Status for OpenSim on Raspberry PI

[Geir Nøklebye]

People are asking for the status on running OpenSim on Raspberry PI. The short, but disappointing answer is, it is no longer practically possible.

With the latest OpenSim development requiring Microsoft dotnet 6 to run (as the mono project is defunct), and Microsoft explicitly has said they will only provide an ARM based installer for dotnet 6 and 7 on macOS with Apple Silicon, you are pretty much on your own to establish an environment on the PI where you can run or build current and future versions of OpenSim. The effort is simply not worth the outcome.

When it comes to running Opensim on the PI pre the dotnet 6 requirements, it is possible to hack it to run on 64-bit Raspbian OS with mono, but it is not possible to compile Opensim on it as the compiler will crash. So even that is mostly not worth the effort.

It is possible to make OpenSim with mono on 32-bit Raspbian OS. It will also compile in that event, and the libraries provided in the Resources section on the forum can be used for that purpose.

Add to that the very limited supply of Raspberry PI hardware, no performance upgrades for almost 3 years, and the uncertainty of availability of Raspbian OS based on Debian 12 (Bookworm), the odds for a future version of Opensim on Raspberry PI is at the moment pretty bleak.


Sorry!

 

[Benjamin]

Hello Geir! My Raspberry Pi4b has been running opensim since last we spoke here. No real problems with 9 regions and a dozen NPC's.
Now with the latest 9.3.x release of Opensim it seems they have completely dropped the 32 bit platform and now only X64. There is no more Lib32 in the ./bin directory only Lib64, also the physics modules are labeled as x86_X64 and makes me wonder if they are interchangeable.
There is one fellow named Pete that did an article on an easy install of 32 bit dotnet6 and it genuinely worked for me.
Link here
I now have 32bit dotnet6 up and running...that was before I realized that opensim had no 32bit support, and then I slapped my head. So I checked and yes they now have 64bit Raspbian Linux OS Here's the link.

So that leaves me wondering if once all of this criteria is met, a 64bit OS, 64bit Dotnet6, Opensim 9.3.x, then we should only have a possible recompile of physics libraries? I think there may still be hope here and I certainly appreciate your website and announcements. Thank you!

 

[Geir Nøklebye]

I have the latest OpenSim running on a PI 4 with latest 64-bit Raspbian OS (Debian 12) after I manually installed dotnet to /usr/local/dotnet.

I also got it installed and compiling on a PI 5 last night, so will test it with a region.

The PI 4 region, which is a small VAR, is at grid.xmir.org:8002/Dayturn It runs pretty decent.

 

[Benjamin]

Did you have to recompile the physics modules or did they work out of the box? I'm waiting to do the x64 update to the OS since I'm not excited about possibly loosing 400GB of data on my Raspberry's hard drive.

 

[Geir Nøklebye]

The necessary libraries are all there for it to work - use Bullet physics.

 

[Benjamin]

Very nice thank you for your help and updates!