twongkee's Blog

had to install neofetch manually.

installed as instructed without issue last night.

Does not see the nvme drive, at least without any tweaks. Haven’t dug into it yet. All the previous 5.15 kernels did see the drive.

also did not see the provided usb wifi dongle.

so may need to dig into hardware stuff?

Also running headless; have not checked to see if the hdmi works.

more to come!

java seems to be the theme of the week.

still have the same java as the minecraft experiment.

pulled the “community” version of kafka from confluent: https://www.confluent.io/installation/ (may have to register)

have extracted the tar file onto the nvme drive:
/nvme/community/confluent-7.3.2

edit the properties files to point to the nvme also:

etc/kafka/server.properties:log.dirs=/nvme/kafka/kafka-logs
etc/kafka/zookeeper.properties:dataDir=/nvme/kafka/zookeeper

now using “tmux” to start multiple components
(https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/introduction-tmux-linux)

and manually start the components each in their own “tmux tab”
zookeeper
./bin/zookeeper-server-start etc/kafka/zookeeper.properties

kafka-server
./bin/kafka-server-start etc/kafka/server.properties

and create a sample topic: (this is all on one line)
./bin/kafka-topics --create --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --replication-factor 1 --partitions 1 --topic riscv-topic

now also use python, so installed kafka-python

and used it to create some random data

import csv
import json
from kafka import KafkaProducer
import random

MIN_LETTER = 65
MAX_LETTER = 90

producer = KafkaProducer(
    bootstrap_servers="visionfive2:9092",
    client_id="my_client",
    acks=1,
    value_serializer=lambda v: json.dumps(v).encode("utf-8"),
)

# simple random data test
for r in range(0, 100):
    random_string = ""
    for s in range(6):
        random_integer = random.randint(MIN_LETTER, MAX_LETTER)
        random_string += chr(random_integer)

    row = {"count": r, "code": random_string, "number": random_integer}
    producer.send(topic="riscv-topic", value=row)
    producer.flush()

then to see them on cli: (in its own tab kafka-consumer)

./bin/kafka-console-consumer --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --from-beginning --topic riscv-topic

this is putty, from my windows machine, you can see the various “tabs” running the different servers.

downloaded this weeks armbian visionfive2 image and got it running;

Notes:

Did have to change dip switches, as mentioned in a forum, the settings for the default debian image did not work;

booted headless (even with the XFCE image), so used the serial to USB connector, to input default root password, and new user info.

I have the 8 gig version, and the default (above) boot only detected 4 Gig ram; searching google/forums indicated this is a known issue, and followed the steps from here (with different paths), final re-compile line, with the default image was

dtc -I dts -O dtb -o /boot/dtb-5.15.0-starfive2/starfive/jh7110-visionfive-v2.dtb vf2.dts

reboot, and all memory visible!

quick test, since I also have an nvme drive attached, with java and minecraft from my last post… started that.

runs fine, does not initially seem any slower (or faster) than the default debian image.

prompted Bing in compose mode with

installing minecraft java edition on risc-v sbc visionfive 2

and this is the result

How to Install Minecraft Java Edition on RISC-V SBC VisionFive 2

Minecraft is one of the most popular sandbox games in the world, with millions of players across different platforms. Minecraft Java Edition is the original version of the game, which runs on any computer that supports Java. However, if you want to play Minecraft on a RISC-V single-board computer (SBC) like VisionFive 2, you will need some extra steps to make it work.

RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) that can be implemented by anyone without paying royalties or fees. RISC-V offers many advantages over other ISAs, such as modularity, scalability, and efficiency. VisionFive 2 is a powerful RISC-V SBC that features a quad-core processor, 8GB of RAM, and a Mali-G52 GPU. It can run Linux and Android operating systems and supports various peripherals and expansion modules.

To install Minecraft Java Edition on VisionFive 2, you will need to follow these steps:

1. Download and install OpenJDK 16 for RISC-V from this link: https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/openjdk16-binaries/releases/download/jdk-16%2B36/OpenJDK16U-jdk_riscv64_linux_hotspot_16_36.tar.gz
2. Extract the tar.gz file to a folder of your choice and set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to point to it.
3. Download and install LWJGL 3 for RISC-V from this link: https://github.com/LWJGL/lwjgl3/releases/download/3.3.0/lwjgl-3.3.0.zip
4. Extract the zip file to a folder of your choice and set the LWJGL_HOME environment variable to point to it.
5. Download and install Minecraft Launcher for Linux from this link: https://launcher.mojang.com/download/Minecraft.deb
6. Install the deb file using sudo dpkg -i Minecraft.deb
7. Run Minecraft Launcher from your applications menu or terminal and log in with your Mojang account.
8. Edit your installation settings and add these JVM arguments: -Dorg.lwjgl.librarypath=$LWJGL_HOME/native/linux -Dorg.lwjgl.system.jni.nativespath=$LWJGL_HOME/native/linux
9. Save your settings and launch Minecraft Java Edition.

You should now be able to play Minecraft Java Edition on your VisionFive 2 SBC with decent performance and graphics quality. Enjoy!

Impressive. Incorrect, but sounds good.

step 1: the riscv64 openjdk download link does not exist 🙁. There ARE riscv64 java versions, including one directly from the debian repos, but it missed that.

step 3: talks about the minecraft launcher, try it and:

sudo dpkg -i Minecraft.deb
dpkg: error processing archive Minecraft.deb (--install):
package architecture (amd64) does not match system (riscv64)
Errors were encountered while processing:
Minecraft.deb

what actually worked?

Minecraft Java Edition Server runs on the VisionFive 2

Configured to run, along with an old windows 10 machine.

on the windows 10 machine, start the minecraft launcher, (need an account) and download the server.jar, by going to the installations tab, click “New installation”, and click the down arrow next to SERVER:

you then need to copy the server.jar to the visionfive 2

On the visionfive 2

• sudo apt install openjdk-21-jre-headless
• mkdir minecraft_server
• cd minecraft_server
• copy the server.jar to minecraft_server dir

will need to accept eula by editing eula.txt; simplest way is to run the server twice:

• java -jar server.jar
• will stop with message, edit the eula.txt and set to true and rerun the server
• java -jar server.jar

then connect from the windows machine, with the IP of the visionfive 2.

notes. above java command just uses defaults; if you want to give more memory, you can with

java -Xmx4096M -Xms2048M -jar server.jar

this is not a fast machine, will see errors like

[13:59:15] [Server thread/WARN]: Can't keep up! Is the server overloaded? Running 2469ms or 49 ticks behind

so not for any major games, but useful to try it out. Similar to a raspberry pi, so all the “tweaks” from that will also work

Installed python, pygame, jupyter-lab (and matplotlib).

Sound works via hdmi (sort of). There is sound coming from the TV, but not totally clear, sort of garbled, as if timing is a bit off, but fine for beeps and explosions from simple games. When previously using the headphone jack, was no distortion.

downloaded Python-Games from github. One note, debian is case sensitive, so some games looked for Fonts not fonts, or similar … so had to edit a few of the scripts. Simple ones (tetris) were playable, some of the more complex ones, were slow.

For Jupyter Lab, found installing the pure apt packages worked best, often got some compile/dependency errors when trying to just use pip install