After you have installed the OS of your choice on the DeskPi Pro, you can’t use the frontpanel USB ports and there is no fan control, too. The standard recommendation goes as follows:

If your system has gcc installed, enter this command, if not, read the next paragraphs first:

git clone https://github.com/DeskPi-Team/deskpi

What’s missing here is: You should do this under your normal user account. If you have successfully done this, you will have a new directory

deskpi

More precise:

~/deskpi

The sudo/root problem

Change into this directory and type

sudo install-ubuntu-64.sh

You may choose your appropriate install script, of course. It is very important that you must not do this as root! You’ll end up with erroneous path entries which can’t be resolved by the script. You must use

sudo

The GCC problem

The abovementioned install script contains a line beginning with gcc:

log_action_msg "DeskPi main control service loaded."
cd $installationfolder/drivers/c/ 
mv $installationfolder/drivers/c/pwmFanControl $installationfolder/drivers/c/pwmFanControl.old
gcc -o $installationfolder/drivers/c/pwmFanControl $installationfolder/drivers/c/pwmControlFan.c
sudo cp -rf $installationfolder/drivers/c/pwmFanControl /usr/bin/pwmFanControl
sudo cp -rf $installati...

I show you the lines before and those after the gcc call to demonstrate that this script does not check the existence of gcc on your system! So you get no explicit warning, you’ll only see one error message flying by. On my Ubuntu 21.10 64bit OS gcc was missing, it was not installed by default. Check this and install the gcc package before you even try to install deskpi!

In my case the USB ports on the front panel did work, that was a success, but I could not verify that the fancontrol has any effect at all. The noise inside the DeskPi Pro case did not change when I switched the fan mode using deskpi-config.

Checking the temperature manually

The command

vcgencmd measure_temp

does work, so I’m able to check the temperature whenever I like. That’s great!

The shutdown problem with the power button (see PPPS!)

One thing remains, no big deal, but one should take care: When I shutdown Ubuntu via the system menu, the shutdown seems to work fine, but the power button does not change to red, it remains blue as in normal working state. So, after your monitor shows that no input signal is received anymore, you should press the power button until it has become red. The same is true for the command

halt -p

Same problem. I couldn’t figure out yet how to resolve this.

Have fun with your DeskPi!

PS: Maybe a part of the solution…

https://github.com/DeskPi-Team/deskpi/issues/59

PPS: The support team…

If you expect an answer from support@deskpi.com: I sent them an inquiry mentioning the halt problem on January 8, 2022, until now there was no reaction at all. I’m not very optimistic that there’ll be an answer some time in the future…

PPPS: Halt problem resolved?

On 26 January, 2022, I performed an Ubuntu update on my deskpi, and magically the problem disappeared… Normal shutdown as well as the command halt -p shut down the Pi correctly now. Also the fan control works properly, no problems left 🙂 !