Will Readerware run on a Raspberry Pi?

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Last Updated: October 06, 2019
Keywords: Linux, Raspberry, Raspberry Pi, ARM

Yes!

What is a Raspberry Pi? The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It is a capable little computer which can be used in electronics projects, and for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. The Raspberry Pi Foundation wants to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.

The Raspberry Pi runs Linux but it uses an ARM processor. That means that our regular Linux distributions for Intel processors would not work. However it turned out to be real simple to get Readerware to run on a Raspberry Pi as it includes Java. We now have a Linux ARM distribution designed for the Raspberry Pi.

Installation

We recommend that you use the deb installer. Currently Raspbian, the Linux distribution used by the Raspberry Pi, does not include a graphical deb package installer but you can easily install Readerware from the command line. Download the Readerware Linux ARM package installer and then issue the following command:

sudo dpkg -i rware3armhf.deb

This will install Readerware into /opt/readerware3. It will also add shortcuts to /usr/share/applications/Readerware. You can drag selected shortcuts to your desktop.

Running Readerware

Double-Click on one of the shortcuts to launch Readerware. You can also run Readerware from the command line. For example:

/opt/readerware3/readerware.sh

In our testing here, everything works as expected. The Raspberry Pi is not the fastest machine out there so performance is not great, but both client and server work. You could run Readerware on your Raspberry Pi or run the Readerware server on it and connect from other machines.

For more on the Raspberry Pi, follow their blog.