EasyOS version 2.3.2, June 22, 2020

[blgs]

Easydd utility is refreshed/updated but ..... the image files (.iso or .img) are located in the home folder. By selecting a folder, in easydd, the host folder is selected???? The home folder is gone ??

The previous version of easydd was located in folder /usr/sbin. I have replaced this file with the new one.

See attached screenshot

[BarryK]

I have 2 64-bit PCs both of which are about 15 years old. One has a built-in Broadcom BCM4306 wifi device requiring the b43 driver.

EasyOS 2.3RC shows the following messages about firmware files the device needs:

• b43 ssb0:0: Direct firmware load for b43/pcm5.fw failed with error -2
  b43 ssb0:0: Direct firmware load for b43/b0g0initvals5.fw failed with error -2
  b43 ssb0:0: Direct firmware load for b43-open/ucode5.fw failed with error -2
  b43 ssb0:0: Direct firmware load for b43-open/ucode5.fw failed with error -2
  b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43/b0g0initvals5.fw" not found
  b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43-open/ucode5.fw" not found

That firmware has been added, will be in the 2.3-final.

[BarryK]

I use Google Hangouts for video chat. There is not a plugin/app available for Seamonkey so I have been using Chrome. There is also a Google app available for Opera and Firefox and they perform in a similar way and they work. Hangouts has worked fine for me using Quirky 8.7.1 and EasyOS 0.9.4 the last of the Beaver Ubuntu packages. Since EasyOS has started using Buster packages from Debian and newer audio mixers, I have not been able to use Hangouts. This is also true with the EasyPup and the new Quirky 8.8.1. When starting the video call, Hangouts flashes "Oops! Something went wrong. No camera or microphone". No microphone is the problem. When looking at the drop down in the app settings, no sound cards are present as there should be to make a microphone selection. I am using a Logitech C270 HD USB Web Cam. When I plug it in, 9 additional Kernel Modules get loaded, 2 for sound and 7 for video and I believe this to be correct as compared to Quirky experience. Also, in Chrome settings, Privacy and security, Site Settings, Microphone, no sound cards are present to make a microphone selection from, not even the native motherboard sound cards. At wits end.

Using Multiple Sound Card Wizard. It only displays 2 lines or the scroll does not allow you to roll down another line. The 3rd line should be my USB Sound card which can not be seen. I know it is present because selecting the Report button show it is present as the 3rd device but I can not select it because of the display issue.

Using Pavrecord and Precord. When recording video from USB Web Cam, the USB sound card can be selected in the alsamixer and the result is that video is captured but no audio. This has worked for me in Quirky and EasyOS Beaver. Also I am have trouble selecting the alsamixer. Click on it and it gives a quick flash. Have to click on it several time to have it stay visible.

I think these 3 USB sound card issues have a common problem and solution. They are duplicable on multiple boxes/motherboards. Maybe others have had experienced similar issues.

Another problem for me is the missing command genisoimage which is needed for PeasyDisk to write files to disk.

No other problems for me with EasyOS 2.3, EasyPup 2.2.16 or Quirky 8.8.1 Work Great.

Thanks for a great trio.

I read somewhere, that a recent change in the kernel is causing audio problems. Don't have any details, and cannot recall where read that.

But that might be the problem. Maybe I should build a 2.3RC with a older kernel, see if that makes any difference.

[BarryK]

Easydd utility is refreshed/updated but ..... the image files (.iso or .img) are located in the home folder. By selecting a folder, in easydd, the host folder is selected???? The home folder is gone ??

The previous version of easydd was located in folder /usr/sbin. I have replaced this file with the new one.

See attached screenshot

EasyDD-portable is running inside a chroot environment. The only way it can access "/" is by mounting it on "/host" inside the chroot.

So you should see /host/home. I probably should mention that in the help window.

Or, you can just drag the image file into the EasyDD window.

For those who don't know what EasyDD-portable is, see this:

https://bkhome.org/news/202005/easydd-p ... linux.html

...but you don't need it in Easy. That is for non-Puppy Linuxes that don't have gtkdialog etc.

[rerwin]

That firmware has been added, will be in the 2.3-final.

You might not want to get into the business of trying to satisfy all users of b43 wifi. There are many variations of the firmware files. The full set is about a megabyte in size.

While experimenting with the latest available firmware from gyro's firmware repository, linked to from here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 212#820573
I found that its version of the two "b0g0" firmware files do not work with my device, whereas the versions from the b43-fw12-4.150.10.5.tar.gz archive do work.

Maybe you should let the users sort out the firmware issues so that you don't have to accommodate them. Or possibly refer them to the firmware repo.

Or you could make an SFS file of the repo to include in EasyOS so that the user need not download it, in case there is no wired connection for downloading. That repo contains firmware for many wifi devices as well as for other types of devices. Maybe the networking firmware could be extracted into a networking firmware SFS package.

