[HowTo] Install a vnc server on the Raspberry pi

The changes to the Raspberry Pi stack after the launch of the Pi 4 were significant. They make sense, and moving away from those proprietary Broadcom OMX layers made sense moving forward. They did however cause a lot of breakage.

Sure has and still is.

Tried this and it fails:

osmc@OSMC2023-12-1:~$ sudo nano /boot/config-user.txt
otg_mode=1
sdtv_aspect=1
sdtv_mode=2
start_x=1

dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d

Whereas, for example, Iā€™m reasonably certain (without having an instance to flip into just ATM for verification) that LibreELEC 9.2.6 /flash/config.txt includes dtoverlay=vc4-fkmx-v3d out of the box.

modinfo vc4 on OSMC December 2023 returns details.

modinfo v3d on OSMC December 2023 returns details.

modinfo vc4-fkms-v3d on OSMC December 2023 does not return anything.

Is the vc4-fkms-v3d driver|module available in the December 2023 version of OSMC? If so, what funkyness is required to enable it :slight_smile:

Some settings donā€™t work in an includes file and would need to be added to config.txt itself. I believe enabling fkms is one such setting.

Sensational help @darwindesign ā€¦ will give it a go, despite the warning :slight_smile:

# Warning: do not edit this file, or it could prevent your OSMC system from starting.
# If you wish to make changes, you should do so via My OSMC or edit the config-user.txt file in this directory

# Any changes that you make here will be overwritten as this file is managed by the OSMC via the update system

Well, errm, actually, how do I avoid those warnings ā€˜bearing fruitā€™, as it were, if I was to edit that file.

Actually edit via the My OSMC Kodi plugin, is that the best option?

I donā€™t think editing via the My OSMC add-on makes any difference at all. Basically the deal is that certain files are considered part of the system and others are treated as userdata. Userdata is treated as sacred and changes to it are avoided when changes/updates are formulated whenever possible. The config.txt file is problematic treating it as userdata as their has been times where it needed to be changed with updates and there is no reason to believe that it wonā€™t become necessary again for some reason in the future. Thus the warning is basically giving a warning that an update may overwrite that file so you should add modifications to config-user.txt since that file should never get touched with an update. My recommend would be to just make the changes you want to make and then write yourself a note or keep a copy of the file so if the day comes that config.txt gets overwritten with an update it is less effort to put your changes back again.

Thanks @darwindesign

Very sensible and logical. Helps that it also matched what I was thinking myself. That is, the warning is there to discourage using config.txt because config.txt is such a powerful file in the RPi ecosystem. Tweaks to config.txt can, do and will render a system broken. So, I guess the warnings are basically the equivalent of ā€œenter at own riskā€.

The warning also telling you that the file might be overwritten by an upgrade

Could you elaborate a little, if not too much trouble and too time consuming for you, which would be fair enough? Perhaps point me to links if so?

I understand that the RPi hardware and firmware, along with Kodi, have gone through quite the ā€˜sea changeā€™ but itā€™s a bit tricky for me trying to reconcile that with what appears to be an almost identical scenario to LibreELEC 9* in that the VNC addon files, settings and so forth are all but the same whilst LE9 was able to allow CEC and VNC via the ā€˜fakeyā€™ FKMS driver.

Please donā€™t get me wrong, Iā€™m not pushing for any extra unreasonable efforts here. If ultimately CEC is not available whilst VNC is running then Iā€™ll possibly just have to work around that. But I am quite curious what ā€œisnā€™t trivialā€ represents :slight_smile: