EasyOS version 2.3.2, June 22, 2020

[BarryK]

Bonjour,
I completely recreate my USB stick (brand new, 32 gigas) using this time the Standard English EasyOS version. I get to Easy's desktop without any problem. When I restart, I have an error message as shown in the first image below.
Back on my basic Puppy, the content of the second partition looks like the second image. If I reformat it, then Easy starts without complaint but at the next starts, the installations and configurations are not taken into account...

Thank you for your patience with this. Something is very wrong.

For the English version, after writing the .img file to the usb stick and booting up for the first time, was there a message that the working-partition is being resized to fill the drive?

Enter a password at first bootup.

Then after bootup, the working-partition will have an orange rectangle at top-right on the desktop icon. If your usb-stick is sdb, then the working-partition should be sdb2.

If you mouse-over the working-partition icon, it will show the size of the partition. It should be large, almost the size of your sdb drive.

If the working-partition is only 640MB, that is the problem, it hasn't resized to fill the drive. That will cause the error message that you posted.

If resizing of the drive had failed at first bootup, there should have been an error message.

[Argolance]

Bonjour (from an EasyOS session/Seamonkey...),
Thank you Barry.

For the English version, after writing the .img file to the usb stick and booting up for the first time, was there a message that the working-partition is being resized to fill the drive?

Yes there is a message telling the resizing is in progress.

Enter a password at first bootup.

I didn't... I thought it was an unnecessary complication for the tests. Should I do it?

Then after bootup, the working-partition will have an orange rectangle at top-right on the desktop icon. If your usb-stick is sdb, then the working-partition should be sdb2.

No orange rectangle , just the non mounted partition icon. If I click on this desktop icon, pmount is launched and if I click the "MOUNT" button, then a red error popup is displayed saying:

ERROR: unable to mount the partition (in my case sdc2).

If I run pmount in a terminal:

Code: Select all

# pmount
/usr/sbin/pmount: line 311: 17142 Terminated              yaf-splash -bg orange -fg black -close never -fontsize large -text "$(gettext 'Please wait, probing hardware...')"
# /usr/sbin/pmount: line 312: 17973 Terminated              yaf-splash -bg orange -fg black -close never -fontsize large -text "$(gettext 'Please wait, probing hardware...')"
mount-FULL: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc2,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error

       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail or so.

If you mouse-over the working-partition icon, it will show the size of the partition. It should be large, almost the size of your sdb drive.

Currently:

• sdc1 vfat 639M
  sdc2 ext4 28,5G

If resizing of the drive had failed at first bootup, there should have been an error message.

I didn't see any error message. A description of the working partition is displayed and the OS normally starts after choosing a keyboard layout.

Cordialement.

[BarryK]

@Argolance,
Yes, enter a password. You shouldn't have to, but I always do, and perhaps there is a bug if one isn't entered -- I will have missed it, as I always enter a password when testing.

Would you mind trying again, from the start, write the .img file to sdc.

From your post, it looks like sdc2 did get resized, so that is good, However, something is wrong, as sdc2 should have been set as the working-partition and it should be showing on the desktop with an orange rectangle, which means that it is mounted and cannot be unmounted.

[BarryK]

Guys,
I intend to read through the suggestions that you have posted, and make some changes in Woof, then release Easy Pyro64 version 1.1.

Quite likely that will be the last in the Pyro series, as I have posted here:

http://bkhome.org/news/201907/chasing-dependencies.html

I regularly receive emails from users of Easy asking for more apps. Openshot for example. Pyro has a very small repository, and it is a challenge to add to it. Also, app versions need to be updated.

So, it is pragmatic to build Easy from the Debian Buster DEBs and have that large repo to install from. It will also make it easy to create SFS, just download an app and it's deps, and put into a SFS.

...in fact, the PETget package manager could be enhanced to do that automatically. At install time, it could ask do you want to make this app into an SFS.

If decide to go this way, "buster" will be a new series, the first release will be 2.0.

[Argolance]

@Barry
Again...
So, with a password: it works! The desktop icon of the working partition has an orange rectangle, as expected...
I'm glad I accidentally discovered this little bug.

