@alexandros Thanks for the tips.
Much appreciated!
I knew about the [declare -patch Gem] use and with other externals/libraries, stuff usually that you are taking from libraries on a piece by piece basis. But I probably needed a reminder. I may have incorporated the declare without thinking about it. I am working through a book on Pd at the moment and am using my Raspberry Pi for a lot of it, seeing if I can get it to work.

@ddw_music Thank you so much. That helped immensely and was much easier than I thought once I knew where GEM installed.

It was as simple as:
$ sudo apt install gem
// Then just to see what came up:
$ apt show gem
// Then to see that gem installed where you said it would:
$ dpkg -L gem
// and /usr/lib/pd/extra showed. I hope it does not cause any problems there.

Sorry about the hacked together reply with odd formatting. I do not know how to add the blackbackground formatting yet. I imagine there is a sticky somewhere about that.

From there I opened Pd, went to Preferences > Edit Preferences > Path > New > went to the root and selected /lib/pd/extra/Gem.
Then went to the Startup tab > New > typed in Gem + Enter > OK.
Then I closed and opened Pd and it showed GEM loaded. I opened a basic example from the Browser and it ran. I see now what you meant by [declare -lib Gem]. I am very new to Pd and have also been learning SuperCollider. A lot of the things get forgotten until I get into the relative platform environment. In that example, [declare -lib Gem] was there. It looks just like it does on the Mac.

@willblackhurst if you get to work, can you please provide the commands you used to install it? It would be greatly appreciated. I have tried several things to install it.

In my op, I provide what I used to install it but I think that was just for Ruby. I could not find the library anywhere on my Raspberry Pi and as I searched for the answer, I think what I did was install gem for Ruby. I do not have Ruby installed so I could not even get that to run and I am not looking to figure that out to even see if that would have any benefit for me. Not at this point anyway. In the end, I uninstalled gem.

Maybe the problem is with the current Raspberry Pi OS, Trixie.

When I type gem in the deken - Find Extenrals window, search field and click Search, I get the following:

Searching for "gem"...
Searching on http://deken.puredata.info/search...
Searching on http://deken.puredata.info/search returned 21 results
"gem": Found 0 usable packages (of 20 packages in total).
It appears that there are no matching packages for your architecture.

Maybe it just will not work with the Raspberry Pi at this time.

Hi. I am trying to install the GEM external for Pure Data on my Raspberry Pi. I have always found installing source code troubling as I do not know nearly enough about programming to work with all the options during the install.

I did find out that you can install GEM with the command line so I did that:
sudo apt install gem

I cannot find where it installed to and typing $ gem
gives me nothing but $ sudo apt install gem
gives me:
gem is already the newest version (1:0.94-8+b5).
Summary:
Upgrading: 0, Installing: 0, Removing: 0, Not Upgrading: 1

I can point Pure Data to a normally installed external when I know where it is. How do I find GEM so I can point Pd to it?

There are some more patches up in the "Working-Through-Pure-Data-Programming-Fundamentals-Vol-1" repository on GitHub: https://github.com/playinmyblues/Working-Through-Pure-Data-Programming-Fundamentals-Vol-1/tree/main

Hi. I have created a new repository that I consider patches that are more of my own exploration of Pure Data. I am currently working through Maurizio Di Berardino's book that I have mentioned before, which is pretty good. But these patches are a lot of my own explorations of Pd and figuring out some stuff on my own while I do that. The is a fair amount of jumping ahead of the book but that is fun too. I also started using my Raspberry Pi Zero W again, figuring out things on that in preparation of the idea of turning my cheap Barracuda bass into a synth bass.

Here's the repository if you are interested:
https://github.com/playinmyblues/Patches_Along_the_Way

@alexandros & @whale-av, thanks for the replies.

I use Facebook groups a lot for posting questions about synths and that sort of thing. However, the Pure Data group on Facebook looks to have fallen out of use.

Pure Data has been on my radar for a while, years actually, but I have tried a couple of times and found it to be a little too much past my level of knowledge when it comes to synths and computers. I think I have become comfortable enough with all the things that provide a good base for learning Pd aside from a good knowledge of programming in tradtionally typed languages. I have been dabbling in Raspberry Pi for years, spent some time using a Ubuntu Studio PC with Waveform and mostly hardware synths, and currently use mainly a Mac for my computing needs.

In this time I tried Patchblocks a couple of times and finally buckled down and actually figured them out. Too bad it was well after they sold their tech to another company and they are no longer widely used. It took me a while to learn enough about synth terminology and their use to become comfortable with that programming system too.

I suppose all the back and forth between different synths and some platforms that are not quite mainstream, (I would include Pd among those), I am finally figuring out the tutorials presented on Pd that I find.

As mentioned in the title of this post, I am working through that book. I had seen that some externals are available on GitHub and decided to give that a go and am posting the patches I make there for others to have a look at if they are interested. Here is that link:
https://github.com/playinmyblues/Working-Through-Pure-Data-Programming-Fundamentals-Vol-1

I also posted the link to that repository on the Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/puredata). If anybody reads this post that is an admin there, would you mind having a look at my post for approval?

I see that there are a fair number of people whom have joined that group recently so it might still get some traffic and use if it gets some posts.

Just to get the feel of what people are using, what is your preferred way of interacting with people interested in Pure Data? Where do you like to browse for ideas people have, post questions, answer questions, post music, etc.? Thanks.

@jameslo
I had just fixed that problem and could not figure out why there was some action now.

Thank you for pointing that out. It would have taken me a long time to realize what I had done wrong.

Maybe you can help with a working problem?

It seems for this particular case, I have to click on the table itself in Run mode before the bottom box will track the changes in the table according to the top box. Is that how it is supposed to work or am I doing something else wrong?

TIA

@playinmyblues
Btw, I can change the contents of the lower box, below the <tabread sticky> box. Then when I scroll the values up or down in the box above <tabread sticky>, the lower box changes to 0.

Hi. It is good to be looking at PD again. This time around I am using a Mac or a PC to learn how to program PD. It is simpler than making sure all the settings are correct with an RPi.

I am having a problem with getting a table to read correctly. The example is from a YT tutorial for a beginner but it is from 2007. It might not work that way anymore. The rest of the tutorial works well enough until I get to the point in the tutorial: 6:30 where the cursor is moving up and down, changing the values in one box to alter the values in a another box.

Video:

Beginner's Puredata Tutorial PArt 1 of 2
vreahli

Error message in PD main window:
gatom: no method for 'tabread'
first_patch.pd