Kernel 5.10.26 compiled for EasyOS Dunfell series

There has been a hiatus in EasyOS development, as I have been in "hiking mode". Still am, but interest is rising to do some more things with Easy.

Firstly, Feodor has been testing Samba in the Dunfell series, and reported that CUPS printing was broken.

Almost all of the packages in the Dunfell series are compiled in OpenEmbedded, Samba included, and I discovered that the 'cups' package was not included as a dependency in the 'samba' build recipe. I recompiled samba in OE, and Feodor tested it, with success.

That's great, so I should bring out a new release of EasyOS Dunfell series. Latest is 2.6.1. With that in mind, there are a few thing on the to-do list, one of which is the Linux kernel...

There was a request to enable "CONFIG_MOUSE_ELAN_I2C" in the kernel config. Due to the hiatus and my mind going onto other things, I forget who requested this, just saw the note on a piece of paper on my desk.

OK, have compiled kernel 5.10.26, with these changes:

Device Drivers
  Input Device Support
    Mice
      <*> Elan I2C touchpad support      CONFIG_MOUSE_ELAN_I2C
      [*]   Enable I2C support           CONFIG_MOUSE_ELAN_I2C_I2C
      [*]   Enable SMBus support         CONFIG_MOUSE_ELAN_I2C_SMBUS
      <*> Synaptics I2C touchpad support CONFIG_MOUSE_SYNAPTICS_I2C
      <*> Synaptics USB device support   CONFIG_MOUSE_SYNAPTICS_USB

...those last two were previously modules, now builtin.

The reason that I want touchpad support builtin, is we may want to run GUI apps in the initrd. Currently this is done with the non-English builds of EasyOS -- a framebuffer Xorg is run and a gtkdialog-based app is run to ask for password input, and also keyboard layout on the first bootup.

A note about this: the English build of EasyOS boots in text-mode. I considered running Xorg and a GUI app from within the initrd to be a bit experimental, also choosing keyboard layout with Xorg running is good for non-English users, more choices.

The kernel source, patches and build scripts are here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/source/kernel/5.10.26/

Next up, want to do some work on PETget, the package manager.   

Tags: easy