Hy,

I would recommend turning off Audio Notifications in KStars. You can find Notifications in one of the menus. You can just turn off each of the "Play a sound" ones. That should prevent it from trying to use Audio. Based on what you said, I suspect you don't have an audio device that VLC likes.

Thanks,

Rob

Rob,

I've looked for such a menu option, unsuccessfully.
I've even searched the code:

Not sure what to do with the snapcraft.yaml.
Do you know specifically where to look ? I can't find code that does the notifying either.

Thanks,
Hy

Not so fast rlancaste. I personally noted when I built KStars version 3.3.5 with your script some time ago, the entire notification configuration menu was missing. I have since updated it to 3.3.7 and the menu has returned.
Although interestingly enough I do not have the icons displayed in the top pull down menus as shown in your screenshot.

Rob, thanks, but that menu item "Configure Notifications" is missing from my system.
Perhaps that's a Raspbian Buster thing?
See the screenshot:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/f1kaxfJjub8KXmi78

@Ihoujin: FWIW, I'm running code I compiled from the head of the git tree yesterday.

> cd ~/AstroRoot/kstars
> git log --oneline | head -4
61729fdff Adds an option to mouse-pan the HiPS graphics.
b926ba790 Use AppDataLocation on Android
576e9ab55 Add JNow to indicate the epoch for both telescope and solution coordinates
9cfac15cf implement detect from ekos in FOV editor. Use INVALID_VALUE instead of -1 when there is no solution available yet

Interesting. I'm running the bleeding edge on an AstroPi3 installed Kstars on an Odroid-N2 and I have the menu item "Configure Notifications". My AstroPi3 install was relatively recent (probably less than 2 weeks)>

So one thing that is probably relevant is that about 8 days ago, I accepted a pull request from Radek to add the optional dependencies libkf5notifyconfig-dev libqt5datavisualization5-dev and qt5keychain-dev. I would say all three of those are desirable packages. A raspberry pi may or may not have an audio device, but being able to configure it is useful. And the visualizations package will enable the user to make use of the 3D Star profile viewer that I made last year. And the qt keychain dependency will support logins for Ekos Live. So they are useful. So if you built since the change was made, you should be able to use the 3D Star Profile, you should be able to use the notification configuration and probably also use Ekos Live with the qt keychain. But if you built It before then, you probably don't have those features.

The 3D star profile is working at least with simulators. It performance is laggy on the RPi4 with a selection of 128 or larger.

Well, when I said I did a pull yesterday, I meant a kstars pull, not astroPi. Once installed, I don't tend to re-run AstroPi (eg just 'git pull' inside kstars and 'make -j6 kstars'). So, I just 'pulled' the new AstroPi and, yes, found the new line in the Raspian script.
I manually ran the following:
$ sudo apt -y install libkf5notifyconfig-dev libqt5datavisualization5-dev qt5keychain-dev
$ cd ~/AstroRoot/kstars-build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ../kstars
$ make -j 6 kstars
Then started up kstars with
$ ~/AstroRoot/kstars-build/kstars/kstars

and sure enough, the KStars-->Settings-->ConfigureNotifications menu was there!!!!!! (I unclicked 'Play a sound' for everything that had a sound attached).

BTW, on the topic of mods to the script, the conky window was jumping around a lot, in a sort-of annoying way (basically resizing itself every half second). I looked into it, and in ~/.conkyrc, I changed the minimum_width, which fixed things for me. In my case, I changed it to 250, but I suppose that might be dependent on what screen resolution was being used. It's much better for me after this change.

Thanks for your help,
Hy

Cool, I’m glad the star profile works on the pi. I never would have dreamed of trying it before the pi 4 came out, but it is much more powerful. I didn’t expect it to work great on the pi 4 even then, but if it’s working ok, then awesome! I guess with the pi 4 the resources limited mode is unnecessary too?

I’m glad you got it fixed Hy.

Some other folks have given me some ideas of how to make the script even better recently. I hope I will have some time soon to make some of those improvements, but I have had a lot of grading to do recently. My students have to come first. But I will get back to this soon.