Print42 - thermal printer software for Free42

[Thomas Okken]

(01-11-2020 05:37 AM)tcab Wrote:  I managed to compile Free42 on the Raspberry Pi. As Thomas said, its dead easy:

Code:

sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev
git clone https://github.com/thomasokken/free42.git
cd free42/gtk
make
./free42bin

Not sure whether I should have run the build-gtk script instead?, but the resulting binary free42bin using the steps above seems to have worked OK (though I did get a few compile warnings flying past...)

The difference is that the build-gtk script checks if /usr/include/alsa/asoundlib.h exists, and adds AUDIO_ALSA=1 to the 'make' command line if it does, and it strips the binaries to make them smaller.

Regarding the warnings, those are probably related to GTK. In the later GTK 3 versions, a few APIs were deprecated, but I'm sticking with them in order to be able to continue building in Ubuntu 12.04, which has a rather old version of GTK 3 (3.4.2). I don't know if it's possible to suppress those warnings, but they are harmless at any rate.

(01-11-2020 05:37 AM)tcab Wrote:  Print42 was unable to automatically detect the location of the Free42 printout text file (Print42 tries to guess via inspecting the Free42 state file, which it thinks is in /home/pi/.local/share/Free42/state but the Free42 state file is not there - I'll have to find out where the proper location is and tweak that in the next release of Print42).

The location of the directory containing the state file is hard-coded in gtk/shell_main.cc, line 408, and the state, print-out, and keymap file names, which include the Free42 directory name, are hard coded starting at line 421, six lines in total. Search for /.free42/ to make sure you find all occurrences.

I guess it's a bit ugly but I didn't anticipate people wanting to store those files somewhere other than $HOME/.free42

(01-11-2020 05:37 AM)tcab Wrote:  Here is a photo of my setup.

Cool!

(01-09-2020 06:08 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  Enjoy your new little computer.

I'm liking it so far! It has already helped me fix a bug that I hadn't been able to reproduce in my other Linux environments. Although that bug is caused by bad behavior in GTK or in the display driver, so that is a mixed blessing, I guess.

I have had dropped WiFi connections a couple of times, although I'm not 100% sure the Pi is at fault there. It could also be a problem in my router (Netgear WNDR4300 running a not-very-recent version of DD-WRT) or in the MacBook Air I'm using to VNC into the Pi. I haven't noticed WiFi flakiness before, but I don't usually VNC between machines at home for long periods of time, either, so that will require some investigation.