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EasyOS Excalibur-series version 7.4.2

June 27, 2026 — BarryK

Newcomers to EasyOS, please read the 7.4 announcement, as it has more detailed information:

Changes since version 7.4.1:

Limine bootloader has been updated from 10.7.0. Unfortunately, we cannot bump to the 12.x version, due to a change in I/O handling that renders our ext4 patch invalid. See here. To jump to 12.x, we will have to drop support for ext2/3/4, which will require 'vmlinuz' and 'initrd' to be in a vfat partition. Very reluctant to do that.

Download:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/excalibur/2026/7.4.2/

Newcomers will also find the new YouTube videos helpful with getting started:

https://www.youtube.com/@barrykauler/videos

Feedback welcome at the forum:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=172954#p172954

Have fun!    

Tags: easy

Limine version 12.3.3 panic

June 26, 2026 — BarryK

I posted yesterday about compiling the latest Limine bootloader

Built EasyOS with it, what was to be version 7.4.2; however, got a Limine panic loading 'vmlinuz'.

Have reported it to the developer mintsuki:

https://github.com/Limine-Bootloader/Limine/issues/602    

Tags: easy

Xlibre xserver segfaults

June 25, 2026 — BarryK

I posted earlier today about recompiling Xlibre:

Alfons sent me the content of /var/log/Xorg.0.log, testing on a computer with nvidia gpu. The xserver segfaults.

I had a look at the project "Issues" on github.com, and unfortunately there are a lot of reports of the server crashing:

https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/issues

I posted the Xorg.0.log from Alfons here:

https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/issues/3144

Unfortunately, Xlibre is too unstable. The next release of Easy will be built with the normal Xorg packages. Unless the Xlibre developers come back with a fix.    

Tags: easy

Xlibre recompiled

June 25, 2026 — BarryK

EasyOS version 7.4 is built with Xlibre; however, with 7.4.1 reverted to the normal Devuan/Debian Xorg packages. This was because testers of 7.4 reported that X failed to start with nvidia gpu.

I don't have a computer with nvidia gpu, so cannot test. It would have been good if they had posted content of /var/log/Xorg.0.log, but we didn't get into trying to debug. I just went back to the normal Xorg.

However, have discovered a configure setting that might be a factor, so have recompiled Xlibre and will build it into Easy 7.4.2. If still no joy with nvidia, will need to examine the failure logs, for example Xorg.0.log  

Tags: easy

Limine bootloader version 12.3.3 compiled

June 25, 2026 — BarryK

EasyOS currently has version 10.7.0, with our ext2/3/4 support patch. It has been reported in the forum that limine has failed to load the Linux kernel on an old PC; perhaps it will help to bump to the latest version of limine.

I have compiled limine version 12.3.3 in woofQ2, and also fixed the ext2/3/4 patch. A PET package has been created, that will be in the next build of EasyOS.

Limine project site:

https://github.com/Limine-Bootloader/Limine    

Tags: easy

EasySR screen record without audio

June 25, 2026 — BarryK

EasySR was introduced recently:

It may be that will want to record without audio, maybe record audio separately and merge later, so have introduced a checkbox:

img1

Thinking ahead to future videos planned for YouTube.   

Tags: easy

Exit Chromium unmounts all NTFS mounted partitions

June 25, 2026 — BarryK

Forum member Miminou reported this:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=172836#p172836

...I posted a quote from Google AI, reproduced here:

This issue is primarily caused by xdg-document-portal (a sub-service of xdg-desktop-portal), which uses FUSE to expose files to sandboxed apps. It is known to aggressively lock files or mismanage its internal FUSE mounts (/run/user/$UID/doc), which can result in recursive hangs or force-unmounting of other active FUSE filesystems.

But no, it turns out that the cause of the problem is the 'umount' script in EasyOS. The Debian 'mount' package has 'mount' and 'umount' executables; however, woofQ2 renames those as 'mount-FULL' and 'umount-FULL', replacing 'mount' and 'umount' as scripts.

I tested, mounted a ntfs partition, then ran Chromium. Running 'mount' with no parameters in a terminal reported these mounted:

/dev/nvme1n1p2 on /mnt/nvme1n1p2 type fuseblk (ro,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,blksize=4096)
portal on /home/chromium/.cache/doc type fuse.portal (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=25397,group_id=25397)

I inserted an echo into the 'umount' script to report passed parameters, and when I exited Chromium, got these two calls to 'umount':

--no-canonicalize -i --fake /home/firefox/.cache/doc
--no-canonicalize -i --fake /mnt/nvme1n1p2

The important thing to note here, 'umount' is being called with "--fake", which means dry-run only. The xdg-desktop-portal (or whatever) code does the actual unmount in a direct C call to "umount()" function and these calls to the 'umount' script are informational only.

