Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Taiga on my Orange Pi PC

Recently, one of my hobby projects made it to a very nice first prototype state. It doesn't do much yet, but it is in a state where I can show it to people and personally I think it shows a lot of potential that is in the ideas I had. However, working on the prototype was kept simple because it was so basic; there were only a couple of tasks to work on. In order to keep the further progress of the project structured, I decided I need some form of an issue tracker. I have used Taiga.io for such a project in the past and it worked well. Unfortunately, though, their hosted version only allows a single private project and I already had one.

Remember all the Single-Board Computers I wrote about a while back? The Pi 2 is still actively running Kodi, the newest Pi 3 is driving an official Pi touch screen and some of the CHIPs are part of the project I mentioned while their versatility means I have ideas for quite a few more of them. However, the Pine and the Orange Pi have been idle since my last post about them. However, for the Orange Pi, this has recently changed.

I took the Orange Pi and installed Taiga on it. It is quite nice to have my own "dev server" and I'm quite happy about the current situation. I won't describe the exact procedure I followed to get where I am now, as it was basically following their guide for installing it. However, I will post a list of notes. Some of them will relate to installing it on the Orange Pi (or on an SBC or on an ARM based device) whereas others will just be my personal gripes with the installation or the guide.

  • The guide uses the user "taiga" instead of telling you where to use your own username. This makes it easy to miss a spot if you are using a different user.
  • To make matters worse, they chose the name of their software, so not every instance of the word should in fact be replaced by your user.
  • I would probably have been better off creating a user and naming it taiga, though. The procedure installs quite a lot in the home directory and now that's under some other user.
  • The procedure calls for installing postgresql 9.5, but Debian only has 9.4 on stable. By simply replacing the 5 by a 4 it works, as the minimum requirement is version 9.4. (Alternatively, I could have used 9.5 from unstable.)
  • The guide installs python3 and then just uses Python 3.5. On Debian, you will have installed Python 3.4. This earlier version does simply seem to work for me.
  • Installation of lxml is known to be problematic on the Raspberry Pi, but can be achieved by increasing the amount of virtual memory. For me, it worked without such hacks, though I do not know if this is due to running Armbian, running a headless image or using an Orange instead of a Raspberry.
  • Circus isn't available in Debian stable, so I had to add the testing repositories and get it from there.
  • Pay attention to the output of "service circus status". This is the only way to tell if the backend is actually running.
  • I skipped everything that was even remotely optional, so I might revisit some of that in the future. The optional parts are sometimes somewhat out of order, which makes it seem you have to pick them up again before the end, but this isn't really the case.
  • I currently use a .local domain. I think that means I use mdns, but it works on Windows (which mdns shouldn't) so I'm not 100% sure how this is working. It definitely isn't working from android, though, which is a shame. 
It's a real pity there is no "normal" installation procedure like running a script or installing a package. Nevertheless, I do now have the whole things running and I am quite happy with having my own development server.

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