Right now, late 2025, RTB is only available for the Raspberry Pi running a Debian bookworm or later. Both 32 and 64-bit version are supported. Older versions are still available for other platforms, but the Pi version is the only current one.

Planned releases include generic ARM (32 or 64 bit), x86_64.

To download and install:

Navigate to https://project-downloads.drogon.net/rtb/ and check the readme.txt file, or use the instructions below:

cd /tmp
wget http://project-downloads.drogon.net/rtb/rtb-pi32.deb
sudo apt install ./rtb-pi32.deb

That ought to install it, however it may throw up a dependency (most likely libsdl-sound), these may be pulled automatically, but if not to resolve this, then in the usual Debian manner:

sudo apt-get -f install

will complete the installation.

Change 32 into 64 to fetch the 64-bit version.

Note that the RTB package has wiringPi built-in and includes the gpio command from wiringPi. Also note that GPIO actions only work on Pi’s version Zero through 4. The Piv5 is not supported (yet) and you need to use the generic aarch64 vrsion.

You can check this is installed with the command

gpio -v

The demo programs will also be installed and you can find them in

/usr/share/rtb/demos

You may want to copy them to your home directory if you want to change them.

At this point you should be able to start RTB by typing:

rtb

or by finding it in the desktop menu.

RTB should work both in X Windows and in the console, but certain things like keyboard mappings may be different when run directly on the console.

RTB has a built-in DIR and LOAD command, so you can load up the demos and run them – e.g.

dir
load bubble
run

And off you go.

If you have used ssh to login to your Raspberry Pi from another Linux PC, then you can use the ssh -X command and RTB will run on the Pi and display locally, however it will be very slow as the SDL libraries do not lend themselves to speed when used like this. You’ll also need to start it with the -s flag to disable the sound system.

If you like RTB and want to help development then consider buying me a coffee through this link: https://buymeacoffee.com/gordondrogon – thanks!