new KLU-jamXFCEbase 1.1 (620MiB) Ubuntu Jammy-based

[wiak]

KLU running on QEMU like squirrels under an Oak tree in the fall.

Is above sentence from poet Robert Frost?; sounds like it to me, but must be some kind of channelling or re-incarnation involved since he passed away sixty years ago.

[rockedge]

Is above sentence from poet Robert Frost?

Sitting at my Dell blade server/desktop I am in a spot that I can see out two windows, one facing east and one north which look out over the tiny patch of native grass we call a "lawn" and a fast moving brook going through the yard on the edge of a forest. Being half in the woods which creeps up to the back door there are many grey squirrels around (when the bobcats, coyotes, owls, Fisher cats and or the various raptors aren't hanging a'bout) and yesterday being weather wise a wonderful day, the squirrels were doing their thing in a hectic fashion and taking advantage of the fresh acorns starting to fall from the massive oak trees around our house.

I counted 16 running, climbing, chasing around and thought about the show of energy being displayed and wouldn't it be neat if I could climb like that. Sure it's still summer officially but the golden rod is in full bloom so the Fall is approaching..........and I thought how fast and nimble this distro is running in QEMU, it reminded me of those squirrels in the yard.

Robert Frost eh? I should read some his work again now that you mention it...........

[geo_c]

So computer techies can also be Renaissance men. Who knew?

[Geek3579]

Has anybody successfully used WINE in this OS ?

I tried @mikewalsh's portable 5.11 with no useful results. Also tried a WINE appimage without success.

Can WINE be installed using sudo apt-get install ... ??

[wiak]

Has anybody successfully used WINE in this OS ?

I tried @mikewalsh's portable 5.11 with no useful results. Also tried a WINE appimage without success.

Can WINE be installed using sudo apt-get install ... ??

I haven't used WINE for many years, but the KLU distro is fully Ubuntu package repo apt/dpkg compatible and the package wine is available via apt so should work fine. I don't think it is even a large package. Maybe someone who is familiar with WINE could try it and report back, or maybe yourself? I believe there is a choice of wine64 or wine32 - personally I'd go with wine64 (since KLU is a 64bit distro with 64bit libs), but not sure.

Alternatively, maybe...:

https://linux.how2shout.com/how-to-inst ... lts-jammy/
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/01/ins ... -on-ubuntu

According to above link, you might want to:

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sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

But I really don't know so best to just google (using WINE with Ubuntu Jammy); there are plenty of tutorial links and youtube videos for doing exactly this.

As far as Mike's portables are concerned, I wouldn't know. Perhaps depends on their organisation. Modern distros tend to put most all binaries in /usr/bin with the likes of /bin and /sbin just being symlinks to there. If portable is not in that form then it can't work and would need remade. Also, the portable is unlikely to be 'fully portable' like an AppImage might be - some libs that the portable expected as default in Puppy Linux may not be present or more likely present in different (may be incompatible) release versions. I'd go with the google search install mechanisms as the best bet; I have read that the Wine available from Ubuntu repos gave issues, but not having tried it I can't say more about that.

Note there is a Wine AppImage that claims to work with several 64bit distros: https://github.com/ruanformigoni/wine

also:

https://github.com/mmtrt/WINE_AppImage

This AppImage includes i386 GPU drivers. If it still doesnt work then don't get angry at me.

Also, see this forum post by trister. Maybe still works: https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 634#p13634
and linked there is jrb choice: viewtopic.php?p=65840#p65840

[Geek3579]

Thanks @wiak ,

I did Google "install wine in Ubuntu", and I quickly found a method here for wine64:
https://utho.com/docs/tutorial/how-to-i ... ntu-20-04/

I used that method and could run Faststone image editor as a test, which worked fine, but I had to use the CLI to launch it. Mono and gecko did NOT seem to download, but there was a LOT of stuff that was stored on my virtual drive (running KLU-Jammy in QEMU). Not all of the WINE menu links worked, it seems wine32 was an issue somehow. Proof of concept anyway. However, I would still like to get a wine portable working as they are very easy to install and have nice menu features.

Aside from that, I really liked the XFCE Desktop, and pleasantly surprised that the OS booted on my machine in less than 20 seconds when frugally installed on my SSD cf 45 seconds for Fossapup64.

[mikeslr]

Geek3579. "I would still like to get a wine portable working as they are very easy to install and have nice menu features."

Don't know much about the 'Kennel Linuxes'. Have enough on my plate that keeping up with them can't be a priority. But so far today hasn't generated a lot of posts on the Forum which caught my attention and 'took a peek'. Consider the following 'a guess'.

