Progress has been slow on development of CraftBian 2. Sorry to say this, but i haven’t really gotten far yet. Now that “Winter is coming”, and i have finally found some time again, I’m hoping that i can actually progress now.
However, there is only a few things to tell for now.
It seems like the repositories on the original CraftBian image was broken
This isn’t really related to CraftBian 2, but i think it should be mentioned somewhere as it was a little concerning. CraftBians trusty betatester and user Shadowstreik, pointed this out to me the other day, and it seemed to have been broken for at least a week. To the normal user, this shouldn’t be a an issue, but if you tend to keep the packages behind CraftBian up to date, this was halting that process completely. It seems like that Minibian have JUST been fixed, as in as i was writing this post, so that is good news at least. Otherwise i would’ve had to create a completely new image for CraftBian.
I’ve got a Minecraft Server running on the upcoming CraftBian 2 image
Not exactly huge news, but I’ve just gotten a Minecraft Server running on the upcoming CraftBian 2 image. Using the default JAVA runtime environment on a Ubuntu installation makes this task impossible due to very very poor performance. So i had to switch it out with Oracle’s JAVA instead, which boosts performance 100x compared to the original on the Ubuntu image. This is the same package which i use on the current CraftBian image, albeit newer, so performance should, and seems, to be around the same 🙂
CraftBians backend has FINALLY been upgraded!
I’ve wanted to this for over 6 months, but have been waiting for a specific model to be released. CraftBians backend, has until last weekend been running on a Synology NAS. More specific the model called DS214SE. This was a model from 2014, and back then it was the cheapest model they made = the slowest and worst unit spec wise. I didn’t originally intent to run a webserver or any of the other tasks it ended up doing for that matter. It had a single core 700 mhz CPU with 256 mb ram, so not exactly a beast. The new unit is a 2018 model: DS918+, which is Synology’s top model for Home / Small office use. This has a Celeron 4 core cpu @ 1.5 GHz boosting up to 2,4 Ghz, and 4 GB ram, so it should be, and seems to be, a very nice performance boost and hopefully helps the speed of CraftBians webservices and backend.
That is all for now! I hope i get started with the development of the actual interface a little more this weekend. There is ALOT to do yet before anything is even remotely ready for beta testing, but i will keep this space updated, hopefully more often from now on 🙂
Instead of Minibian as is used now, i want to use Ubuntu at it is updated more frequently and still based on Debian. Also wider support across multiple platforms.
I hope to make a CraftBian installer, so that you can install the interface on whatever platform you might want to use. Everything from a Raspberry Pi, to a full fledged Server PC. However i still want to provide a full image like you are used to on the current CraftBian release.
I’ve already begun the early testing phase on this, to test the compatibility of the current functionality in CraftBian
Simply because it is better supported
Smaller, yet important changes:
One of the things that i don’t quite like about CraftBian v1.x is that if my remote server is down, CraftBian will be very slow or/and maybe even not work properly. This is something i do not want.
When updating CraftBian currently, the software behind it, in Linux, is not updated. This means that if some major change happened on this side, the user would be forced to completely reflash the image with a newer version. Something i do not want.
Something i had always intended but never got around to.
Another thing i had always wanted, but never got around to, as it would be easier for me to help and debug users having trouble.
This blog is intended for a detailed explanation on the progress of the development of CraftBian 2 and it will include some rather techy terms along with some programming. I also intend to use it for my self, as notes i need to remember along the way.