But there is only a direct call to unmount "/home/firefox/.cache/doc", not "/mnt/nvme1n1p2", which makes that second informational call to the 'umount' script very puzzling.

Anyway, I found the problem; the 'umount' script was ignoring the "--fake" parameter and was unmounting both fuse mounted folders.

The /usr/bin/umount script is a bit long in the tooth, so as well as recognizing "--fake", took the opportunity to completely rewrite the script:

#!/bin/ash
#Copyright Barry Kauler 2026, licence GPL3 (/usr/share/doc/legal)
#20260624 rewritten

#mount-FULL, umount-FULL are the full versions.
#The Busybox versions of mount and umount are available but only by:
# # busybox mount ...
# # busybox umount ...
#mount and umount are scripts.
#if an ntfs partition, EasyOS uses fuse ntfs-3g driver.

[ ! $1 ] && exec busybox umount

. /etc/rc.d/functions4puppy4
. /etc/uimanager #has UI_DESK_MANAGER='jwm' #or rox
. /etc/rc.d/PUPSTATE

MNT0="$(cut -f 1 -d ' ' /proc/mounts | grep '^/dev/[nsmf]')" #ex: /dev/nvme1n1p2
[ -z "$MNT0" ] && exec busybox umount ${*} #precaution
MOUNTSpre="$(echo -n "$MNT0" | sed 's%^/dev/%%')"

#note, xdg-desktop-portal may mount like this:
# portal /home/chromium/.cache/doc fuse.portal rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=25397,group_id=25397 0 0
# umount passed params: --no-canonicalize -i --fake /home/chromium/.cache/doc
case "${*}" in
 *--fake*) exit 0 ;;
esac

#this will also catch ntfs-3g fuse mounts...
RETVAL=0
Pend="${*#*/}"
Pend="${Pend/ */}"
if [ -n "$Pend" ];then
 [ "${Pend##*/}" == "${WKG_DEV}" ] && exit 1 #cannot unmount
 MNTdir="$(grep -F "/${Pend} " /proc/mounts | cut -f 2 -d ' ' | tail -n 1)"
 grep -F "/${Pend} " /proc/mounts | grep -q 'fuse'
 if [ $? -eq 0 ];then
  fusermount -u $MNTdir
  RETVAL=$?
 else
  #busybox umount -d $MNTdir
  umount-FULL -d ${*}
  [ $? -ne 0 ] && busybox umount -d $MNTdir
  RETVAL=$?
 fi
else
 #maybe just ran "umount -a" to unmount everything
 umount-FULL ${*}
 RETVAL=$?
fi

#check any desktop partition icons showing as mounted, but now unmounted...
[ -z "$DISPLAY" ] && exit $RETVAL
for aDEV in ${MOUNTSpre}
do
 [ -z "$aDEV" ] && continue
 [ "$aDEV" == "$WKG_DEV" ] && continue #cannot unmount (already screened out above)
 grep -qF "/dev/${aDEV} " /proc/mounts
 if [ $? -ne 0 ];then
  if [ -d /root/.pup_event/drive_${aDEV} ];then
   case "$aDEV" in
    fd*) DRV_CATEGORY="floppy" ;;
    *)
     aDRV="$(echo -n "${aDEV}" | sed -e 's%[0-9]$%%' -e 's%[0-9]$%%' -e 's%p$%%')"
     DRV_CATEGORY="$(probedisk | grep -F "/dev/${aDRV}|" | cut -f 2 -d '|')"
    ;;
   esac
   [ -z "$DRV_CATEGORY" ] && DRV_CATEGORY='drive'
   if [ "$UI_DESK_MANAGER" == "rox" ];then
    #remove the close-box...
    icon_unmounted_func $aDEV $DRV_CATEGORY #see functions4puppy4
   else #jwm
    /usr/local/ui/jwm/generate-drives-menu
    jwm -reload
   fi
  fi
 fi
done

#make sure the symlink stays there...
if [ ! -L /etc/mtab ];then
 rm -f /etc/mtab
 ln -s /proc/mounts /etc/mtab
fi
exit $RETVAL
###end###

Probably should revise /usr/bin/mount also; that is also very old.    

Tags: easy

Missing devx icon when switch icon set

June 24, 2026 — BarryK

Forum member retiredt00 found this problem and posted a fix:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=172759#p172759    

Tags: easy