EasyOS version 2.3.2, June 22, 2020

[Sage]

Your music choice, Bill, also reminds me of my long gone youth...
As for mc, used to use it all the time 30+yrs ago. It's CLI isn't it or is there a graphical version now. Think there was an 8bit version, or somethiing resembling same?

[Billtoo]

Hey, thank you for the cmus pet, Billtoo!

Any particular reason to run it as spot?

Cmus will play internet radio if you know the url of the station so I run it as spot.
I had a list of stations but I've lost it, still looking for it.

[Billtoo]

Your music choice, Bill, also reminds me of my long gone youth...
As for mc, used to use it all the time 30+yrs ago. It's CLI isn't it or is there a graphical version now. Think there was an 8bit version, or somethiing resembling same?

Hi Sage,

Mc is still included in some of the new distros, Manjaro for one I think, it will run in a terminal or from the command line.
There are several mc-like filemanagers available.

I like the oldies music but some of the new stuff as well.

[Sage]

I like the oldies

Rumour has it, if you listen acutely, you can hear Billy Bolden singing...
or
for the jazz&blues fans in the UK:
true musicians are reputed to live within the sound of Dobells'.

Young stags requiring explanations can speak to any oldie or PM me.

[Billtoo]

@Barry

Thanks for the new Firefox, it's working well.

[foxpup]

Hey, thank you for the cmus pet, Billtoo!

Any particular reason to run it as spot?

Cmus will play internet radio if you know the url of the station so I run it as spot.
I had a list of stations but I've lost it, still looking for it.

Yes it can, I forgot.
Isn't there a list (made) in pupradio or so?
I mainly use cmus with an external harddisc, or more then one, mine and others I borrow from friends for a while. I let cmus search everything on the discs and then kind of surf. Hearing one thing makes me search for something else and so on...

[BarryK]

@Barry

Thanks for the new Firefox, it's working well.

Good, the blog announcement is here:

http://bkhome.org/news/201805/firefox-6 ... -pyro.html

I also attempted to compile chromium. Followed the instructions, it downloaded vast amounts of files, about 10GB, it took ages just to download, even with my new fast Telstra account.

Then, finally got to the step of doing the actual build, and it almost immediately gave an error. What is particularly annoying is that the error seems to be something internal, not due to the host system.

I have attempted to compile chromium before, never succeeded. I notice that it is offered in OpenEmbedded, but an old version.

[Billtoo]

I made a pet of Lxtask, it creates an entry in the System section of the menu.

[belham2]

Hi Barry, Bill and all,

Made a change from my usual 'frugal' installs, and installed Easy 0.9.3 to a 4GB USB stick, using EasyDD and the easy image from Ibibio. All went smooth, and it has been running for 72 hours straight now on this somewhat old Sony Vaio Core I3 laptop with 8GB ram.

Much thanks for compiling Firefox....installed it, immediately put it into a Container, and have not had a problem since. I could deal with Seamonkey, but my only problem with it is the utter lack of support for adblockers and such. No one supports it anymore ;-( Can't even get seatabX and/or colorful tabs working on it without it crashing Seamonkey constantly. Oh well, this nightly build of Firefox is working quite nicely.

Thanks again, Barry! Easy has really turned into something nice

[BarryK]

Much thanks for compiling Firefox....installed it, immediately put it into a Container, and have not had a problem since. I could deal with Seamonkey, but my only problem with it is the utter lack of support for adblockers and such. No one supports it anymore ;-( Can't even get seatabX and/or colorful tabs working on it without it crashing Seamonkey constantly. Oh well, this nightly build of Firefox is working quite nicely.

Is it just because I'm getting old, and belong to an earlier era...

I like the traditional drop-down menus of SeaMonkey. Firefox has the new menu style which is phone and tablet touch-interface-friendly. The main problem with the new-style UI is that it has much less "information density", in other words, there are usually less options, or to put it another way, it is dumbed-down.

But, I guess it is what you personally prefer ...like some users hated my earlier green theme

Changing the subject, interesting things happening:

http://bkhome.org/news/201805/isolated- ... mount.html

[tigs]

Much thanks for compiling Firefox....installed it, immediately put it into a Container, and have not had a problem since. I could deal with Seamonkey, but my only problem with it is the utter lack of support for adblockers and such. No one supports it anymore ;-( Can't even get seatabX and/or colorful tabs working on it without it crashing Seamonkey constantly. Oh well, this nightly build of Firefox is working quite nicely.

