Quirky Xerus 8.1.4 for Raspberry Pi2 and 3

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veronicathecow
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#661 Post by veronicathecow »

Hi Barry, great you are doing some more stuff on the Raspberry Pi, Quirky / puppy is so much better for it for my needs than any other distro.

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BarryK
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#662 Post by BarryK »

don570 wrote:
So far, just one problem, the QuickSetup window renders with everything upside-down. That is, the "OK" button is at the top of the window. It is still usable. I do recall this problem from ages ago, but not the solution. QuickSetup uses gtkdialog for the GUI rendering.


If you're having problems with widgets appearing in the reverse order

then read this....

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 309#974309
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=108945
______________________________________________________
Interesting, mac needs a patch too. I consulted with jamesbond, and we came up with a patch that fixes aarch64:

http://bkhome.org/news/201807/fix-widge ... rch64.html
[url]https://bkhome.org/news/[/url]

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don570
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#663 Post by don570 »

To BarryK

I read in your blog that you are having compiling problems.
Probably not enough RAM.
There are ways to adjust RAM

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentati ... /memory.md


You are having power problems. I had the same problems getting my
raspberry pi3 set up. However ever since I started using
hdmi_safe=1 in my config.txt file it has been very solid. No low power warnings.
The screen size is small but that doesn't matter.
The video buffer is kept in RAM so a small screen size makes sense.

hdmi_safe Use "safe mode" settings to try to boot with maximum hdmi compatibility. This is the same as the combination of: hdmi_force_hotplug=1, hdmi_ignore_edid=0xa5000080, config_hdmi_boost=4, hdmi_group=2, hdmi_mode=4, disable_overscan=0, overscan_left=24, overscan_right=24, overscan_top=24, overscan_bottom=24

hdmi_safe=1
There is a warning by some experts to NOT use swap memory.
Wears out chip!!!

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/view ... p?t=197910
https://www.bitpi.co/2015/02/11/how-to- ... n-rasbian/https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/view ... p?t=197910
https://www.bitpi.co/2015/02/11/how-to- ... n-rasbian/
Last edited by don570 on Wed 29 Aug 2018, 00:10, edited 5 times in total.

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don570
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#664 Post by don570 »

James bond wrote instructions on how to compile for ARM

http://lightofdawn.org/wiki/wiki.cgi/Fa ... ArmForQemu
http://lightofdawn.org/wiki/wiki.cgi/QemuSap6

Aboriginal Linux

http://lightofdawn.org/wiki/wiki.cgi/-w ... eToolChain
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ttuuxxx
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#665 Post by ttuuxxx »

BarryK wrote:
don570 wrote:
So far, just one problem, the QuickSetup window renders with everything upside-down. That is, the "OK" button is at the top of the window. It is still usable. I do recall this problem from ages ago, but not the solution. QuickSetup uses gtkdialog for the GUI rendering.


If you're having problems with widgets appearing in the reverse order

then read this....

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 309#974309
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=108945
______________________________________________________
Interesting, mac needs a patch too. I consulted with jamesbond, and we came up with a patch that fixes aarch64:

http://bkhome.org/news/201807/fix-widge ... rch64.html
Hi Barry, I just bought another Android box, This one has 4gb of ddr4 and 4k video:) Just wondering if your going to bring out a never version of arm, This android box is light years ahead raspberry pi. https://www.gearbest.com/goods/pp_00925 ... ate_190116 I also bought a 7 port USB hub for it, The nice thing about this hub it has has on/off switches which will be great for my portable hard drives. https://www.gearbest.com/goods/pp_00943 ... ate_190116
http://audio.online-convert.com/ <-- excellent site
http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/ <-- Codec Test Files
http://html5games.com/ <-- excellent HTML5 games :)

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BarryK
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#666 Post by BarryK »

ttuuxxx wrote:Hi Barry, I just bought another Android box, This one has 4gb of ddr4 and 4k video:) Just wondering if your going to bring out a never version of arm, This android box is light years ahead raspberry pi. https://www.gearbest.com/goods/pp_00925 ... ate_190116 I also bought a 7 port USB hub for it, The nice thing about this hub it has has on/off switches which will be great for my portable hard drives. https://www.gearbest.com/goods/pp_00943 ... ate_190116
Hi ttuuxxx,
That Android box looks great!

