Print42 - thermal printer software for Free42

[Thomas Okken]

I was thinking of tackling the Raspbian issue using an emulated machine in Qemu, but then I caved and just bought a real one, a Pi 4 with 4GB RAM. I wanted one anyway.

I got one of these sets. It comes with a fan and a few heat sinks, which the setup guide calls optional, but since the machine started getting hot and throttling while installing the OS (the cursor turning into a thermometer to warn me, very cute), I put in the fan, and that helped. I'll add the heat sinks later.

I'm not planning to distribute Linux binaries beyond the basic installer-less x86_64 package that I'm building already. Creating deb or rpm or whatever packages from GitHub, or from my "upstream" source code tarballs, should be a simple and mostly or fully automated process, but I prefer leaving that, and the challenge of complying with the various rules imposed by the various repositories, to other people. Building the five packages that I do build myself is enough of a hassle as far as I'm concerned.

N.B. For Raspbian 10, you really need apt only to install libgtk-3-dev (and libasound2-dev if you want TONE and BEEP to work properly and not just call gdk_display_beep()). Everything else, including git, make, gcc, and all the other required headers and libraries, are part of the initial Raspbian install, at least if you go with the full version.