim for my 73rd birthday and it only arrived today. The operating system was already installed on the 16GB memory card and, after connecting the power and the monitor, I was up and running in no time. The first hardware issue that I encountered was with Bluetooth. My ancient monitor has no inbuilt speakers and so I assumed that I would be able to listen to sound using my Bluetooth earbuds. Not so. The Raspberry Pi's Bluetooth 5.0 did not detect them.

I've only ever used the earbuds with my iPhone and they work flawlessly on that device. I succeeded in connecting to them from my Ubuntu laptop and the connection was terrible but it was still, technically, a connection. With a second set of Bluetooth earbuds, I encountered the same problem. I'll come up with a solution to this Bluetooth "invisibility" sooner or later probably, after all it's only Day 1. I know what I'm letting myself in for. If I didn't want any problems, I'd simply go out and buy a Mac of some description. I still may do so but for the moment I'll enjoy tinkering and troubleshooting with my new toy.

Software-wise, it becomes clear that the Chromium browser and the Chrome browser as two different beasts as the following extract from this site explains:

Google Chrome is one of the most popular browsers all over the world. And Raspberry Pi is the most popular mini-PC device. But unfortunately, they can’t meet together –  there is no Chrome build for Raspberry Pi (and for any other ARM-based PC except Chromebook). You can use a number of other browsers (such as Epiphany, IceWeasel or even Lynx), but will face a lack of functionality.  Many Pi-world enthusiasts use the open source version of Chrome – Chromium browser. But this isn’t a full replacement.

Chrome includes a number of proprietary libraries and in some cases, you need to use authentic Google software. For example, you can watch videos on Netflix or Amazon Prime with Chrome and can’t with Chromium. Good news that there is a simple solution to override this issue. Using Exagear Desktop allows you to get full x86 Linux environment. And this means that you can launch any application available in x86 Linux world, including Google Chrome!

Maybe I'll try Exagear out at some point but at the moment I have 4GB of RAM and a 16GB memory card as permanent storage. I need to be careful not to overtax these limitations. If possible, I'd like to upgrade to 8GB RAM and swap the memory  card for a fast SSD. I need to watch some tutorials on the subject to determine if this is possible.

ADDENDUM:

I'll quote from the article on this website:

Updating the firmware is as important as keeping your operating system and software up to date, though there might be less frequent stable updates. The main importance of this is security patches. If vulnerability in the code has been found, your Raspberry Pi firmware needs to be updated to reduce the risk of it being exploited.

The other reason is performance enhancement. Though updates usually only bring minor changes, some offer major benefits. For example, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s November 2021 update increased the turbo-mode clock from 1.5 GHz to the 1.8 GHz for recent Raspberry Pi 4s.

If you’re running Raspberry Pi OS, your firmware options are limited to what’s offered by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. We’ll mention some alternative Raspberry Pi-compatible operating systems later.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has put a lot of work into making the initial setup and update process for Raspberry Pi OS extremely easy. It’s detailed on their website, but the basic steps are to check for updates with sudo apt update followed by running a full upgrade (if there’s anything new) with sudo apt full-upgrade. Using this process, you’ll be updating the operating system as well as the firmware to the latest stable releases.

My hope of course was that this update would solve my Bluetooth problems. As if it would be that easy! The update made no difference whatever in that department. 

Raspberry Pi

I read today that Raspberry Pi had set up its Pixel OS so that it could run under Windows and OS X. Consequently, I downloaded the ISO and ran it successively under VirtualBox. It's certainly lightweight and is very responsive when running in the virtual machine environment. As explained on the Raspberry Pi website:

PIXEL represents our best guess as to what the majority of users are looking for in a desktop environment: a clean, modern user interface; a curated suite of productivity software and programming tools, both free and proprietary; and the Chromium web browser with useful plugins, including Adobe Flash, preinstalled. And all of this is built on top of Debian, providing instant access to thousands of free applications.

Unfortunately, Minecraft and Wolfram Mathematica are missing because the licensing agreement only applies to the OS running on a physical Raspberry Pi. No matter, it's still good to be able to experience and work with the software in a virtual environment.