Big problems from a small bug in v2.31

Hi,

TL;DR: Hostname in /etc/hosts in v2.31 is wrong causing a very unstable and slow/sluggish system because all „sudo“ calls have this error „sudo: unable to resolve host (max2play)“. The 127.0.0.1 entry in /etc/hosts has „raspberry“ as the name which doesn’t match with /etc/hostname (= max2play)

Quick fix for end-users: change „raspberry“ in /etc/hosts to „max2play“
(Or, for those who aren’t familiar with linux/ssh/cmdline etc, change the player name to „raspberry“ in the „Setting/Reboot“ page of the webinterface, that also changes the url to access it)

Long, probably way to detailed, story:
After seeing some videos and reading about max2play I decided to try it and at some point even bought the 5yr licence (if only to support the devs). But after my first install on an RPi3 with the official 7″ touchscreen I found it to be slow, hard to configure and giving weird unexpected results, not at all what I expected as it’s advertised as quick and easy (and reading the feedback it is for most users)

Things I did and encountered:

** I couldn’t reach it with the http://max2play/ hostname but that’s fine. It’s likely more to blame on my providers cablemodem and/or my network set-up. Such a feature just won’t work everywhere and it’s always reachable on the ip, no problems there.
** After getting the Wifi up and running and testing the squeezeplayer from LMS I thought the slowness of the webpage could be related to some settings or that the image wasn’t really optimised for the RPi 3 yet. That’s when I decided to buy a licence and get the Settings plugin which actually claims to detect an RPi2 (possible small harmless bug).
** I ticked the Autostart X environment and after rebooting noticed it could take up to a minute before the desktop appeared after boot completion (saw the login prompt for ~1m)
Not what I’m used to on Raspbian.
** I figured maybe the touchscreen plugin is needed so I installed that and configured it but apart from hiding the mouse I didn’t notice much difference.
** I installed the Jivelite plugin which refused to start and the „click here for details“ revealed nothing. Ticked Auto start Jive, rebooted, still just a delayed empty desktop.
** Found some things on the forum on how to start it from the cmd line so I tried that a few times but it either started shortly and then disappeared, sometimes the desktop disappeared completely, sometimes it got totally stuck.
** And then all of a sudden when I left it sitting for a while after yet another reboot, Jivelite started and I could actually configure it to my liking. It even survived a few reboots so I was happy and called it a day, still thinking it’s some new quirks related to the RPi3.
** Next day, not working anymore, best thing I got was an empty desktop.
** Decided to test the bluetooth plugin as that looked interesting, worked pretty much immediately after installing and all of a sudden I had another stable occurrence of Jivelite, which I lost again. Frustrating…
** At this point I decided to start over with a fresh image, carefully installing things one by one, thoroughly test it before moving on to the next plugin with many iterations and combinations of autostarting on/off, deleting all display settings etc, etc trying lots of suggestions I found on the forums but nothing worked stable, and the interface was still slow.
** This is when I decided to start looking under the hood and started investigating the scripts. I started to suspect the „detect if X is running“ logic was broken or clashing when the next plugin tried the same detection. I noticed multiple „startx“ processes among other things and wrote my own small test versions using only relevant bits from the max2play scripts based on my situation but still, never really able to get a smooth stable system.
** Sometimes I noticed the „unable to resolve host (max2play)“ error message but figured it was related to my very first point and because I’m mostly used to switching to the root user rather then using sudo I never connected the error message with sudo. Once I did, it was easy to solve and after fixing /etc/hosts I finally got the max2play experience I expected.

So, lots of lessons learned which also led me to writing a very basic Jivelite plugin for controlling the RPi touchscreen brightness (happy to share it once I polished it a bit more).
It also made me try a bunch of possible alternative methods on how to launch certain processes/plugins (especially when there’s dependencies) which might be interesting to investigate further. I haven’t tested yet if the sudo error just caused a delay on the command or if it failed completely. If it’s just delaying I can imagine other timing issues or holdups causing this kind of instability, maybe worth discussing later. For now I’m going to enjoy my current stable Max2Play system.

Cheers!