DrRacket on Raspberry Pi 2

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The Raspberry Pi has normally been too slow to run DrRacket. The new Raspberry Pi 2 is quite a bit faster, but if install racket from the default repositories, you’ll probably find that you can run racket, but DrRacket fails with a message like:

Seg fault (internal error) at 0xb0f5b0
SIGSEGV SEGV_ACCERR SI_CODE 2 fault on 0xb0f5b0
Aborted

My guess is that this as something to do with the switch to ARM7 from ARM6. If you try to build Racket from the source, you may get an error like this:

Makefile:155 recipe for target ‘install-3m’ failed
make[1]: *** [install-3m] Error 137
make[1]: Leaving directory ‘/home/pi/Downloads/racket-6.1.1/src'
Makefile:86: recipe for target ‘install’ failed
make: *** [install] Error 2

Best I can tell this is an out of memory error. You can probably get it to work by rebooting and making sure there are no other programs running while you do the build. Also you can start the machine without launching X windows to leave more memory available.

Multi-tasking Communication Failure

I was on a video conference and chat room today. Someone on the video conference asked what to do about some issue with management. At few minutes before someone had typed into the chat window asking how to delete tasks. I responded with, “You have to kill them.”

My chat popped up on everyone’s screen right after the management question. The person talking on video conference said, “Well, Mark, I suppose that is one option.”

Mark Shead’s Brief Bio

Mark Shead has worked as a system administrator, network administrator, IT director, and software engineer in a variety of industries. Currently, he works with startups and on startup style projects within larger organizations. His focus is on getting better business results by improving software engineering processes–paying particular attention to the human element. This includes helping teams follow Agile principles, using DevOps to drive the delivery of business value, and engineering process improvements.

(Posted here so I can find it again next time I need it.)

Mark Shead Photo
Mark Shead