I’m currently hosting a freedombox server on my old Raspberry Pi 3B. I thought it would be a good idea to try and install a desktop on the pi so I can use a screen with it, but for some reason it won’t let me. Is this due to the OS being packaged with freedombox, or am I doing something wrong?
sudo apt install xserver-xorg raspberrypi-ui-mods is all I’m running, but it says E: Unable to locate package raspberrypi-ui-mods
I can’t speak from direct experience with a Pi 3B, but a couple of points:
FreedomBox is a Debian pure blend and the SD card images for the Pi are built on Debian, not RaspberryPi OS. raspberrypi-ui-mods appears to be a RaspberryPi OS package, not a Debian package.
The RaspberryPi3B and RaspberryPi3B+ hardware pages note: “Please do not expect any output on a monitor connected via HDMI to this device as it does not display anything beyond the message ‘Starting kernel…’”.
FreedomBox release 25.2 adds GNOME as an app that can be installed to have a desktop UI, but per the manual page, “This app is not suitable for low-end hardware. It requires at least 4GiB of RAM, 4GiB of disk space and a GPU capable of basic 3D acceleration”, so it’s not an option for the Pi 3B with its 1GiB of RAM.
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That solves that mystery, thank you! Time to see if I have a pi4 lying around.