Just some thoughts.

EDIT 5/30/20:
My statement that gyro's firmware does not work with my b43 device is incorrect -- it does work. All of the versions of the "b0g0" files I found work.

However, EasyOS generates a warning trace that includes b43 elements, as well as repetitive messages that flood the messages log. I originally overlooked the trace, so thought gyro's firmware had triggered it.

The showstopper, though, is those repetitive messages which make the (or at least my) b43 wifi unusable for regular use in EasyOS. Those messages and the trace do not appear in BionicPup64. I guess "we just live with it."

[nnriyer]

I got a pet file for b43wifi after googling. The same was installed and working after rebooting.

[Sage]

make an SFS file of the repo to include in EasyOS so that the user need not download it, in case there is no wired connection for downloading. That repo contains firmware for many wifi devices as well as for other types of devices

Great suggestion, rw. Found a few older dongles recently, including the ever-troublesome, ISL3887/UR054g, which could usefully be deployed, esp. as I only use Puppies for testing, demos and diagnostics, ie frequently!

[BarryK]

Thanks for all the feedback for 2.3RC. Seem to have got some bugs out of it, and have progressed to 2.3-final.

Version 2.3 blog announcement and download link here:

https://bkhome.org/news/202005/easyos-v ... eased.html

Have fun!

[FeodorF]

Great job Barry!

I have so a lot of usb sticks on my desktop with labels like:
1.0.14 , 1.0.8 , 0.9.14 , 1.2.8 , 2.19.1 , 0.9.10 2.2 , 2.1.11 , 2.2.5 time to update those to EasyOS 2.3 now.

Barry, I would call this the greatest 'one man show' I know that you are doing with EasyOS.

[Rodney Byne]

Barry,
Again a kernel panic on bootup.
Am going back to using the stick with 2.2.16 on it
at least that works.

[Terry H]

I updated an installation of EasyOS on a Patriot USB Flash drive from 2.2.16 to 2.3 on Dell laptop with Core i5-5200U 8GB RAM. All went well. I then tried to use gimp to do an edit on an image. The start stalled and remained on the small startup splash screen. I haven't used gimp for some time, so to check if it was something I had introduced in an earlier version causing the issue, I erased the working session to have a clean install of Easy 2.33 only. When I ran gimp again, the same result, only the small splash screen with text 'querying new plugins'. I left it for a few minutes, without change. Currently gimp won't run for me.

[BarryK]

I updated an installation of EasyOS on a Patriot USB Flash drive from 2.2.16 to 2.3 on Dell laptop with Core i5-5200U 8GB RAM. All went well. I then tried to use gimp to do an edit on an image. The start stalled and remained on the small startup splash screen. I haven't used gimp for some time, so to check if it was something I had introduced in an earlier version causing the issue, I erased the working session to have a clean install of Easy 2.33 only. When I ran gimp again, the same result, only the small splash screen with text 'querying new plugins'. I left it for a few minutes, without change. Currently gimp won't run for me.

I'm running 2.3, upgraded from 2.2.16 on my baby laptop, Gimp works. It went through that splash window thing, just took a few seconds.

This Gimp is from the Debian 10.4 DEBs, so may be an update.

The most likely reason for your problem is the video driver. What video card do you have?

If it is Intel GPU, experiment with swapping the Xorg driver, intel <--> modesetting, which you can do in the Xorg Wizard.

My laptop is using the 'intel' Xorg driver.

Or, maybe one of the plugins objects to your hardware, and if you could determine which one, just remove it. That's in /usr/lib/gimp
Perhaps even remove all of them, then gradually put them back in.

[BarryK]

Barry,
Again a kernel panic on bootup.
Am going back to using the stick with 2.2.16 on it
at least that works.

You have previously reported bootup errors that look very much like you have a faulty stick. I suggest that you buy a new, good quality, usb-stick, such as a Sandisk Ultra.

[Sage]

Finally got 2.3 loaded on 4Gb machine but boot times horrendously long. Methinks too many Out house sinks present now. Maybe too many concessions to guys with too much HW. Puppy was always intended as a small, fast distro wasn't it?!

[Terry H]

I updated an installation of EasyOS on a Patriot USB Flash drive from 2.2.16 to 2.3 on Dell laptop with Core i5-5200U 8GB RAM. All went well. I then tried to use gimp to do an edit on an image. The start stalled and remained on the small startup splash screen. I haven't used gimp for some time, so to check if it was something I had introduced in an earlier version causing the issue, I erased the working session to have a clean install of Easy 2.33 only. When I ran gimp again, the same result, only the small splash screen with text 'querying new plugins'. I left it for a few minutes, without change. Currently gimp won't run for me.

