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Installing MPF on a Pine64 with Ubuntu

Note

This procedure for installing MPF on a Pine64 does not fully work. (MPF runs fine, Kivy installs fine, but MPF-MC does not run.) If you want to use MPF on a Pine64, maybe you can help figure out why this doesn't work and share your findings with us?)

Hardware Notes

  • Spring for the fastest MicroSD card you can (Samsung Evo cards are reportedly the fastest), at least 16GB.
  • The Pine64's video seems to only support 1080p and 4K resolutions, so make sure your display can do one or both of those at a proper 16:9 aspect ratio or else everything will be scaled and squished and it looks awful.
  • If you find that your pine64 does not boot it maybe due to using a HDMI->DVI cable, try HDMI to HDMI first.

System Notes

There are a bunch of things that arrive broken with the current Ubuntu installer for Pine64 (as of this writing in November 2016). Some of them will prevent MPF from installing, and a few are just annoying.

Instructions

After installing the OS following the instructions on the Pine64 Wiki), expanding the volume to the full size of the SD card, and getting connected to the Internet, follow these steps. Don't try to update the installed system before following this.

Locale

Locale arrives broken and this wreaks all kinds of havoc, so here's how to fix it.

Assuming you want US English, substitute your preferred language if not:

$ sudo locale-gen "en_US.UTF-8"
Generating locales...
  en_US.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
Generating locales...
  en_US.UTF-8... up-to-date
Generation complete.

That command will open a text-based dialog, we recommend that you don't choose "ALL" and only select the one or a few languages you want (generating them all takes a long time). Then reboot, then do the above reconfigure step AGAIN, then reboot, then run:

$ locale

And make sure it looks good. Mine says:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

It took a few tries for this to stick for me, so do it again, including reboot, if your results here are wrong.

Fix the Software Boutique

This arrives broken, too. Oddly, running the Mate Welcome as root and clicking a button partly fixes it.

$ sudo ubuntu-mate-welcome

When it comes up, click on the "Subscribe to updates" button, then quit it.

Now go to System -> Administration -> Software Boutique. Click on the wrench, then do each repair option (after clicking one, wait for it to say it has finished).

Now go to System -> Administration -> Software Updater and get everything up to date. You will need to reboot again after that.

Install Missing pip3

$ apt-get install python3-pip

The path where pip puts executables is not in the system default path, so edit ~/.bashrc to add the following path:

$ sudo nano ~/.bashrc

At the bottom of the file add the following:

export PATH=~/.local/bin:$PATH

Hit "control + x" to save and "y" then "return" to save the file as the same name.

Now start a fresh terminal so that this new PATH is included in your current environment. Then:

Install MPF

Download the MPF Debian Installer from https://github.com/missionpinball/mpf-debian-installer/archive/0.55.x.zip

To unzip the file navigate in your terminal to the location of the downloaded files.

Unzip the file:

$ unzip dev.zip .

If this does not run you may need to install unzip:

$ sudo apt-get install unzip

After unzip, run ./dev/install from the folder you unzipped the files to. Consult the README for more information.

Running MPF

See the How to start MPF and run your game page for details and command-line options.

What if it did not work? ------------------------

In the following we list some common problems and solutions. If you got another problem please ask in our forum.

YAML error on first start

You will see this error if there is already a different version of ruamel.yaml installed on your system:

pkg_resources.VersionConflict: (ruamel.yaml 0.15.37 (c:\users\robert\appdata\local\programs\python\python36\lib\site-packages), Requirement.parse('ruamel.yaml<0.11,>=0.10')

This could have happened if you are upgrading to a newer version of MPF or you have incompatible versions of MPF, MPF-MC and/or the MPF-Monitor installed. The required ruamel.yaml version is different on newer MPF versions. We used to install ruamel 0.11 and switched to 0.15 in MPF 0.53+. MPF cannot start with two yaml libraries. To fix this check your versions pip3 list and check mpf, mpf-mc and mpf-monitor. Remove the wrong version and install the right one. All versions need to match (for instance all or all dev).

The following command will remove all three and install the latest release:

pip3 uninstall mpf mpf-mc mpf-monitor
pip3 install mpf mpf-mc mpf-monitor

This error can also occur if you already have ruamel.yaml installed in your python system packages for a non-MPF package. Often times, you will have a newer version of ruamel.yaml than MPF requires. Unfortunately, MPF cannot use a newer version of this package because that caused issues in the past because newer versions dropped support (wheels for windows) for older python versions. In the case that you need a different version than the one MPF requires, it is advised to create a python virtual environment and install the required packages there, and use that virtual environment for running MPF.

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