I have gui-v2 working decently well on a raspberry pi 4. Here's how

Modifications
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1

Apologies for the crappy lighting - this was late at night in my bus, and lights are well… bright.

This is a 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 with a BTT TFT 70 display (effectively a clone of the official screen, connects via the ribbon cable, not hdmi)
I gave up trying to make this work on a Pi 3B+

Firstly, this comes with a warning - I’ve had some issues along the way, so be prepared to re-install if something goes sideways. Have a backup.

Secondly, some general thoughts on what this means:

  • You can’t toggle between old + new gui on the fly. That makes Package Manager harder to access. Plan accordingly.
  • I found the most success with a clean setup, that means I removed GUI Mods. Not sure if that is neccesary.
  • Get the RpiDisplaySetup side of things sorted first - make sure screen dimming, rotation, etc is all setup before proceeding.

Did I say backup your data?

Steps:

  1. Upgrade to 3.70~64
  2. Have working ssh access, the following steps all happen via ssh
  3. Switch the package feed to testing (this is because the QT library version are inconsistent otherwise)
    /opt/victronenergy/swupdate-scripts/set-feed.sh testing
    opkg update
  4. Update packages (this might not be neccesary, report back if it works for you without doing it)
    opkg install $(opkg list-upgradable | cut -d' ' -f1)
  5. Install the new gui
    opkg install gui-v2
  6. Switch the startup script from gui-v1 to gui-v2
    opkg install start-gui-v2

At this point the old gui (/service/gui) will be stopped, and uninstalled. And the new gui (/service/gui-v2) will start up.

You can check the logs of the new gui with this command (if you have issues, check here and share these logs)
tail -n 100 -F /var/log/gui-v2/current

To go back to the old gui:

  • opkg install gui will remove the start-gui-v2 package, and restart the old gui. I had to reboot sometimes afterwards.

Now, for the more technical folks - some additional commentary:

  • I don’t know why I’m not running into graphics acceleration issues, I tried separately to enable the GPU and get it working, but couldn’t get past some conflicts with the LCD controller.
  • As far as I know, it’s being rendered in software. I’m not seeing the same thing as previous reports from the testing where I recall someone saying that 2 cores stuck at 100% with this running. For me the gui-v2 process uses ~10% cpu when the display is recently active with higher spikes when it’s rendering things, and then it goes down close to 0 after a bit - so it looks ok to me.
  • It’s possible that with the recent upgrade to Qt 6.8 (from 6.6?) brought some other improvements with it, the last time I tried this was a while back and it definitely didn’t work like this (but that was also on a Pi3B+)
5 Likes
2

Respect :saluting_face:

Its working

Thanks

3

Thanks for the tip. I tried it on my Pi3B and it installed but hung on ‘switching gui’ or something similar. The install error log said this.

opkg install start-gui-v2

Solver encountered 1 problem(s):

Problem 1/1:

package packagegroup-ve-addons-1.0-r0.raspberrypi2 requires start-gui-v1, but none of the providers can be installed

package start-gui-v2-1.2.25-r0.cortexa7hf-neon-vfpv4 conflicts with start-gui-v1 provided by start-gui-v1-6.8.9-r0.raspberrypi2

package packagegroup-ve-console-apps-1.0-r0.raspberrypi2 requires packagegroup-ve-addons, but none of the providers can be installed

conflicting requests

problem with installed package packagegroup-ve-console-apps-1.0-r0.raspberrypi2



Solution 1:

allow deinstallation of packagegroup-ve-console-apps-1.0-r0.raspberrypi2

Solution 2:

do not ask to install a package providing start-gui-v2

FIX:

Running opkg install --force-depends start-gui-v2 removed V1 and allowed V2 to install and load. Seems to be working fine but try this at your own peril.

4

I spent some time today getting both GUI v2 working using this recipe, and the GX Touch 50+70 working natively using the edt-ft5x06 driver without using some of the scripts that were kicking around.

It’s reasonably easy. I started to document the process at this gist here; I might write a script to do this.