I’m new to Jami. I have set up Jami on a Windows PC and on two Ubuntu PCs (same account on all three), and all are working. However, these machines are not online 24/7, which means messages wont transfer until both myself and the recipient are online. My thinking is to have Jami running on a Raspberry Pi, as I have several of these online 24/7, and if I’ve understood Swarm correctly these would act as an intermediary to store and forward messages sent from my PCs when the the recipient comes back online. So my first question is, should this work?
Assuming I’m not wasting my time trying to make this work, the Pi is failing to send or receive any messages. Running jami-gnome & in the terminal, I see the ominous message ** (jami-gnome:19887): WARNING **: 11:32:20.511: no primary network connection detected, check network settings. However, the Pi is able to connect to the network and indeed the internet (eg using the web browser). This may or may not relate to a preceding message, (jami-gnome:19887): libnotify-WARNING **: 11:32:16.388: Failed to connect to proxy, but the Pi isn’t set up to connect to the internet via a proxy server. So my second question is, what do you suggest I do to get the Pi communicating using Jami?
Jami version:
“Together”
built on 2024-09-13 00:14:43 UTC
OS version:
Raspbian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye) (32 bit)
That’s the version that apt install gives me, and it’s only a few months old. Although there is now a 64 bit version of Raspberry OS, that was not the case when I set up the machine. Switching to 64 bit would require starting again from scratch, and would very possibly be too much of a burden on the hardware.
This is because the old Raspberry Pis are still supported (which is good) but have a 32-bit CPU, which means they couldn’t run a 64-bit OS, however 64-bit CPUs can run a 32-bit OS. So, it kind of makes sense to make the OS 32-bit for everyone by default. However, there are some performance benefits of using a 64-bit OS on a 64-bit CPU, to leverage the capabilities of the CPU.
the 64-bit CPU capabilities thanks to the new 64-bit Linux kernel which can give us a performance boost in some situations.
It seems that if your hardware is 64-bit, you will actually get a performance boost when using the 64-bit version of the Raspbian operating system compared to using the 32-bit version of the Raspbian operating system.
Additionally, by having the 64-bit operating system, you will be able to use the latest version of the Jami application.
There is a post in these forums where the Jami developers have written (in French) that provides the instructions on how to install Jami on an always-on computer (in your case, your Raspberry Pi) without the GUI. The link to the instructions (written in French) is:
Ooooh, thank you ovari, that’s some really useful information there. I’ll dd the Pi’s SD card and dive into that. Although I’ve not gone through the how-to details, my schoolboy French from a long time ago kicked in and I largely understood it. As it happens, I must leave the Pi till later as I really need to do my German homework before my German teacher puts me in detention this evening (fat chance, we live in different countries), but I’ll let you know what happens (with the Pi).
Yesterday evening my brother joined me on Jami and we were engaged in a video call on our respective PCs. I logged into the Pi via ssh and fired up Jami on the Pi to see what it was doing. It asked me if I wanted to add in my brother, so that part was at least working, but when I did so it immediately launched an all-out assault, making a call to him and locking me out completely. The video part of the call on our PCs disappeared shortly after, and then the UI crashed on my brother’s PC, but the audio soldiered on. We both ended up resorting to killing Jami like it was a demented robot. Let’s hope the switch to 64 bit works.
The version of Jami running on the Pi seems to postdate COVID by a couple of years. Surely its name during COVID should have been “socially distanced” .
When you, your brother, and anyone else you are having Jami conversations with have updated Jami, please check that the Jami version name is “Εἰρήνη” by clicking the “About Jami” button.
The blog article entitled “Together”, the new version of Jami and a new step forward was published on October 16, 2020:
If you are planning to have group audio or video calls, everyone will need to enable the (Experimental) Enable call support for groups toggle found by clicking the Open settings button. A screenshot can be found by visiting:
Today I removed Jami from the Pi and followed the how-to on switching a Pi from 32 bit to 64 bit, and that all went very smoothly. But when I reinstalled Jami I got the same version again, not working any better. Much searching suggests that possibly Jami has not been supported on the Pi since 2020 / Raspbian 10, but the version I installed using apt said “built on 2024-09-13 00:14:43 UTC” in the about box, even though the version name was given as “Together”. However, this web page explains how to install March 2025 Jami using snap. I hate snap, but I gave it a go anyway. However, after executing sudo snap install jami I was informed that it was only available in (bleeding) edge form. So I installed it with sudo snap install --edge jami, but whilst it did install and started running, it issued vast numbers of errors and never displayed the UI.
Raspberry Pi OS (previously known as Raspbian) version numbers are the same as the Debian releases on which it’s based. So I’m running running Raspbian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye) (now on arm64), which is based on Debian 11 (bullseye). After switching the Pi to arm64 and before I re-installed Jami , in lieu of instructions for Raspberry Pi OS I followed the instructions for Debian 11 (64-bit). This resulted in “Together” being installed. This came from the standard Raspberry Pi repositories, presumably because there wasn’t a candidate for arm64 in the Jami repository.
The information at Report a bug: chat view cannot show in debian installed from snap suggests that all I can do is report a bug with the snap installation. I’ve grabbed the messages it produced in order to do that. Edit: Maybe not. apt installation is very much preferable to both snap and flatpack.
Thank you for translating the French how-to. I’ll attempt a bi-lingual diff to see if I can spot anything that doesn’t look right to me .
I’ve done that now and it looks good to me. My only comment is that it might be worthwhile to make it clear that jamiserver.service can be created and edited with a text editor (eg sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/jamiserver.service).
Note: For Linux on Arm on desktops, we use Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB RAM and Ubuntu 24.04 as a reference platform. If you have an issue with another hardware, please try to reproduce the issue on Raspberry Pi 5. We plan to move to regular platform support when a wider range of ARM-based desktop hardware becomes available.
I’m minded to try this method, but I can’t find any .deb files for arm64, even though you are using Ubuntu 24.04 on a Raspberry Pi, and the QT page you linked to lists Debian 11 on arm64. Do you have a .deb file for Debian 11 on arm64?
Thank you, Rubus_chiliadenus, I look forward to giving that a try.
As I understand it, ovari, Raspberry OS is a specially optimised version of Debian for the Pi. In addition, this particular Pi has been built for a specific purpose, and I went to a lot of trouble to do that. So I don’t want to change it. I would be willing to install Debian 12 on another SD card if necessary, just to prove the idea, but it’s not the solution I’m after. Just having the daemon sounds like a good plan, as then the Pi can be headless and fanless with no GUI (I have several of those). I can’t imagine it requires much processing power just to store and forward a few, occasional messages.
The release name “together” brought back some memory about the COVID-19 pandemic.
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