What to expect in the next release of EasyOS

I am posting these thoughts while filling in time.

Right now, my main desktop PC is doing a complete recompile in OpenEmbedded. This is now "revision 7", and the binary packages created will have "-r7" in their names.

I have downloaded the latest update to the OpenEmbedded Dunfell release, which is 3.1.13, as well as bitbake 1.46.12:

https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Releases

What prompted this recompile, is I wanted to test the Pitivi video editor, that requires gstreamer. So, I compiled gstreamer in OE, as reported a couple of days ago:

https://bkhome.org/news/202201/gstreamer-packages-compiled-in-oe.html

However, I discovered that gstreamer version 1.16.3 is too old for Pitivi. That is a very old version being used in the OE Dunfell release, it is missing the "GstTranscoder" module that Pitivi requires. Good news, I found another OE layer that has recipes for gstreamer 1.18.2:

https://github.com/OSSystems/meta-gstreamer1.0/tree/dunfell

...this does have that "GstTranscoder" module.

The OE recompile was started yesterday at 3pm, it is now 9am, still not finished. Very keen to test if Pitivi works.

Haven't had much luck with video editors in EasyOS. LiVES, Flowblade and Shotcut all run, but have some show-stopper bug. Yes, I can run a an appimage or similar, but would really like a video editor compiled to use all the libraries already in Easy, so it will be small and can be included in a release build.

So, that is one thing I am hoping for, Pitivi in the next release of EasyOS. But, more changes...

A new theme. Getting tired of the dark blue theme in EasyOS. Now, there is a light & bright, still blue, theme.

Another change is expect the return of Firefox builtin. There will be both SeaMonkey (SM) and Firefox (FF), with Firefox set as the default browser.

Reason is, and this was the last straw for me, a couple of days ago was unable to login to my bank account with SM. Have been able to login for years, right up until yesterday. No message about incompatible browser, it just won't login.
When I type the password, the "show password" no longer works, then when I click on the button to login, nothing happens.

It does mean that the download easy*.img.gz file will be a over 600MB, unless I take something out. Maybe Scribus desktop publisher? I want to have everything builtin that will satisfy 95%, maybe even 99% of users. Scribus is an app that although real nice, is probably not needed by those 99%. Of course it will still be available via the package manager.

Ha ha, but then, after having built EasyArch that grew to over 800MB, Easy Dunfell at about 600MB doesn't seem too bad.

Yay, the OE build has just finished, at 9.25am. That is a total build time of 18½ hours. The package count has grown, now 925 packages! The compile was done on an external USB3.0 SATA SSD. Host PC is Lenovo Ideacentre with 32GB RAM and i3 CPU.

EDIT:
For the record, the above exercise required 361GB space in the SSD. I started with an empty 916GB partition, ext4, and copied 'downloads' folder onto it, which is all the source packages, that required 47GB. Also copied the OE-Dunfell project, that is only about 200MB. So, the build used up 314GB. OE is incredibly inefficient in terms of disk usage -- it creates a complete standalone sandbox for compiling each application, with all deps copied into the sandbox.

At some stage I will probably do another OE build for aarch64 target, and that is going to use up another 314GB. You can see why I have used a 1TB drive!

For anyone interested in doing this for themselves, see this earlier blog post:

https://bkhome.org/news/202112/how-to-cross-compile-850-packages-using-yoctoopenembedded.html     

Tags: easy