Mycroft virtualbox appliance?

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Is there a Virtualbox appliance that runs Mycroft? Could someone please put one together?

I have not been able to

  1. get Mycroft working on Ubuntu Gnome
  2. get the PiCroft image working on QEMU

I would love to use Mycroft. My native OS is Ubuntu 16.10.

Thanks!

1 Like
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Hey otto!

What issues are you having with getting Mycroft working on Ubuntu Gnome? That’s exactly what I’m using and I followed this guide here:
https://docs.mycroft.ai/development/getting.started

As for QEMU, that’s something I’m going to try set-up soon as it seems like a good way to develop for the Pi indirectly.

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Hi Karl,

My original issue: I followed the instructions on github:

and ran it on Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 in a virtualbox vm with 4GB of RAM. The install went as expected, the blue icon appeared in the system tray and Mycroft indicated “connected”, but I got no response to either text or audio inputs. No error messages of any kind either. How to proceed/trouble shoot?

Your advice: I followed the instructions on:
https://docs.mycroft.ai/development/getting.started

and the installation was successful! (Cool!) Voice works.

Can I use Mycroft to take dictation? Specifically, can it be used to fill out online forms by voice? My wife is a doctor, I installed Ubuntu on her computer, and voice dictation would make her job a whole lot easier. Any help to this end would be greatly appreciated and would greatly raise the profiles of Ubuntu and Mycroft in the medical community! :slight_smile:

Thanks!

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There isn’t a GUI as part of Mycroft-Core. The Mycroft unit has a display and it looks like Aiix is working on a GUI here:

As for the ability to fill out forms by voice, there isn’t a Skill for that yet, but it’s a good idea. Right now most other Skills that aren’t part of Mycroft-Core can be found here:

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At first, I wanted to try the QEMU route. I found a really great tutorial from Microsoft, no less, still available at: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/iliast/2016/11/10/how-to-emulate-raspberry-pi/

I only sort-of got QEMU working with the PiCroft image. I should note that I tried all this in a Windows environment. Perhaps QEMU on Linux would give better results. In any case, I fell back to VirtualBox approximation. Here is a good overview of approach: http://dbakevlar.com/2015/08/emulating-a-raspberry-pi-on-virtualbox/
Note that as the author points out, VirtualBox is x86 only, and Pi is ARM. Also GPIO is missing. So this is not a true or complete virtualization. But it should still be useful to perform some general python and shell development. Also note that since the time of writing of that article, RaspberryPi group has started dual-build of Raspbian, one for ARM/pi and one for good old x86! So this brings us a little closer to simulating Mycroft.

Supersummary Recipe:

  1. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
  2. https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/
    (“Raspberry Pi Desktop” is the x86 edition)
  3. Create New VirtualBox VM as a Linux - Debian - 32-bit type. Give it at least a 10GB disk.
  4. Start the new VM. It will prompt for location of installer ISO to mount; select the Raspberry Pi Desktop disk and install. (I opted for manual disk partitioning so I could increase swap partition to a full 1 GB).
  5. In VirtualBox Settings, enable PAE/NX for the Mycroft_x86 VM.
  6. Finally, boot up, perform apt updates, then “Mycroft Core for Linux” install
    https://github.com/MycroftAI/mycroft-core/blob/dev/README.md

At this point, I do have an exported OVA (Open Virtual Appliance) that could be useful for others. However, it weighs in at 4GB, so I would need some kind of hosting/sharing to upload it to.

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Hi Otto! I’m new here but we are looking for the same solution.

I deployed over the weekend KDE Neon on a VirtualBox Host.

I’m using an external USB headset that I set on VirtualBox to use it on the virtual machine.

it has been working so far.