I have a 4-port usb3 hub that is independently switchable, and that is very useful. It isn't a powered hub, so limited what I can run through it.

Quirky Linux is retired, doubt whether there will be another release for the Pi.

More recently, I created an EasyOS build for the Pi:

http://bkhome.org/news/201809/easyos-09 ... ry-pi.html

The image is for booting on the Pi only. It could be hacked to boot on other boards. I own a Rock64 board, and it has been on my to-do list to build EasyOS for it.
[url]https://bkhome.org/news/[/url]

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don570
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#667 Post by don570 »

Raspberry pi 3 download is
http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/aarch6 ... h64.img.gz

The Rock64 board download is
http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/aarch6 ... h64.img.gz
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BarryK
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#668 Post by BarryK »

don570 wrote:Raspberry pi 3 download is
http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/aarch6 ... h64.img.gz

The Rock64 board download is
http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/aarch6 ... h64.img.gz
______________________________________
Anyone who want to try the Rock64 build must read the release notes here:

http://bkhome.org/news/201902/easyos-ve ... ock64.html

...coz some manual fixes are required.
[url]https://bkhome.org/news/[/url]

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don570
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#669 Post by don570 »

Kauler Blog page wrote:Startup of some apps is slow, SeaMonkey for example. The first time that you get the desktop, the Quick Setup window will display -- tick the checkbox to "Recompress easy.sfs from xz to gz". File easy.sfs has all of Easy and it is xz-compressed for a smaller download. On a PC it is not noticeable, but on the Pi3 app-startup is noticeably slow, compared with gz compression. So, that is one improvement that you can make.

I found Easy too slow to use on my raspberry pi3 B+ model until I did the conversion.
I am using a cheap SD card that certainly isn't class 10.
File menus were to slow to pop up and the file open dialog windows were
unusable.

I suggest that you not use xz compression at all.
Maybe offer a SFS file for the LIBRE apps.

Libre writer takes only 4-5 seconds to launch which is excellent.
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don570
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#670 Post by don570 »

An interesting thing I found.....

I am using Fatdog64 710 YASSM 2.5 to connect to the server on the
raspberry board.

The field 'Server' is interesting.

I found I could put 'WORKGROUP' in the field (see image)
and then successfully make the connection.
..or I could put 'EASYPC16817'

but I couldn't leave it empty.

_____________________________________________
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BarryK
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#671 Post by BarryK »

don570 wrote:
Kauler Blog page wrote:Startup of some apps is slow, SeaMonkey for example. The first time that you get the desktop, the Quick Setup window will display -- tick the checkbox to "Recompress easy.sfs from xz to gz". File easy.sfs has all of Easy and it is xz-compressed for a smaller download. On a PC it is not noticeable, but on the Pi3 app-startup is noticeably slow, compared with gz compression. So, that is one improvement that you can make.

I found Easy too slow to use on my raspberry pi3 B+ model until I did the conversion.
I am using a cheap SD card that certainly isn't class 10.
File menus were to slow to pop up and the file open dialog windows were
unusable.

I suggest that you not use xz compression at all.
Maybe offer a SFS file for the LIBRE apps.

Libre writer takes only 4-5 seconds to launch which is excellent.
_____________________________________________________
I was wondering what difference it would make if easy.sfs was changed to NO COMPRESSION.

The one that gets loaded at bootup is /mnt/wkg/sfs/easyos/oe/pyro/easy_1.0.2_amd64.sfs and if the sd card is big enough, this could be done.

The thing is though, you can't do it when running on the Pi, would have to copy it somewhere else, while running on the PC, then perform the operation. If interested in trying this, you would need to look at the mksquashfs man page to see how to build the .sfs without compression.

It would be big, which counts against doing it. But, it would be interesting exercise to find out if it is faster, or slower.
[url]https://bkhome.org/news/[/url]

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don570
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#672 Post by don570 »

To BarryK:

32 gigaByte SD cards cost little now so the problem is the download size
albeit class 10 are still pricey. If you could give the command to convert easy.sfs to a bigger size
then most people could do it on their home computer while preparing the card.

By the way raspberry pi only has one thread .
I saw 'multithread conversion' method on my screen message.

man page of mksquashfs
-processors NUMBER
Use NUMBER processors. By default will use number of processors available.
Miscellaneous options
-root-owned
alternative name for -all-root.

