Getting Started

Prerequisites

• A screen
• A speaker system.
• An ethernet connection since wifi is currently not supported.
• A x86 compatible PC/Notebook. (Though ARM has some basic support - see: Hacking)
• An external storage device with at least 512MB. (e.g. a USB stick or SD card)

Install the pre-built image

There is a pre built image that you can simply write to an external storage devices as is. It should work out of the box for most systems since it includes all available kernel modules as well as xorg graphics drivers.

Linux

Open a Terminal. And use wget to download the latest image.

wget https://github.com/downloads/Metalab/ScreenInvader/screeninvader.dd.xz

Change to root user and write the image to the storage device. You need xz-utils to decompress the image.

xzcat screeninvader.dd.xz > /dev/sdX

Windows

• First, extract the .xz image, if you don't have any software to do so, you can use ''7-zip for Windows''.
• Download 7-zip from here.
• Install 7-zip
• The extracted image file will have the extension .dd, but the program we use to write the image doesn't associate with this extension, so right click the file and choose rename, and replace the .dd with .img
• Download the image writer from here, choosing the latest release of the binary (the first download link).
• Extract the contents of the .zip to a known directory.
• Run the .exe labled 'W32DiskImager.exe'
• Select the ScreenInvader Image file
• Select the drive letter/mount point for the storage device (please verify this is the correct device)
• Click 'Write' to begin writing the image to the storage device.

Building the ScreenInvader system from scratch

Creating a custom ScreenInvader file system from scratch is only support on Linux. First you need to fetch the latest source code.

git clone https://github.com/Metalab/ScreenInvader.git

In the base directory of the ScreenInvader project tree there are two scripts of interest: makestick.sh and bootstrap.sh.

• makestick.sh is reponsible for preparing a storage device (e.g. USB stick) for a ScreenInvader file system.
• bootstrap.sh is responsible for doing all necessary steps for creating a ScreenInvader file system.

makestick.sh - Prepare a file system for installation of the ScreenInvader system.

Usage: ./makestick.sh <device-file> [<sizeInM>]

<device-file>    a block special device.
<sizeInM>        the size of the resulting file system in megabytes.

./bootstrap.sh [-a <arch>][-l <logfile>][-c <apt-cacher-port>][-i -d -u ] <bootstrapdir>
Options:
  -a <arch> Bootstrap a system of the given architecture
  -g <num>  Build with selected graphics card
  -l <file> Specify the log file
  -p <port> Enables using apt-cacher-ng on the specified port
  -i        Don't configure and install packages
  -d        Don't debootstrap
  -u        Combined -d and -i
  -x        Install extra packages for debugging

Prepare a storage device

WARNING: The following commands will destroy all data on the storage device.

First create a bootable partition layout and a file system using makestick.sh. (Replace /dev/sdX with the block device of your storage device in the following sections)

cd ScreenInvader
# See makestick.log for verbose output
sudo ./makestick.sh /dev/sdX 500

Bootstrap the file system

Mount the first partition and bootstrap the file system.

sudo mount /dev/sdX1 /media/screeninvader
cd ScreenInvader
# see bootstrap.log for verbose output
sudo ./bootstrap.sh /media/screeninvader

Boot it!

You just need to insert the storage device into the PC/Notebook you want to host the ScreenInvader and power it on though you might need to configure the boot order in the bios settings to boot from the storage device first.