The structure of MIkewalsh's portables should enable them to function under Kennels. But two things must work. The first is that the OS must be able to run a bash command which is 'outside' the operating system --'not on the path'. AFAIK, Kennel Linuxes can run AppImages so that's not likely the problem. The second is that the bash command must use a dialect the OS fully understands. So the first thing I would do is examine Mike's bash scripts: WINE-Link, etc. Try running them in a terminal and see if the terminal output provides any clues.

[Sofiya]

KLU-jamXFCEbase 1.1 - Polished

[Sofiya]

KLU-jamXFCEbase 1.1 - Polished

[Clarity]

Hello @rockedge

I use your site, here, to keep my KL downloads current. But this KL is not there.

Is it an oversight?

[wiak]

Hello @rockedge

I use your site, here, to keep my KL downloads current. But this KL is not there.

Is it an oversight?

KLU-jamXFCEbase latest/maintained version is always best downloaded via its sourceforge site per first post of this thread.

[wiak]

eMachines netbook 355-N571G251kk from 2011
CPU: Intel Atom N570 64bit 2-cores
DDR3 RAM; was 1 GB; just upgraded by me to 2GB
Display resolution: 1024x600 (only drawback really...)

I have two of the above netbooks but both had broken keyboards, one only had 1GB RAM and one had no hard disk. Tonight I fixed both. Managed to find a couple of cheap keyboards for these models on AliExpress, upgraded both to 2GB (apparently max that works with them), and put a spare pretty big 750GB Sata drive in the one that had no HD.

The one with original HD of 250GB came with Win7 (still has that) plus I had put WeeDog WDL_Arch64 on it also a few years ago and that all still working fine.

On the other with the big 750GB drive I am about to put something like KLV-Airedale on it or maybe KLV-Sway or similar for more speed. But... I just stuck my old Ventoy usb stick in and it had KLU-jamXFCEbase amongst the distros on it, and it booted fine and running pretty nice on this old circa 2011 emachines netbook. Yes, it is one of the better Intel Atom CPUs that N570 variant... really perfectly usable.

I went to the trouble of seeking out these two keyboards because I really love this wee netbook for carrying around. The processor is really low power - even the original Li-Ion batteries still hold enough juice for a couple of hours, and the machine is light light light in weight. Don't like 1024x600 display, but its okay for cafe use... overall it works just as well for most of my purposes as my super-duper highish specs business laptop I use at home.

Used KLU-jamXFCEbase quick install of Chromium method. Posting from it now. Worked with youtube too, but hung after a bit (probably over-stressed the 2GB memory); didn't hang the OS though, just the browser needed restarted.

[wiak]

Have the following three distros working in my Ventoy-booting-from-hard-drive emachines Atom cpu netbook:

KLU-jamXFCEbase
Bookworm Pup
KLV_SwayBASE

I'm not quite decided which is best on this machine. Should be Bookworm Pup since being single user I'd expect less background processes also likely and maybe thus more responsive. It certainly is pretty good on this machine. Not perfectly fast enough, but really close to that, so I expect that is close to end of line OS I'd comfortably use on this machine. But pretty good that considering this netbook uses Intel Atom (albeit 2 cored N570 processor) and came out in 2011 I think.

Since KLU uses XFCE I have a feeling that takes it into almost annoying slower status, but not by much, and I don't really know yet since Bookworm Pup has zram enabled and I don't think I have that done for KLU-jamXFCEbase; zram should make quite a difference overall on a machine that only has 2GB physical RAM

I didn't really expect KLV_SwayBASE to boot on such a machine, but it did. However, the cursor did not appear. The fix was to change the startup line in /etc/profile.d/autostart.sh

from:

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dbus-run-session -- sway

to:

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WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS=1 dbus-run-session -- sway

There may be other ways to fix the issue.

Note that other KL distros will also boot on this machine, but I particularly wanted Sway/Wayland/Pipewire and also one Pup with JWM for likely good response performance compared to somewhat heavier XFCE.

I'm on the emachines netbook right now, by the way, and using KLV_SwayBASE
Youtube with audio/video working fine too

NOTE: I used to always use zram back when I was using DebianDogs, but haven't needed it at all since then because I've tended to have tons of physical RAM. However, it would probably be a good idea to enable zram by default (as indeed Puppy does) for all KL releases on this forum - slower computers such as my netbook would definitely benefit from that and I know of no real drawbacks to its use anyway.

[rockedge]

it would probably be a good idea to enable zram by default (as indeed Puppy does) for all KL releases on this forum - slower computers such as my netbook would definitely benefit from that and I know of no real drawbacks to its use anyway.

Good idea. We'll have to look into getting the zram operating in KLV's by default. Give the option to enable or disable it.

