Introduction

This is a short tutorial to install thelounge on Raspberry Pi Zero / W. I assume you have already set up your rpi and connected to the internet.

1. Installing dependencies

thelounge depends on nodejs LTS or greater. current nodejs LTS version is 17.x (as of writing this article) but only 12.x is available in raspbian OS repository. even though, nodejs discontinued official support for armv6, we can still get precompiled binaries from unoffical builds. just don’t expect any kind of support if you run into any problems 😑️

1. Download nodejs LTS for armv6.

wget https://unofficial-builds.nodejs.org/download/release/v17.4.0/node-v17.4.0-linux-armv6l.tar.gz

2. extract the downloaded file.

tar -xvf node-v17.4.0-linux-armv6l.tar.gz

3. install

cd node-v17.4.0-linux-armv6l
sudo cp * -R /usr

4. confirm by checking version

node -v

2. Install yarn

nodejs is prepackaged with npm package manager. we can use npm to install yarn which is recommended to use with thelounge¹

sudo npm install yarn --global

3. install thelounge

1. get latest .deb from github release page.

2. as we installed nodejs from an unofficial source (and not through apt package manager), it will not satisfy the nodejs requirement of .deb file. we can skip dependency checks in two ways.

• force dpkg
  • dpkg --force-all -i thelounge.deb

(OR)

• edit .deb dependencies
  • How To: Change .deb Package Dependencies

3. add (default) user to thelounge

sudo thelounge add ircuser

it will prompt for a password, choose any password. you can then head to http://192.168.x.x:9000 and log in.

Conclusion

A suggestion in good faith: don’t buy armv6 boards. they are already obsolete and as time goes on, compatible software will be hard t come by.