-noInodeCompression
alternative name for -noI.

-noDataCompression
alternative name for -noD.

-noFragmentCompression
alternative name for -noF.

-noXattrCompression
alternative name for -noX.

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don570
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#673 Post by don570 »

I tracked down the instructions to unsquash and squash in fatdogarm
http://lightofdawn.org/wiki/wiki.cgi/Fa ... gFatdogArm
Customising FatdogArm (the old way)
The old way of customising/adopting FatdogArm is similar to the above: one would still need to prepare a bootloader, a kernel, a kernel modules, and modify the initrd. The only difference is on how to prepare fd-arm.sfs - instead of building fd-arm.sfs from scratch using FatdogArm's meta-distribution, one uses and modifies an existing fd-arm.sfs from an existing FatdogArm image.

Get the fd-arm.sfs from the disk image as explained previously.
Extract the fd-arm.sfs by issuing this command.
It will create a new directory called squashfs-root containing all the files inside fd-arm.sfs in the current directory.
unsquashfs fd-arm.sfs
Add/remove packages as needed.
When you do this you must be inside the squashfs-root; thus the commands below is always preceeded by cd squashfs-root.
Adding a package:
( cd squashfs-root; ROOT=$(pwd) sbin/installpkg /path/to/your/package.tbz )
Remove package:
( cd squashfs-root; ROOT=$(pwd) sbin/removepkg name-of-package-to-remove )
Modify other files/scripts/configuration files as needed.
Re-pack (re-generate) the sfs by issuing this command:
mksquashfs squashfs-root fd-arm.sfs -comp xz -Xbcj arm -noappend

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don570
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#674 Post by don570 »

The problem appears to be the xz compression since the distro
boots up quickly in gz compression.
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amj
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#675 Post by amj »

After having been busy with other things, I came back to the forum a few days ago to catch up and see what was new. Having arrived at this thread I found I had two new builds of Easy for RPi3 to play with - which of course I did.

Perhaps the most important comment is that both builds lived up to the name in that they were very easy to install and the first run sequences executed flawlessly. Perhaps I should confess that in both cases, after install on the micro-SD and before first run, I edited the config.txt file to add a display_rotate=3 command to cater for my portrait mode screen.

I only played around with Easy-0.9.6.3 for a couple of hours. It quickly became apparent that some of the built in applications had problems and were not in full working order. So I moved on to Easy-1.0.2. I liked the new system for specifying keyboard layout. That's an improvement. But again it soon became apparent that some of the problems with applications had been carried forward. Applications that crashed, applications that stopped responding and could only be stopped with the kill function. So neither of these builds form the basis for developing a system for daily use. But that's probably not the point.

The important thing is that Easy proved to be robust and carried on working perfectly even when some of the applications it was running repeatedly fell over. A stable OS.

There is probably no point commenting on how specific applications failed. These same problems may have been apparent in builds for other architectures and since Easy is now on version 1.0.14, they may have been long since fixed. The essential single sentence feedback is: it was easy to install and remained stable. That's a good starting point. And when Easy has reached a suitable level of maturity I hope we get another build for RPi3 (and perhaps RPi2 as well).

Some trivia to finish with.

The built in copy of Audacious in version 1.0.2 worked very well - but the sound quality was off. I got a nasty 'whistle' with my music which my ears did not like. This problem is certainly not present in the QX814 build.

I was pleased to see FFconvert make an appearance in version 1.0.2 but that made the absence of ffplay all the more surprising. I thought the addition of ffplay to QX814 was very successful.

amj
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RPi4

#676 Post by amj »

I took delivery of a RPi4 today and now have Quirky Xerus 8.1.4 running. Too early to say if there will be problems but first impression is that everything looks OK.

I have used the same trick we used to get alpha4/zap6 to run on RPi2.

It took me three attempts before the system started correctly. I had to take the micro SD card out and do some off-line debugging before I realised which particular stupid mistake I had made this time round. So I am going to do a complete rebuild and see I can get a clean start-up at the first attempt.


Some immediate comments:

I have the 2Gb version of the RPi4 and am pleased to report that QX814 sees (and is using) all the RAM.

The built in 'hardware info' programme reports the BCM2711 processor in the RPi4 at 108 bogoMips. If I remember correctly, the figures for RPi2 and RPi3 were 57 and 76 bogoMips.