Is it just because I'm getting old, and belong to an earlier era...

I like the traditional drop-down menus of SeaMonkey. Firefox has the new menu style which is phone and tablet touch-interface-friendly. The main problem with the new-style UI is that it has much less "information density", in other words, there are usually less options, or to put it another way, it is dumbed-down.

But, I guess it is what you personally prefer ...like some users hated my earlier green theme

Changing the subject, interesting things happening:

http://bkhome.org/news/201805/isolated- ... mount.html

I like both of what you mentioned here. The reason I was using 0.9.2. the 0.9.3 is good as well, but it doesn't work with nvidia as well as 0.9.2.

the new idea is similar to TENS or LPS.

[Cu Chulinux]

Hey all thanks for the mc pets. Run fine in 0.9.1

On another note, I upgraded my Easy HD install from 0.9.1 to 0.9.3 and I got "failed to load q.sfs". I updated the BOOT_SPECS same as previously. I double-checked everything and seems to be set up fine, just won't load q. I'll see if I can get a snapshot of the screen message for you with my phone.

It (0.9.3) booted fine from USB, although intel sna started acting up again. I couldn't find a modesetting option in xorgwizard. Switched to uxa and settled down some. Things just seem flaky in general running from USB on this laptop (Toshiba P55-A5200).

On yet another note, I prefer seamonkey for its much more modest RAM requirements. Firefox is a major memory hog.

[Cu Chulinux]

Barry, here is a screenshot of the startup for Easy 0.9.3 showing failed mounting of q.sfs

[Billtoo]

I installed to a usb-3.0 SSD, computer is an Acer laptop.

video-info-glx 1.5.3 Wed 30 May 2018 on Easy Pyro64 0.9.3 Linux 4.14.41 x86_64
2.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)
oem: Intel(R) Sandybridge/Ivybridge Graphics Chipset Accelerated VGA BIOS
product: Intel(R) Sandybridge/Ivybridge Graphics Controller Hardware Version 0.0

X Server: Xorg Driver: intel
X.Org version: 1.19.1
dimensions: 1366x768 pixels (361x203 millimeters)
depth of root window: 24 planes

direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.4
OpenGL vendor string: Intel Open Source Technology Center
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Ivybridge Mobile
OpenGL core profile version string: 3.3 (Core Profile) Mesa 17.0.7

Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3227U CPU @ 1.90GHz
Core 0: @1241 1: @1333 2: @1332 3: @1190 MHz

Works well, the touchscreen is supported.

Thanks.

[lp-dolittle]

Hi Barry,

just a question, as for your 'isolated bootup' project. If I correctly understood your explanation, while running your planned Easy OS from a flash drive which has 2 partitions you will enjoy 'complete security'.

Did you also figure out a way to protect this new Easy OS when the flash drive is plugged in after, for example, a Puppy which provides full root capabilities already is running in RAM, booted from a live-CD? I'm thinking of the risk that this new Easy OS - and the comprised data - still would be vulnerable to manipulation while being inactive.

Could your 'isolated bootup' system also work if the flash drive's second partition (the working partition) contains an encrypted filesystem?

kind regards

[BarryK]

Barry, here is a screenshot of the startup for Easy 0.9.3 showing failed mounting of q.sfs

Thanks for the that. The snapshot is reporting that the date format is wrong, so let's start with that.

It says that this is the wrong format:

2018-05-29 21:41-04:00

...which it is.

/etc/rc.d/rc.shutdown saves the shutdown date in a file, and it is this that has the wrong format.

My first thought is that this may be due to a non-English locale. What locale are you using?

Open a terminal and type this. I have done it and you can see what I get, which is the correct format:

# date -Iminutes | cut -f 1 -d '+' | tr 'T' ' '
2018-06-01 09:01

If you get the wrong format, try this:

# LANG=C date -Iminutes | cut -f 1 -d '+' | tr 'T' ' '

If you still don't get the correct format, just do this, and let me know the result:

# LANG=C busybox date -Iminutes

...that's a capital letter "I" by the way.

