SamplerBox and Pure Data: Theory and Practice

Step by Step guide to installing Pure Data to the SamplerBox OS (Updated for the January 2022 image!)

I finally had the energy and motivation to start with my fresh build of this project!

first things first, you'll want a larger SD card for installing your OS, as we will need to install a lot more than Pure Data to get everything working, I'm using a 32gb card.



Start by installing a fresh copy of SamplerBox to your SD card, we will next need terminal access, either by connecting a keyboard and monitor to your Pi or using SSH (you'll want to use remote access later so you might as well start now, I'm using Terminus on Windows)


We need to modify our file system (we need to enlarge both the Samples partition as well as the root partition so that we can), this is easily done if you have a linux system or a second SD card with the standard Raspbian OS and a card reader handy, here I'm using gparted to resize the drives, notice that I've increased the root folder to 8+gb (should be more than enough), and gave the remaining 19gb to the samples directory, this can all be done from the terminal but I find the GUI helps me make sure I'm not screwing up



   


boot up your new samplerbox image and enter 'devel' into the terminal, this is development mode, which remounts the drives as read/write and stops samplerbox.py

enter:
sudo raspi-config

and go to localization, update the timezone and press finish

update the local time as directed by the prompt when you entered development mode, run

sudo apt-get update

return to raspi-config and under 'interface' enable VNC, this will take awhile

we still need to install a desktop environment before we can boot into vnc,
enter the lines below and while you're at it go ahead and install synaptic (it'll be useful soon)

Code:

sudo apt install xserver-xorg
sudo apt install xfce4 xfce4-terminal
sudo apt install synaptic

We should now be able to boot up and go to a desktop environment with VNC

in the next post we will compile the latest version of Pure Data from scratch (all the raspberry pi repositories are using a version from several years ago, and there have been some substantial improvements since then)