[fr-ke]

Well, I don't know. This throws me into some... despondency, perhaps. I'm talking about the lack of a clear development plan for one, the main distro. We have some kind of European Union in the Linux world: Germany is a locomotive, France is coming on its heels, Poland wants to get through without a queue at all, and so on. And we also have a bunch of everything, but everything is fuzzy.

Here the people are already making separate distros for their personal use. And I, too, to be honest, made a homemade version of Jammypup for myself. In addition, I look in the direction of MagOS, a little-known Russian system even in Russia. Based on Rosa Linux (based on the French former Mandriva). There are UIRD, KDE (& LXQT), configuration files picked up on the fly, and so on. The password for user and root are set in the conf file not as text, but as a hash. Not convenient, but kind of like security.
rpm and dnfdragora are used to install packages. But most importantly, it is a close relative of Puppy at its core.

Well, okay, I'm Russian - I'm easily distracted, not collected and I hope that everything will be solved by itself But someone present should write a plan and follow it in developing a common system. Otherwise, people will start to "run away" from our Association... Union... club of interests.

+1 !!!!

[wiak]

Set up KLU jam frugal alongside full Linux Mint in triple boot scenario with ms windows for my eldest son heading to uni. Actually a wd_multi klu install and two separate full Linux Mint installs (different partitions) for redundancy since I wont be there should something badly break...

I preferred klu to default to firstrib user desktop rather than root, to avoid issues some apps otherwise have and because not accidentally wiping anything is main objective. In the process I discovered thunar failing to mount some seen partitions when thus logged in as user firstrib. Was a minor permission issue to the media firstrib mount folder, which I manually fixed using chown -R. I'll permanently fix that in later new iso release.

Good thing was apt upgrade had no issues, so result nicely current. Discovering small issues like that permissions issue becomes main target for new releases along with funtionality tweaks/improvements. I really like Linux Mint xfce release so aim for a klu jam that works just as smoothly such that I'm equally happy to find myself in either of them despite klu jam pristine installation being so relatively tiny compared to Linux Mint. I would really like to have a KL Mint of similar size to KLU jam because Mint avoids snaps and provides chromium browser as deb file for normal apt install. However, I don't as yet have a good KL Mint variant build mechanism to match KLU jam result, but I'll work on that sometime (the todo list grows exponentially).

As things stand I do also avoid using snaps in klu jam and use a ppa for suitable deb of chromium, my preferred browser most of the time.

[Clarity]

Hello @wiak
Which link to KL SWAYBASE did you use (couple post back)? I want to run as a daily use distro. I have a 6GB system with nvidia adapter HDMI driving my TV as a monitor. The PC has its 2nd HDD as a Ventoy unit that boots the PC to its list of ISO-IMG files. From there I boot Windows or any of the listed linux ISOs. This, of course, is similar to a configuration you have tested.

Thanks in advance

[wiak]

on android phone right now. Pretty sure the klv sway iso I used was from first post thread

viewtopic.php?p=100390#p100390

[mikeslr]

Is there a way to create/change the root password AFTER you've changed the Window Manager.

Not sure this is the best section to post. Move it if not.

Background of the problem. I want to use a Voice to Text application under Linux. The 'easiest' way for me would be to make use of use the Speech-Note Flatpak. https://github.com/mkiol/dsnote/releases Although I generally dislike Flatpaks, one does what one has to. Previously, I was able to obtain a functional Speech Note under various Major Linux Distros, but NOT those which use the xfce window manager. Under those I receive notification that some KDE components were missing. [It could be run with Cinnamon as Window Manager; but Ubuntu doesn't offer that desktop. And FWIW, despite its prior reputation as a RAM hog, KDE runs well on my Laptop].

So I started with an installation of KLU-jam-XFCEbase-1.1, updated it, installed synaptic and the meta-package for KDE-Full. I had needlessly worried about figuring out how to switch Window Manager at log-in. But the installation seems to have automatically switched to logging in to KDE. I CAN log in as spot with the password 'spot'. I haven't tired logging in as first-rib as I'm not certain of its purpose. But neither just pressing Return nor typing in "root" or "root:root" allows me to login as Root.

Maybe I made a mistake or failed to select something while the KDE desktop was being installed.

Of course, everything I've installed is in the 'Upper Changes" folder; and I can boot into this computer using a Puppy booted from a USB-Key.

Any idea how to set or change the root password?

[wiak]

Any idea how to set or change the root password?

I only currently have KLU-jam 1.1 on a Ventoy usb stick and can't boot that right now on this particular machine in UEFI mode for some reason or another. I'll try it later when other machine isn't being used by my son.