[Cu Chulinux]

Ok, first off I have been getting that wrong date format in Easy since 0.6.8 (first I used). It also shows up with 0.9.1 that I reverted back to after 0.9.3 wouldn't boot. Never thought anything about it.

Results of the commands:

# date -Iminutes | cut -f 1 -d '+' | tr 'T' ' '
2018-05-31 21:54-04:00
# LANG=C date -Iminutes | cut -f 1 -d '+' | tr 'T' ' '
2018-05-31 21:54-04:00
# LANG=C busybox date -Iminutes
2018-06-01T01:55+0000
#

Note I am in North America Eastern time zone that is (with daylight savings) -4:00 hours behind GMT (or UTC or whatever they call it these days). The actual local time at the command entry was 21:54.

Currently my time zone locale is America/Toronto. I believe this is a fairly newly added locale as I recall using New York in the past. My hw clock is set to local time instead of UTC as I also have Win 10 installed.

I use EN_US language and US keyboard and afaik locale is English. I did click to set time from internet (North American pool).

Side note I tried booting 0.9.3 from USB on my work computer (nVidia card - Quadro 600) with no luck getting to X. It failed loading X with nouveau and nv and modesetting. I didn't try vesa. Was just a quick test to see if it would work.

[tigs]

I have some observation.

I have been trying to install it to windows 10 hard drive with inconsistent success. What I find is multi-boot on a windows 10 machine does not work if the primary hard drive is a PCIe based drive. Initially I thought it is the nVME problem. No, I have tried on a PCIe mSATA drive as well ( all lenovo laptop msata are PCIe interfaced). It did not work either. The boot menu does not show the sub-menu as it would on a SATA drive if installed on the same drive as windows 1o.

I have not tried to install in on a PCIe secondary drive yet.

[BarryK]

Results of the commands:

# date -Iminutes | cut -f 1 -d '+' | tr 'T' ' '
2018-05-31 21:54-04:00
# LANG=C date -Iminutes | cut -f 1 -d '+' | tr 'T' ' '
2018-05-31 21:54-04:00
# LANG=C busybox date -Iminutes
2018-06-01T01:55+0000
#

To get a complete picture, would you also mind just doing this:

# date -Iminutes

...just so that I can see exactly the difference that the full 'date' utility is outputting, compared with the busybox one.

Trying it myself:

# date -Iminutes
2018-06-01T16:33+08:00
# busybox date -Iminutes
2018-06-01T08:34+0000

...now isn't that interesting!!!

The actual local time here is 16:33, that is, 4:33pm, and hardware clock is set to local time, timezone is UTC+8:00 (Perth, Australia).

The busybox date applet is reporting wrong time!

The reason that you were getting an error, is the script rc.shutdown was only looking for the "+" and dropping off that "+08:00"

Right, I know how to fix it. Thanks for reporting it!

[BarryK]

Barry, here is a screenshot of the startup for Easy 0.9.3 showing failed mounting of q.sfs

OK, so it has failed to mount q.sfs, and has dropped out to a shell.

This shell is in ram. Do you have keyboard inpout at this stage? On some PCs the keyboard does not work at this stage of bootup.

If you do have a working keyboard, can you type in these commands:

Code: Select all

# echo "$Q_DISTRO_VERSION"
# echo "$WKG_DEV"
# echo "$WKG_DIR"
# ls -1 /mnt/${WKG_DEV}/${WKG_DIR}repository/easy-${Q_DISTRO_VERSION}

The 'init' script tried to run this:

Code: Select all

mount -r -t squashfs -o noatime,loop /q_ro/q.sfs /q_ro/q_sfs

but failed, with "invalid argument" error.

It would seem that one of those variables, that are got out of file BOOT_SPECS in initrd.q, is wrong, and q.sfs is not found.

q.sfs is expected at /mnt/${WKG_DEV}/${WKG_DIR}repository/easy-${Q_DISTRO_VERSION}/q.sfs and the script then copies it to /q_ro, then the above 'mount' operation is performed.

Another possibility is that q.sfs is there, but is somehow corrupted.

One other thing to check: if you have Easy installed in a sub-directory, say "easy", then WKG_DIR must have a trailing slash, WKG_DIR='easy/'