While doing this I noticed that Seamonkey asks for an application to open the directory where is the downloaded Easy imgz (or any other) file, that is to say the default directory /root/Downloads automatically created by Seamonkey... instead of the Easy /mnt/sdc2/home/downloads default directory in my case. For newcomers, it is hard to guess where to find it and browse up in the tree structure...
Please, let me tell you that there are a multitude of small pitfalls of this kind in Puppy (... then also in Easy) that the user can solve himself if he has the knowledge but which can block/irritate him if he does not and I suppose this is the case for the majority of users.
That's very important and why I've spent a lot of time doing ToOpPy (first for my own usage and finally for others), where many of these little things are already configured, making life much easier.
So, if I had one thing to worry about with Puppy/Easy, it would be this one...

Something else: I firstly typed a non allowed password (with the "*" character inside) and I noticed that the color tags are wrong (Sorry, only a-z...)

So let me now go further in testing EasyOS...

Cordialment.

[lp-dolittle]

@ rufwoof
@ Barry

@ rufwoof

I'm still not sure if we are talking at cross purposes. Yes, meanwhile I realised a problem with the EasyOS live flash-stick which I so far was not aware of.

As soon as the easyos-persistent-iso file is placed onto an additional flash-stick partition (in my case <sdx3> if created via the fix-usb.sh script) that is thought to be the working/save-partition, the flash-stick needs to be left inserted after boot-up (a limitation which we actually tried to avoid). So, at first glance, the situation is similar to the result of Barry's easy and perfectly working 'simplicity' method.

However, I could imagine a pragmatic workaround for security-aware users:

Why not use an EasyOS live flash-stick (containing the pristine easy-1.0.92.iso and an additional partition for 'personal use') for booting and optional final data save, exclusively, while an additionally inserted stick (containing the easyos-persistent-iso with the specific settings) would be left in place after boot-up. It's an admittedly clumsy method which, apart from that, provides flexibility and security!


@ Barry

What we are missing is the Quirky-Xerus 'save' option which made it possible to save into RAM when a Quirky.iso live flash-stick was unplugged and which optionally allowed a (final) persistent saving of settings and data onto the stick. Is it impossible to provide this functionality also in EasyOS?

kind regards

lp-dolittle

[Argolance]

So, with a password: it works! The desktop icon of the working partition has an orange square, as expected... Smile

Yes I "had" a sane working partition with a little orange square but... when I restarted, against all odds, I got exactly the error message reported above, about EXT4-fs and /mnt/sdb2/containers already exists...
O dear...

[EDIT] (About one or two hours later):
To find out for sure, I changed the stick because a brand new stick is not necessarily a good stick! With an old 4 gigas stick everything works fine.
Sorry to have bothered you for (quite) nothing.

[KiltedKoder]

Ive gotten Easy installed and I'm trying to customize it but I've run into a problem. I searched, but i might have missed an answer in the prior 100+ pages of comments in this thread.

Two main questions about SFS files with Easy.

1) When I download SFS files from the repo and I place them in the directory on my drive
they dont show up in bootmanager thing where I can enable them like I did before. What did I do wrong? The dialog says you can place SFS files in that directory.

I've tried to load them that way because they dont show up in the sfsget program


2) Do SFS files have to be made in a differnet way on EasyOS? Or can they be made using the same methods as use with Puppy? I've used the Edit-SFS program to alter sfs files before, and I am curious if I can do the same thing now?

Unrelated last question. I know that the new version of easy will be built from Ubuntu packages. Will easy have the same ability as Puppy in that it could be built from slackware packages as well using woof... or will it be very specifically tied to Ubuntu?

[scsijon]

@kiltedKoder

Barry may correct me but I believe you need both files relating to the sfs package to install/mount it. The second .specs file has the db information for it as well as things like the hash needed. Something like a pet's pkg.specs contents, just in a different format.

[zygo]

williams2 thanks for the right click trick. Who would have thought -- everyone but me!

I like sakura. For urxvt you missed the insert key but now I'm back in xerus I find it doesn't work in either emulator. I only tried it because it's in the 2x3 group. I doubt I've ever used it.

I'm not a fan of keyboard shortcuts.

Where do you get these codes from? Doesn't each key have a keycode as well (shown in xev)?

[williams2]

The insert key and ctrl+V and ctrl+Q seem to be set to quoted-insert in readline. The insert key does not seem to switch between insert and overwrite mode.

