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The return of EasyVoid

January 12, 2024 — BarryK

A few months ago, was playing with EasyOS built from Void Linux binary packages. Expressed reservations about the rolling-release model, but the show-stopper was that NetworkManager (NM) refused to recognise the wifi interface. Here are related blog posts:

There was too much trouble with Simple Network Setup, and the wifi failure of NetworkManager meant that had to shelve EasyVoid. However, I received an email -- sorry, can't think right now who sent it -- advising that the problem with NM might be because Void uses Runit and NM might not be accessing dbus. Or something like that.

Today I conducted an experiment. Replaced the dbus, dbus-glib and networkmanager packages with those from Kirkstone, and voila, NM wifi works!

Interesting also, Firefox is playing nicely, doesn't flicker. That is FF 117.0.1; need to test latest.

This is good. Next up, will study how Runit can be made to play nicely with busybox init, and with EasyOS's pup_event extensions.

Busybox has Runit applets, that I looked at back in 2018:

I have compiled busybox 1.36.1, with the Runit applets enabled, and created a PET. This will be used in future builds of EasyOS, including EasyVoid.   

Tags: easy

Things are happening

January 06, 2024 — BarryK

Just a short post to inform that "things are happening", though I'm not posting much to the blog recently.

Caramel identified a problem with updating, as the year is now 2024. I will get onto that; hopefully soon release a Kirkstone-series for 2024, probably that will be 5.6.6. It will have just a few fixes.

I posted recently about the upcoming Yocto/OpenEmbedded Scarthgap-series. The official release won't be until April; however, getting ready. Gradually porting my build recipes, lots of things need fixing, also updating many packages.

The full-suspension solar electric tadpole recumbent trike project is progressing, though slowly. Currently building the front suspension, and intend to post about that soon. Need to do some welding next week, and will try and improve my arc welding from awful to passable.

Putting together a test system setup to test capacity of the two 48V lithium batteries that I now own (20AH NMC and 10AH LFP) -- want to find out how honest the vendors are. Also want to test the solar panels.

Thinking of bring back Quirky Linux; a completely different concept. Intend to post about that soon also.   

Tags: easy

Planning move to Yocto Scarthgap

December 30, 2023 — BarryK

EasyOS 5.x is currently built with the Yocto/OpenEmbedded Kirkstone release packages; however, having to backport some dependency packages to compile later releases of some packages.

This upward movement of package versions is inexorable. It causes problems, as some packages we do need to keep updating, mainly for security reasons. Especially web browsers. I compile Chromium in OE; we had to backport libva, which saved the day for awhile. However, have now hit a brick wall:

https://github.com/OSSystems/meta-browser/issues/773

Looking at Yocto/OE release schedule, Kirkstone is an LTS release, supported until 2026. The next LTS will be Scarthgap, expected to be released in April 2024 and supported until 2028:

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

The git repositories do not yet have scarthgap branches, so I have downloaded master branches, and now experimenting compiling. So far so good. Will see if Chromium compiles.

Looking ahead, an alternative is to build Easy from packages of another distribution, such as Debian or Void. That option is always there, always an attraction as this endless struggle with compiling packages can be done away with. There are downsides of getting locked into some other distribution though.

Another alternative is to give up compiling the web browser, and only use the official generic x86_64 binary package provided by the browser developer.    

Tags: easy

Firefox is still disappointing

December 19, 2023 — BarryK

I have been working on Firefox, fixed some things, see recent posts:

https://bkhome.org/news/202312/fix-firefox-second-instance-will-not-start.html

https://bkhome.org/news/202312/improved-firefox-user-settings-and-default-browser.html

I was considering bringing back FF as the builtin browser; however, still cannot get rid of the flicker on my Lenovo desktop PC. The content of the window flickers periodically. When this flicker occurs, it will break a text-input box if it has keyboard focus, and will wreak the menu.

What I mean by the latter, is if you click on the menu button, the three horizontal bars on the top-right of the window, then wait until the next flicker. Then the drop-down menu will disappear, and the menu button becomes greyed-out and unusable, see this photo:

img1

I reported this to the forum:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=103106#p103106

The flickering window in FF has been around for awhile, and there are many suggestions to fix it, for example:

  1. Turn off hardware acceleration
  2. Turn on hardware acceleration
  3. Turn off smooth scrolling
  4. Flickering happens only when 4+ tabs open
  5. Use Xorg modesetting driver instead of intel
  6. Disable gfx.webrender

None of these fix the problem on my computer.

In short, FF is disappointing, and it looks like I will stay with Chromium as the builtin browser.   

Tags: easy

Fix sudo-sh segfault

December 19, 2023 — BarryK

Yesterday I posted about adding a Cancel button to sudo-sh:

https://bkhome.org/news/202312/sudo-sh-cancel-button.html

Then discovered that if the DISPLAY variable is not defined, the /usr/bin/sudo-sh binary executable segfaults.

Fixed, bumped the package to version 1.3 and compiled in OE, see commit:

https://github.com/bkauler/oe-qky-kirkstone/commit/b84383cff7da10083b970aab7258d3ba7436e91d  

Tags: easy

sudo-sh Cancel button

December 18, 2023 — BarryK

In June 2023, I posted about "sudo-sh", my light-weight replacement for sudo:

https://bkhome.org/news/202306/light-weight-replacement-for-sudo.html

https://bkhome.org/news/202306/workaround-when-setuid-is-ignored.html

I have added a "Cancel" button:

img1    

Tags: easy

Improved Firefox user-settings and default browser

December 17, 2023 — BarryK

I think that it was about 9 months ago, version 112, that a new path for global setting preferences for Firefox, in /etc/firefox/default/pref. I have started to move to using this, see commit:

https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/c6b11d452ed559c5aad6c8117211dd7f43b5ad6f

Reference:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1170092

There are some issues with setting and determining the default web browser, especially for apps that run non-root. The 'mimeapps.list' file has been created to help fix this:

https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/1bff80f891d25d7178830628e2db8f2b27a491ad   

Tags: easy

Limine v6 has dropped support for ext4

December 17, 2023 — BarryK

Limine bootloader, up until the 5.x releases, supports ext2/3/4; however, v6 has just been released and now only supports fat12/16/32 and iso9660. Forum member 'luvr' reported this a couple of days ago:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=105931#p105931

I raised an issue at the Limine github site, to which mintsuki, the main developer, replied:

https://github.com/limine-bootloader/limine/issues/320

For the foreseeable future it doesn't really matter, I think, as v5 has become quite mature, and it has been awhile since any problem booting with Limine has been reported. So we could just go on indefinitely with v5.

Anyway, I had another look at the alternatives. There is always grub2 of course, but then I stumbled upon a new project; Easyboot and Simpleboot:

https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/easyboot

https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/simpleboot

I worked on it for several hours, but couldn't get the boot menu to display; just something flashing momentarily on the screen. Then the menu would timeout and it reported the kernel could not be found.

After trying lots of variations, did manage to get the kernel to be found, but then it crashed. But it might be 'KERNEL8.IMG' provided by Easyboot, that crashed, not the EasyOS 'vmlinuz'.

Bootloaders need a lot of development to work on a wide range of quirky computer hardware.   

Tags: easy