For those of you who have not yet read the specifications for the RPi4, the major changes are:

2 USB3 ports and 2 USB2 ports rather than the 4 USB2 ports in the RPi3.

3 amp power supply with USB-C connector.

Two mini-HDMI ports rather and one large HDMI port.


My initial impression (subject to revision) is that QX814 looks quite usable on RPi4 while we keep our fingers crossed for a RPi4 build of EasyOS. Posted from my RPi4.
Last edited by amj on Thu 22 Aug 2019, 11:33, edited 1 time in total.

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Smithy
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#677 Post by Smithy »

Is the audio still 11 (yes eleven) bits? Would have thought they could do better than that...
One can find all the specs for a lot of processors, but Broadcom and Rasp seem reticent to reveal audio chip specs or much else.

amj
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RPi4

#678 Post by amj »

I've built a basic system on the RPi4 and not yet encountered any difficulties (still early days). There might be some glitch with wifi support, but I am currently all ethernet and no wifi so I can't test this.

For anyone who is interested, this is the sequence I followed for porting QX814 to the RPi4:

From Github, download the latest RPI firmware master and unpack it. This provided me with Linux kernel version 4.19.66. The kernel is updated as and when necessary, so the number moves on every once in a while.

Code: Select all

https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-firmware/archive/master.zip
Write the Quirly Xerus image on a micro-SD card as per BK's instructions.

Code: Select all

http://bkhome.org/news/201612/quirky-814-for-pi2-and-pi3.html
Mount the partitions on the card you have written and make some changes.

On the first partition (75Mb) delete everything except the cmdline.txt and the config.txt. Then replace the files you have deleted with the up to date equivalents from the firmware master. Copy the overlays directory and the start-up files to the partition (you don't need the github hash).

On the second partition (6.8Gb) navigate to /boot/part1 and repeat the operation you have just performed.

Navigate to /opt, delete the vc folder and replace it with the up to date version from Github

Navigate to /lib/modules and delete the 4.4.34-v7+ folder and replace it with the 4.19.66-v7l+ folder.

Put the card in the RPi4, power-up and hope for the best.

spotted
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#679 Post by spotted »

I give up
@ amj
Whats the magic to getting firefox working. A year ago I had this quirky running with berryboot and had a go at firefox. I remember that I had to get this GLIBC 2.27 and a dozen of later new libs but I could not get firefox to work. Just had another go at firefox. Found a libc6 deb package and opened it up and was heading to user/lib and noticed an arm-linux-gnueabihf folder in /usr and thought to myself, I didn't put that there yet, I looked inside and it has the same files I just downloaded. I thought @ amj must have put it there so I went to ld.so.config to see it must have been @ amj that installed libc6. Then when I saw the 'couldnt load XPCOM' that where I gave up a year ago.
Whats the magic to getting firefox work.
I got vivaldi to work firstly and wondered why I only needed libnss3 to make it load. @ amj done all the heavy lifting.

Anyone wanting to use vivaldi running as spot can try this courtesy of STEP.

I wrote a small starter script some time ago, and it's been working up to this version. Save the following code to /usr/bin/s-tor-browser or another name of your liking, and make it executable. Run the script to start tor browser. For added security, it runs the browser as user spot. For convenience, I keep the tor browser folder tor-browser_en-US, in /home/spot/Downloads/.
(vivaldi is installed to opt, call the script in usr/ bin simply vivaldi )
log="/tmp/${0##*/}.log"
TBB=vivaldi
exec 2>"${log}"
cd /opt/${TBB}/ &&
chown -R spot.spot .. &&
rm -f ../torbrowser.log &&
if ! exec run-as-spot ./vivaldi -l --detach "$@"; then
[ -f ../torbrowser.log ] && cat ../torbrowser.log >> "${log}"
defaultterm -title "ERROR while starting TorBrowser" -e less "${log}" &
exit 1
fi
echo "see ${log}"

spotted
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#680 Post by spotted »

Are you still around amj.
You seamed to have bumped the kernel, but it dont work.
Can you do your magic on Easy arm 64, its for a pi 3. I am able to have it work on a pi 3b+, but my trick dont work for a pi 4.
Its handy to have a spare around if one cant do something with the first OS.

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