I'm running 2.3, upgraded from 2.2.16 on my baby laptop, Gimp works. It went through that splash window thing, just took a few seconds.

This Gimp is from the Debian 10.4 DEBs, so may be an update.

The most likely reason for your problem is the video driver. What video card do you have?

If it is Intel GPU, experiment with swapping the Xorg driver, intel <--> modesetting, which you can do in the Xorg Wizard.

My laptop is using the 'intel' Xorg driver.

Or, maybe one of the plugins objects to your hardware, and if you could determine which one, just remove it. That's in /usr/lib/gimp
Perhaps even remove all of them, then gradually put them back in.

Thanks Barry for pointing me in that direction. I found the culprit. I looked at /usr/lib/gimp and saw 123 items in the directory, too much to do an elimination process. I checked the process manager and saw a process for gimp referencing /usr/lib/gimp/../xsane was running. I killed that process and gimp startup completed successfully.

I recreated the symlink for xsane to /usr/bin/xsane and ran gimp again and got the same startup error. Killed the process again. Subsequent starts of gimp now execute successfully.

I have now also updated easypup 2.3. I checked it, same error. It now runs successfully also.

[shevy]

Is there a description how busybox's init is setup? And how to work with it?

I am avoiding systemd but I would also like to explore alternatives to sysvinit, sysv, runit etc...

[FeodorF]

Found this bug while working with EasyOS 2.3:

'/usr/bin/mtpaintsnapshot.sh' is missing.

I copied the missing script from EasyOS 2.2.11 to make it work.
On the copy below just take the .gz ending of and set the 'Exec'-Flags.

[lp-dolittle]

@ Barry

Hi Barry,

maybe, the following observations are of interest to you.

Mainly driven by curiosity, I tested an installation variant for EasyOS 2.3 which I actually expected to cause an error message. Instead, EasyOS showed a surprising reaction. The screenshots (see attachment) illustrate my procedure:

1. After booting EasyOS 2.3 RC from an external HD (sdb; IDE; 6 GB; entire drive populated) on a laptop with an internal HD (sda1), I executed the command <gunzip --stdout easy-2.3-amd64.img.gz | of=/dev/sdb bs=1M> while running sakura in the folder /mnt/sda1/easy 2.3RC. (screenshot 1)

2. To my surprise, no error message appeared, despite sdb2 was mounted and the dd command had to copy EasyOS 2.3 onto this partition. The result is shown in screenshot 2.

3. Rebooting started seemingly successful, and I chose the <normal startup> option.

4. After searching for drives, EasyOS spontaneously mentioned that it was going to boot into zram0, without offering a persistent storage option. Thereafter, it only asked for the keyboard layout, and pretended to create a snapshot for a rollback. No password option appeared.

5. This bootup resulted in the quick-setup desktop as shown by screenshot 3. No drive or partition mounted, yet all of them accessible. A situation which is not offered by the usual booting options! This variant of EasyOS 2.3 could be configured as usual (as expected, without persistent storage of the changes).

6. Rebooting this EasyOS 2.3, after chosing the official last option (booting into RAM without accessing any drive) had the expected result.


I carefully kept apart the easy-2.3-amd64.img.gz images of the RC and the final version whose names do not differ in the download repositories. As shown in the screenshots, I renamed the RC-variant to <easy-2.3-amd64RC.img.gz> to avoid confusion.
This renaming had another, surprising, effect! An attempt at re-installing now EasyOS 2.3 RC (out of EasyOS 2.3 final) via the command
<gunzip --stdout easy-2.3-amd64RC.img.gz | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=1M> (screenshot 5) caused sakura to crash (screenshot 6)! Sakura could be stopped by the <close> command, <kill> was not required.
After this attempt, the easy-2.3-amd64RC.img.gz file could not be renamed as long as it was left in the folder /mnt/sda1/easy 2.3RC. After moving it to sdb2, renaming worked (as well as removing).

I, so far, have not checked further details, but the following questions might be relevant:

1. How does the dd command manage to populate and install EasyOS 2.3 onto sdb2 in the form of a version that is not foreseen for this OS. If I recall correctly, the result is similar/equal to that of the boot option <wkg-dev=zram0>
2. What about the unexpected effect of renaming the EasyOS RC image?

Kind regards

[BarryK]

I have bumped the Firefox SFS to 68.7, but note there is an issue with the menu entry:

https://bkhome.org/news/202006/firefox-687-esr-sfs.html

[BarryK]

Found this bug while working with EasyOS 2.3:

'/usr/bin/mtpaintsnapshot.sh' is missing.

I copied the missing script from EasyOS 2.2.11 to make it work.
On the copy below just take the .gz ending of and set the 'Exec'-Flags.

Thanks for reporting that, fixed:

https://bkhome.org/news/202006/mtpaint- ... fixed.html