If you press the insert key or c+V or c+Q the next character is put in the buffer as-is. For example, you can type insert then c+C and the c+C will go in the buffer. Normally c+C will cancel the line you are typing. Or you can type insert then ESC to put an escape char in the buffer. So you could print ESC codes to set colours. So these two lines would do the same thing.

Code: Select all

echo "^[c"
echo -e "\ec"

Most of the lines were already in /etc/inputrc, they were just commented out.

There's lot of information out there. The readline manpage has a lot of info and lists the default key bindings.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Readline also has a lot of info, and a link to the urxvt wiki page.

xev can be used to get the key codes, or you can type c+V then the key.
So the insert key in my terminal is:

^[[2~

which would be "\e[2~" in inputrc ( ^[ is ESC ).

The standard default readline keys should work without anything in inputrc.
So c+A and c+E should work even if Home and End don't.

[Argolance]

@KiltedKoder

you need both files relating to the sfs package to install/mount it. The second .specs file has the db information for it as well as things like the hash needed. Something like a pet's pkg.specs contents, just in a different format.

Security obliges...
I think this is automatically done by the latest version of dir2sfs. Maybe you can unpack the sfs you want to install, rebuild it with this new dir2sfs version and then place the 2 generated files in the appropriate directory?

[BarryK]

@Barry
Again...
So, with a password: it works! The desktop icon of the working partition has an orange rectangle, as expected...
I'm glad I accidentally discovered this little bug.

Thanks for discovering that bug. Now I have to study the code and find out the cause! I suspect all the changes that I made recently to support persistence for the iso, is the cause.

[BarryK]

So, with a password: it works! The desktop icon of the working partition has an orange square, as expected... Smile

Yes I "had" a sane working partition with a little orange square but... when I restarted, against all odds, I got exactly the error message reported above, about EXT4-fs and /mnt/sdb2/containers already exists...
O dear...

[EDIT] (About one or two hours later):
To find out for sure, I changed the stick because a brand new stick is not necessarily a good stick! With an old 4 gigas stick everything works fine.
Sorry to have bothered you for (quite) nothing.

Yes, maybe the new stick has some bad bits in it. Is it a very cheap one?

[BarryK]

Ive gotten Easy installed and I'm trying to customize it but I've run into a problem. I searched, but i might have missed an answer in the prior 100+ pages of comments in this thread.

Two main questions about SFS files with Easy.

1) When I download SFS files from the repo and I place them in the directory on my drive
they dont show up in bootmanager thing where I can enable them like I did before. What did I do wrong? The dialog says you can place SFS files in that directory.

Yes, they are different, you can't use SFS files from Puppy. EasyOS SFS files have special meta-data in them.

When you run the GUI to select an SFS, any without the required meta-data are ignored -- I should put up an information popup if the happens.

To create an SFS in EasyOS format, run the 'dir2sfs' script. You can use it to convert a Puppy SFS. First mount the Puppy SFS on a folder. The folder should be named according to a certain convention -- have a look at /usr/sbin/sfsget in a text editor.

The you run:

# dir2sfs <name of folder>

I deliberately screened out Puppy SFSs, as many of them can break things. For example, I have seen them with a folder /usr/lib64, whereas in Easy Pyro that is a symlink to /usr/lib (and in Easy Buster a symlink to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu).

[BarryK]

Unrelated last question. I know that the new version of easy will be built from Ubuntu packages. Will easy have the same ability as Puppy in that it could be built from slackware packages as well using woof... or will it be very specifically tied to Ubuntu?

I am using Debian Buster DEBs for the proposed Easy 2.0.

Easy is built with my variant of Woof, which started several years ago from Woof2, which was also the starting point of Woof-CE. I did call me variant WoofQ, now tend to just call it Woof.

My Woof can build EasyOS from various binary package repositories, Ubuntu, Debian, OE (my fork of OpenEmbedded) and Slackware.

This is in theory. Getting one of these to build a distro that boots to a desktop, may need a lot of work. Woof should do a Slackware 14.2-based build ok.

My Woof is not online, only uploaded as tarballs:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/project/woof/

I expect to upload another tarball when Pyro 1.1 and Buster 2.0-beta are released.

