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newsEasyOS Dunfell-series 0.91 alpha release
STOP THE PRESSES!
Failure to boot, see appendage at end of this post.
The cause of the failure is known, see appendage at end of this post.
EasyOS Buster series, latest is 2.4.1, is built with DEB packages
from the Debian Buster 10.x repository, so has the enormous advantage
of binary-compatibility with Debian Buster DEBs and packages can be
installed from that very large repository. In Easy, that is done via the
"petget" icon on the desktop.
Sometime ago, I compiled everything from source, using a port of
OpenEmbedded (OE), and used those packages to build EasyOS. That was the
Pyro-series, and the 1.0 release was in March 2019.
The last release of the Pyro-series was in December 2019, see blog post:
https://bkhome.org/news/201912/easy-pyro-version-13-released.html
I considered that to be the End Of Line for the Pyro-series, mostly
because the building-block packages such as glibc and gcc were getting
rather dated.
Well, recently I got enticed back, have compiled everything using the
latest release of OE, named "dunfell". First post, when I decided to go
"down the rabbit hole":
https://bkhome.org/news/202009/buildroot-and-openembedded-revisited.html
Then imported the packages into woofQ and built the first of the new
Dunfell-series. This blog post is about the OE "dunfell" tarball:
https://bkhome.org/news/202009/openembeddedyocto-dunfell-meta-quirky-first-release.html
OE-specific posts:
https://bkhome.org/news/tag_oe.html
Yesterday I completely recompiled in OE, without 'pulseaudio', and
also removed 'modemmanager'. The "dunfell" tarball, my port of OE with
'meta-quirky' layer, has just been uploaded, the one dated 20201014
(note also the readme file):
http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/project/oe/dunfell/
WoofQ, the build system for EasyOS, is able to import the compiled
packages from OE and build the distro. The latest is dated 20201014,
available here (it has readme's inside it):
http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/project/woof/
Now getting onto the main purpose for this post...
EasyOS 0.91 alpha released
This is an alpha-quality release, basically to find out if everything
is sane. It is built entirely from packages that I have just yesterday
compiled from source. Testers are most welcome to "kick the tyres",
"take it for spin", that is, find faults and report them.
If you have an installation of EasyOS, the Buster series, don't
attempt to update it to Dunfell 0.91. Instead, treat 0.91 as new
installation -- write the image file to a USB stick and boot it. If you
don't know how to write an image file to a USB stick, some notes are
here:
https://easyos.org/install/how-to-write-easyos-to-a-flash-drive.html
Download the image file from here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/dunfell/0.91/
...it is English only.
If it works 100% for you, then you will be wondering why I have
announced it as alpha-quality. I have tried a few things, and everything
seems to be working, but as the whole thing is new, one never knows
what gremlins are lurking in there.
I haven't even tried Bluetooth yet. Previous build, was using
'pulseaudio', but have recompiled in OE without 'pulseaudio', a pure
alsa system, with 'apulse' for any apps that want pulseaudio, and
'bluez-alsa' to support BT audio. But as-yet untested.
You can provide feedback via the "Contact me" link at top of this
page, but it is probably preferable to post to the forum, so that others
can contribute and share ideas:
Release 0.91 has a small online repository of packages, that you can
access via the "petget" icon on the desktop -- all of those compiled in
OE -- explore it, and you will find some gems in there, such as VLC
media player and Epiphany browser.
However, if you want access to more packages, remember that EasyOS is
designed to run applications, even complete distros, in containers. If
you click the "sfsget" icon, you can download the EasyOS Buster
easy-*.sfs file and run it in a container -- then you will get an icon
on the desktop labelled "buster" -- click on it and you will have the
Buster desktop, and the Debian repository available via the "petget"
icon.
...this in theory though, I haven't actually tested that it works. A
brand new system, there could be a gremlin lurking in the container
mechanism!
If you are new to EasyOS, you will find it to be the most fun, so different from all those look-alike distros. Really, unique.
One final note: as I am typing this, have just started to upload the
binary packages that were compiled in OE, in total, 1GB. Uploading to
ibiblio.org tonight is extremely slow, so perhaps hold off clicking on
the "petget" icon until several hours after this post -- current time in
Perth, Western Australia is 10.00pm 14 October (GMT +8.00), which is
7.00am 14 October in Los Angeles, 3.00pm 14 October in London
UK.
EDIT 2020-10-15:
Not good! Feedback from five people so far, the USB stick won't boot. One person has reported that it does run as a container.
I have so far been testing on my desktop PC,
with Intel i3 CPU, 8th Gen., and it has consistently always booted.
After this feedback, I tried the USB-stick on my old Compaq Presario PC
and Mele mini-PC, it wouldn't boot on them.
At first I thought that the testers were using a
very old 64-bit CPU. OE's "genericx86_64" is set to a Intel Core2
instruction set. However, the very first 64-bit CPUs had what is known
as the Nocona instruction set, which has, I think, one-less instruction.
That would have accounted for the failure, but my Compaq has an Intel Core2 and the Mele has a much more recent Intel CPU.
So, you are welcome to try it, and it would be
interesting to know if it will boot for you. Anyway, I will track this
down and fix it. Expect 0.92 soon!
EDIT:
I have found out why booting is failing. Give me a few days to fix it. That will be version 0.92. Forum discussion here:
https://easyos.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=184
Tags: easy