@sdetweil I did find dietPi (https://dietpi.com/) to be the best distro for ease of installation, generally small, and still up to date - they keep up to date with Debian

My experience trying to run MM on a system with 512MB of RAM is really poor. I found it pretty frustrating really.

Very nice. I have done something similar, although I prefer the Pi 3 Model A+. It’s slightly bigger than the zero 2w but is clocked faster (1.4 GHz vs 1) and has a full-size HDMI port. (they both use essentially the same SoC).

Note I have historically had problems with running out of memory running electron in the 512 MB limited memory space - but using dietPI has really help stability

I had considerable problems with running on a model A - but I found dietPI (https://dietpi.com/) to be a solid distro that works well even when using the default electron GUI front-end. (Previously OOM’d consistently)

Note, also I frequently have trouble with the calendar events appears as there seems to be some problem in the websocket communication layer (this bug: https://github.com/MagicMirrorOrg/MagicMirror/issues/3380)

I basically use MMM-RemoteControl to force a refresh in a daily cron job (curl http://localhost:8080/api/refresh) and this works. Why? No One knows

uname -m
armv7l

cat /etc/os-release 
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)"

free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           425Mi       316Mi        99Mi       8.1Mi        67Mi       108Mi
Swap:          732Mi       274Mi       457Mi

swapon -s
Filename				Type		Size		Used		Priority
/var/swap                               file		204796		0		-2
/dev/zram0                              partition	544892		299760		15

zramctl 
NAME       ALGORITHM DISKSIZE   DATA COMPR  TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 lz4         532.1M 292.7M 98.2M 101.8M       4 [SWAP]


Jan 26 22:00:46 kid-mirror kernel: Out of memory: Killed process 23127 (WebKitWebProces) total-vm:1178000kB, anon-rss:184084kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:0kB, UID:1000 pgtables:1044kB oom_score_adj:0

Although it’s not related to your problem - I have a lot of trouble getting MM to run on the 512MB Pi3 A+.

It freezes often - possibly it’s bad h/w or sd card although it all tests fine - but after several days of running and it ends up frozen and inaccessible. (ie can’t ssh to it, etc unless I restart it)

I tried using some of the lower memory options instead of using electron without much success. It runs for a little longer but eventually still dies. None of my Pi3 B models with the 4GB RAM have had similar problems - so I tend to think it is something related to RAM

Just to say that you may find the experience in running on the Pi 3 A+ to be “complicated”

Then use Ext3Agenda in the normal way vertical way.

In any event, it sounds like you don’t want the month view - and Ext3 does have just a week view - so maybe it’s as simple as just using week view for you.

Ext3Agenda supports calendars in the same way AFAIK as Ext3 - so I would expect if Ext3 works then Ext3Agenda also works

I would try using Ext3Agenda version in horizontal layout - it is by the same author and it sounds like the Horizontal layout might be what you want

https://github.com/MMRIZE/MMM-CalendarExt3Agenda

https://github.com/MMRIZE/MMM-CalendarExt3Agenda/wiki/Horizontal-layout

Something even stranger - if I immediately refresh the page it also works. Here I mean is:

npm run server
got to browser and bring up host:8080
calendar will say “Loading” for a very long time
(despite the events getting broadcast)

But if I :
npm run server
go to browser and bring up host:8080
calender says “Loading”
Refresh the page immediately
calendar says “Loading”
calendar will immediately show the events as soon as the events are broadcast

I added various log outputs to node_helper.js and calendar.js

node_helper is sending the socket notification for CALENDAR_EVENTS
this is not received by the front end code in calendar.js

I don’t know what happens to it, but I added logging to print out in calendar.js whenever the socketNotificationReceived handler is called and it doesn’t print.

(unless I refresh the page - at which point it does)