QV version 240403 pre-alpha

April 03, 2024 — BarryK

For previous news about QV, see this blog category:

Things change every day; the directory hierarchy has changed again, yet to be documented.

This is a pre-alpha. Anyone wants to take it for a spin, you are welcome. Let me know of any bugs.

There is still some EasyOS stuff in there, that needs conversion.

Notice the download 'qv-240403-amd64.img' is quite big, 1.2GB. EasyVoid alongside it on Ibiblio is only 913MB. They contain about the same packages, mostly from the Void Linux repository. Squashfs and btrfs are both using zstd; however, squashfs compacts much more efficiently.

Maybe this is useful information if you have an Intel GPU. Booting on my Lenovo desktop PC, with 8th Gen i3 CPU and Intel GPU, the QuickSetup window shows that Xorg has chosen the "intel" Xorg driver. What I notice after a very short time, is text not displaying properly on the screen; characters missing. I have even had Xorg freeze.
The solution is to exit from X, then run "xorgwizard" from the shell prompt. A window will tell you that the intel driver is using 'sna' acceleration, and will offer to change to 'uxa'. This fixes it for me.

Feel free to test Lockdown mode, and snapshots. I'm thinking maybe it would be good to have some information on the screen, such as snapshot number and whether Lockdown is on.

A technical note. The drive-image file is populated with zstd:15, meaning compression level 15. However, at bootup, the rootfs '@qv' is mounted with zstd:3. This means that any future writes will be level-3. It was done this way to try and get the drive image as small as possible; however, there is a penalty of slower read times expanding the level-15 files. I might change 15 to 7 in the future.

The desktop "update" icon doesn't work. How to implement updating will require more thought. You can run the 'xbps' utility and do a complete package update, so why do we even need a "update" icon?
Well, might need to download some fixes, for example for the 'initrd' file, or update the kernel. QV cannot use the Void kernels.

Get the 'qv-200403-amd64.img' drive-image file from here:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/void/

...write it to a USB-stick using 'dd' or whatever, and boot it.

The github repository has changed since the announcement a few days ago. It is now:

https://github.com/bkauler/woof-quantum-vis

...you can download it; there are scripts in the 'rootfs' folder, that you run in sequence, and you end up with a 'qv-<date>-amd64.img' file.
However, the host OS will need to be btrfs-aware (btrfs-progs installed) and have xbps installed. Actually, I haven't tried it yet, but it should work from a running QV. Make sure you have a good quality Flash stick or SSD; apart from quality drives being able to handle more writes, slow cheap Flash sticks will cause very noticeably longer app startup times.

Feedback is welcome here:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=11131

Have fun!

Tags: quirky