[BarryK]

@kiltedKoder

Barry may correct me but I believe you need both files relating to the sfs package to install/mount it. The second .specs file has the db information for it as well as things like the hash needed. Something like a pet's pkg.specs contents, just in a different format.

Yes, as well as meta-data inside the SFS, the 'dir2sfs' script will also create a <name of sfs>.specs file. This is just a text file. In a running Easy, look in /mnt/wkg/sfs/easyos/oe/pyro and you will see one or more .specs files.

[zygo]

Barry,

Some obs from brief test of 1.0.92 ISO booted from USB stick.

There's a word missing in the middle line of the select keyboard instructions before desktop starts.

leafpad 0.8.15 allows only 1 search term. "Find next" works but I had to restart leafpad to use another term.

[KiltedKoder]

Ive gotten Easy installed and I'm trying to customize it but I've run into a problem. I searched, but i might have missed an answer in the prior 100+ pages of comments in this thread.

Two main questions about SFS files with Easy.

1) When I download SFS files from the repo and I place them in the directory on my drive
they dont show up in bootmanager thing where I can enable them like I did before. What did I do wrong? The dialog says you can place SFS files in that directory.

Yes, they are different, you can't use SFS files from Puppy. EasyOS SFS files have special meta-data in them.

When you run the GUI to select an SFS, any without the required meta-data are ignored -- I should put up an information popup if the happens.

To create an SFS in EasyOS format, run the 'dir2sfs' script. You can use it to convert a Puppy SFS. First mount the Puppy SFS on a folder. The folder should be named according to a certain convention -- have a look at /usr/sbin/sfsget in a text editor.

The you run:

# dir2sfs <name of folder>

I deliberately screened out Puppy SFSs, as many of them can break things. For example, I have seen them with a folder /usr/lib64, whereas in Easy Pyro that is a symlink to /usr/lib (and in Easy Buster a symlink to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu).

Thanks for the explanation. Do you have any idea why only two SFS packages are showing up in the SFS-Get utility? I can see them all there if I view the directory on the website.

Unrelated last question. I know that the new version of easy will be built from Ubuntu packages. Will easy have the same ability as Puppy in that it could be built from slackware packages as well using woof... or will it be very specifically tied to Ubuntu?

I am using Debian Buster DEBs for the proposed Easy 2.0.

Easy is built with my variant of Woof, which started several years ago from Woof2, which was also the starting point of Woof-CE. I did call me variant WoofQ, now tend to just call it Woof.

My Woof can build EasyOS from various binary package repositories, Ubuntu, Debian, OE (my fork of OpenEmbedded) and Slackware.

This is in theory. Getting one of these to build a distro that boots to a desktop, may need a lot of work. Woof should do a Slackware 14.2-based build ok.

My Woof is not online, only uploaded as tarballs:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/project/woof/

I expect to upload another tarball when Pyro 1.1 and Buster 2.0-beta are released.

Cool, thanks for the info. I'll try my hand at making one for me with Slackware whenever you get time to finish up 2.0 and upload it. I'm unhappy with some of the decisions Canonical has made about Ubuntu, so I dont know if I want to hitch my wagon to them as the saying goes.

[Argolance]

Bonjour,

Yes, maybe the new stick has some bad bits in it. Is it a very cheap one?

Not very but too cheap I guess (I already noticed a strange behavior of the my 2 identical sticks: hdsentinel crashes when trying to check them. So they are just "good" enough to store data)!

Some little notes on the fly:

• Multi-screen/Zarfi:
  - When a window is maximized, it occupies the entirety of both screens and does not remain confined to the screen where it is located.
  - It doesn't seem possible to have any regrets (LXRandR for example, applies the settings for a few seconds and then keeps the original settings if they do not fit). So Zarfi must be restarted, then settings modified... if the previous "bad" settings allow it...
  - The desktop drive icons are hidden at the bottom of the screen and if I put them a bit higher to see/be able to use them, their position is not retained at the next session.
  
  Gimp: right-click on an image ("Open With"... Gimp), opens a new Gimp session each time instead of opening the image in the current one.

A subsidiary question: Is a USB stick installation supposed to work on any machine, which was possible with Puppy by booting without a pupsave file and possibly creating a new one for each?

Cordialement.