EasyOS Kirkstone-series version 5.6 not quite released

What I mean by the title, is did upload 5.6, then removed it several hours later. Need to fix a few things first.

Version 5.6 is built with the "revision 5" packages compiled in OE, as reported a couple of days ago:

https://bkhome.org/news/202311/openembedded-revision-5-build-with-firefox.html

Version 5.6 has Firefox browser, instead of Chromium. The advantage is that FF is much smaller, so built a smaller drive-image file. So easy.sfs and hence the drive-image file is smaller, so smaller download, but these days we are not so much concerned about size. EasyOS 5.5.5 with Chromium, the easy.sfs file is 793MB. Easy 5.6 with FF, the easy.sfs file is 766MB.

A saving of 27MB. Yeah, Chromium is a bloated monster, but do we really care these days? Perhaps it is more a question of which one we would prefer to be the default builtin browser. If you have a preference, let me know on the forum. I have started a forum thread for Chromium versus FF feedback:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=9875

A fresh pristine boot of 5.6, everything looks good. Then I went ahead and uploaded 5.6.

However, problems arose when I did an update (see "update" icon on desktop). After the update, clicking on the "www" icon, FF did not start. /usr/local/bin/defaultbrowser still had "chromium" in it. OK, fixed that.

Then I thought, for users who would prefer Chromium, it is available via PKGget; so I installed it. I then discovered that a required dependency, libc++, is missing. OK, installed that. There is another optional dependency, upower, installed that also.

Good, Chromium now works, and as /home/chromium is still there from before updating, all the bookmarks, history, login settings, etc., are still there. Good.

FF though, has no bookmarks, history, etc. It should be possible to import all of that from Chromium, as explained here:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-bookmarks-google-chrome

However, FF was unable to do so. This is because of the security. Each app runs as its own user. FF home folder is /home/firefox and runs as user "firefox". Chromium home folder is /home/chromium and runs as user "chromium". Each app is unable to see into other apps home folders.

This is achieved by home folders, and subdirectories, having 700 permissions. This means completely invisible to any other users.

So, I will need to figure out how to temporarily overcome this so that FF will be able to import bookmarks etc. from Chromium.

After encountering these problems, decided to withdraw 5.6.       

Tags: easy