First Time build WLAN Pi on Raspberry Pi 4

[timg11]

I downloaded WLAN Pi OS, wrote it to an SD Card, and installed it in a Raspberry Pi 4 that I already had.
I have an HDMI monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
The Pi boots into the shell, and I can perform typical linux commands.

I see that WLAN Pi ships with a small LCD display in the pre-made versions that provides a basic user interface. Is there an application that can give me similar UI functions but displaying on the HDMI monitor?

[joshschmelzle]

You will need to install a desktop environment. Just like the official Raspberry Pi OS Lite image, the WLAN Pi OS image does not ship with one.

[joshschmelzle]

Try installing the official Raspberry Pi one with sudo apt install xserver-xorg raspberrypi-ui-mods followed by sudo raspi-config and change the system boot option to boot to desktop. Let us know how it goes.

[timg11]

Thank you! I forgot that GUI could be added later.
All steps completed - sudo apt install packages, enabled "desktop autologin" in raspi-config, let it reboot. The boot process on the console looked normal, but when it was time for the desktop to appear there was nothing but a black screen.
Luckily I had enabled SSH while I was in raspi-config, so I was able to log in over SSH and change boot back to console.

Also I'm noticing several minutes of delay during boot on "waiting for network to be configured", which eventually displays "Failed".
Finally, Ethernet gets an IP and works, but using raspi-config to configure WLAN fails.

[joshschmelzle]

Correct, the desktop environment doesn't load and the HDMI output is just a black screen.

Either capture card I tried shows the boot process and start-up sequence scroll by prior to failing to load the desktop environment. I imagine yours is failing at the same spot.

I haven't been able to figure out what is wrong yet. We don't officially support a desktop environment in our image because using the WLAN Pi via keyboard + mouse + monitor isn't a targeted use case, but at the same time, there should be a way to optionally enable that use case.

[timg11]

OK - I'll proceed with the terminal for now. Next step is to get the Netgear AXE3000 USB 3.0 WiFi Adapter -A8000 recognized and operating. I'll start a new thread for that.

[jiribrejcha]

@timg11 the Netgear adapter works out of the box.

[timg11]

@jiribrejcha that's good to know. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious. My findings so far are summarize in this post

I have searched for a while for a CLI guide on the wlanPi, but have not found it. Since I only have the terminal, I need to use the CLI for configuring wlanpi. I'm finding that "traditional" Pi utilities like iwconfig don't work as expected.

[joshschmelzle]

@timg11 iwconfig and wireless extensions is deprecated. You should be using ip and iw instead.