Hacker News Reader

Comment by neals | Hacker News Reader

I know very little about the working of both Linux and Chrome OS. So here's a question:

On a Raspberry PI, one would typically use the command line, right? So does this VS Code install with a kind of GUI? Of do you need to install a window-manager-type-thing first?

View on HN

Unless you are accessing the Pi over SSH you will probably be using a GUI. VS Code will be running inside the window manager (LXDE). It's not something you run from a CLI.

The main version of NOOBS has X starting by default these days. Even the standard Raspbian image has a GUI, but you can use the lite version for headless servers (https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/). This is similar to Ubuntu Server but different to NOOBS lite, which is just a small network installer.

Pretty much it'll use whatever desktop environment you have installed (if you have one installed).

Raspbian now ships with PIXEL, for example, but I tend to have a preference towards XFCE for my own use (very lightweight).

In any case it should "just run" after installing, but if anyone has any trouble please let me know!

The common Linux distributions targeting the RPi all come with a GUI environment, at least as an option.

Just tried it on a RPI2 + Ubuntu 16.04.1, a headless environment with X11 forwarding over SSH. There are missing package deps for GUI-like things (libasound2 and some OpenGL libs), and even with those deps manually installed, it crashes with "X IO error received (X server probably went away)" ... sooo, probably not a good choice if you don't have a local monitor & keyboard & mouse.

Also, there's an "Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/ivoras/.config/Code - OSS (headmelted)/storage.json" , don't know if it's important.

I got a Raspberry PI 3 to use as a web server a few months ago, and the Raspbian OS image I downloaded for it had a full blown GUI. It even had a version of Minecraft on it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com