FAQ

I am only getting white-on-black text on my monitor. Where is my UI?

motionPie will never display anything beautiful on your monitor - it is meant to only be used from a web browser. The ugly text that appears on the monitor is actually useful when debugging. Most users should ignore it.

Why do I get permission denied when trying to log in with SSH/TTY console?

Make sure you use root or admin as username. admin is just an alias for root. Use the password you set for the administrator in the UI. By default (or when the administrator's password is empty), you need to enter the board's serial number as password.

Also keep in mind that passwords are applied at boot so your new password will be fully effective only after a reboot.

What's my board's serial number?

Your motionPie's hostname is displayed in the UI in the top bar, when logged in as administrator. It has the form mp-xxxxxxxx, where xxxxxxxx is the serial number. The hostname also shows up when you're prompted to log in a shell (SSH/TTY).

I can't seem to find apt-get or any other package manager. What gives?

motionPie is not a general-purpose Linux distribution. You can't install packages like you do with a normal distro. If you need to further customize your setup, installing motionEye on a common distro is recommended.

Why do I get Read-only file system when trying to edit a file?

Both the boot and the root partitions are mounted read-only to prevent filesystem corruption. If you want to make changes to a file on any of these two partitions, re-mount them as writable:

mount -o remount,rw /
mount -o remount,rw /boot

What's the deal with Snapshot URL, Streaming URL and Embed URL?

Snapshot URL serves a single JPEG file when requested. The served JPEG image is always the most recently captured frame. You can use this URL as the src attribute of an <img> HTML tag but keep in mind that it won't update automatically. You shouldn't use this unless you know what you are doing.

Streaming URL provides MJPEG streaming. It can be used as a source for other applications that deal with video streams and know how to handle MJPEGs, or it can be used as the src attribute of an <img> HTML tag.

Note: Internet Explorer doesn't support MJPEG streams at all; Chrome plays them nicely if they are part of a web page but won't display anything if the streaming URL is entered directly in the address bar.

Embed URL provides a complete standalone HTML document (i.e. web page) that can be opened in most modern browsers and that will refresh automatically. Think of it as the camera frame part of the UI without any surrounding elements. You can use this to embed the stream into another web page, using an <iframe> HTML tag.