Board Manager / Library Manager are Empty on VirtualBox / Remote SSH

[MitchTalmadge]

Howdy. I am trying to use this plugin over remote SSH on a VirtualBox machine because I'd like to develop in Linux even though I run Windows. Unfortunately the board manager and library manager just show empty windows and I cannot find any errors related to this.

Any ideas of where to go from here? I know this may be an odd setup so I appreciate any help.

• VSCode version: 1.46.1
• OS:
  • Host: Windows 10, v2004
  • Guest: Debian GNU/Linux 10 Buster
• Extension versions:
  • Arduino: 0.3.1
  • Remote SSH: 0.51.0
• Arduino version: 1.8.13

[rotogro]

Same issue. All the same versions. Getting Error:

/snap/arduino/current/arduino: line 35: java: command not found
[Error] Exit with code=127

[Strat00s]

Yey, I am not the only one.
I wanted to try the remote development using SSH and everything seems to work fine. Except for Arduino.
And I am also not sure, if it even can work remotely (using my windows PC as I/O and the server as everything else).
PIO also seems to not work as I expected. Hopefully it will get better.

P.S.: I am using a headless server, which is (or at least was) an issue for Arduino, so maybe there is still a problem with it.

Edit: Just as I thought. I can't select serial port, so it is kinda useless for me as of now 😞

[MitchTalmadge]

For what it's worth I have switched to WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and it works much better. It does have its own problem though: code formatting takes FOREVER and I have no idea why. But that's the C++ plugin's fault, not this one.

microsoft/vscode-cpptools#5558

[mj2068]

Yey, I am not the only one.
I wanted to try the remote development using SSH and everything seems to work fine. Except for Arduino.
And I am also not sure if it even can work remotely (using my windows PC as I/O and the server as everything else).
PIO also seems to not work as I expected. Hopefully, it will get better.

P.S.: I am using a headless server, which is (or at least was) an issue for Arduino, so maybe there is still a problem with it.

Edit: Just as I thought. I can't select serial port, so it is kinda useless for me as of now 😞

I have exactly the same encounters as you, but, tbh, our setups are kind of an odd one... but hopefully, things will get better.

and, regarding the problem, the only information I've found that i thought might relates to the issue is in the "System Requirements" section of the Overview page of the "Remote Development" extension, quote:
"...
Some extensions installed on ARMv7l (AArch32) and ARMv8l (AArch64) devices may not work due to the use of x86 native code in the extension. Similarly, extensions installed in Alpine Linux containers or the Alpine WSL distribution may not work due to glibc dependencies in native code inside the extension. See the Remote Development and Linux article for details."

this hit bullseye for me, as I'm using an raspberry pi 4b+ as my remote device, which is indeed an ARM device.

but I'm NOT knowledgeable enough about the Arduino extension to be sure about whether it's really the x86 code in it that's causing the issues.

[bastibeckr]

The empty windows / tabs show a web-view. I tried it locally and it looks good. The URL is something like
http://localhost:37061/boardmanager...

When opening the dev-tools / inspector in VSCode, indeed a web-view will load and fails (in case of remote). When I try to open this URL on the remote machine (via curl), I get something back.

Of course, when the extension is installed on the remote machine, this will not work out-of-the-box. The localhost:// must be replaced somehow and the http-server must allow external connections.

This should be the source for the Web-Server:

vscode-arduino/src/arduino/localWebServer.ts

Line 20 in 3bb7b14

return `http://localhost:${this.server.address().port}`;

I don't know creating a local web server is common practice for extensions and if the problem can be solved by this extension or by remote-ssh extension. There's an option for port-forwarding in the remote-ssh extension, but since the port seems to be random, this won't work.

I don't know the details about VSCode extension development, but maybe this helps.

EDIT:

Webviews seem to be common-practice: https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/webview
And this issue seems to be related: microsoft/vscode#102449

[RanzQ]

@rotogro Check this config to fix the java not found issue: #1163

[davidcooper1]

@MitchTalmadge I think I found the issue. When serving the view to the UI extension, the workspace extension sends a link using localhost instead of using vscode.env.asExternalUri to automatically port forward from the remote computer. I was personally dealing with this issue trying to remotely develop with my raspberry pi. I'll be reading through the contributing readme and posting a PR hopefully soon.

[benmcmorran]

Reactivating because the fix is merged to main but not yet released.

[github-actions]

This issue has been fixed in the latest release of this extension, which is available in the VS Code extension marketplace.