The original passwords set were spot:spot, firstrib:firstrib, and root:root. Not sure how root:root is no longer working on your updated system.

As far as I recall I included the Userswitch small gtkdialog app under Start Menu - System category. That allows you to switch who the default user login desktop is. Starts out as user root, but can userswitch to user spot via logout (rather than restart or shutdown) in the gui for shutdown of the system. However, both spot and firstrib were set up with sudo permission (I don't think you even needed to use their password to effectively use them as root user). Thus you should be able to do a:

Code: Select all

sudo passwd

command and thus change root passwd directly anyway and then save that to persistence.

You certainly should not need to mess with the original 07firstrib_rootfs.sfs in order to change root passwd since should already be root:root in there. As I say, I'll check above later assuming you don't report back all is well for you now.

[wiak]

Just booted pristine KLU-jamXFCEbase 1.1

My above post seems to be accurate. Pristine has user:pw combinations root:root, firstrib:firstrib, and spot:spot.

firstrib has userid of 1000, and spot is 1001 on KLU-jam distro (which is different to a Puppy distro userid for spot).

On pristine boot, KLU-jam goes to root desktop. You can temporarily change to spot, for example, from there (not desktop, but in a terminal only) by using terminal command:

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su - spot

No password asked for since you did above as root user. As that user spot, you can then change to root using:

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su - root

This time password will be asked for, which for root in pristine distro is root.

You can instead change to a spot or firstrib user desktop using Start Menu - System - User switch (I think it is actually a small yad app). The password selector in user switch app is irrelevant. Once new use is chosen and OK pressed, the desktop remains as that of root user until Logout. That is you need to then go again to Start Menu and go to shutdown window, but important step there is NOT to shutdown or restart, but instead to simply choose LogOut. The desktop will then auto-switch (without rebooting whole machine) to become, spot (if that is the user switch you chose).

Anyway, even if you just managed to get to user spot or user firstrib in a terminal at any stage, since these both have sudo rights they have the power to change root password via, as I said above post:

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sudo su - root
followed by
passwd

Or alternatively, as spot user, you should simply be able to do:

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sudo passwd root

I think...

What I don't understand overall though is how or why you changed root passwd from its default of root:root anyway? Unless you wanted to do that and did so on purpose, or are you using some sfs in higher layer that overwrites the underlying default firstrib_rootfs.sfs configurations? Obviously any such root passwd change made to persistence would take precedence of course since upper_changes is read/write topmost layer of the overlay stack.

[mikeslr]

Hi wiak, thanks for responding to my post above. I owe you at least an explanation of why I'm not pursuing the question further.
I didn't change root's password at anytime. When I deployed KLU-jamXFCEbase 1.1 the password was 'root.' IIRC at some point I may have chosen the option to boot-in automatically, maybe during the deployment of the KDE package. When I installed and ran the KDE-Full-meta package among the questions asked was which login manager to use, with IIRC KDE's being recommended. I chose whatever was recommended.

On boot-up I was first confronted not with a desktop but with a virtual keyboard taking up most of the screen. Neither pressing 'Return' nor typing 'root' nor 'root:root' did anything except to eventually present a desktop with the choice of loging-in as 'spot' or 'first-rib'. Choosing 'spot' I now had a working system. I could use it and install applications. But these did not survive a reboot. With Spot as user initiating either su or sudo also failed to change or save anything. I also tried to create (from spot) a new User --Mike-- with administrative privileges. No user 'Mike' was created. Using your 'user-switch' I discovered that the password for all Users was the word 'null' -- not a blank space nor 'Enter' nor 'Return'.

Perhaps that was why neither sudo no su worked.

I think my initial mistake(s) were (a) not requiring a password to login as Root; and/or (b) changing to the Login-manager to KDE's; or (c) using the 'meta-Full' package rather than just one of the two other alternatives which would only have installed some files.

I think a work-around might be to login to a Puppy, file-browse to wherever User-passwords are stored in 'KLU-JamKDE' and edit those files.

As I wrote, my reason for trying this was only to run the Speech-Note flatpak. Having also approached that objective from a different path --overcoming the problem I had deploying LinuxMint-cinammon without loosing all my Puppys, see https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewto ... 92#p116992 -- and succeeded in that effort I'm disinclined to continue to try to get 'KLU-JamKDE' working.

However, I'll leave its current setup on my hard-drive for awhile so that I can try using Puppy to edit KDE's user password if someone has an idea how to do that.

FWIW, the KDE desktop under KLV-Jammy looks very nice.

[dcung]

Installed KLU-jam-XFCEbase-1.1 today (frugal).

Got an app that requires snap (cctv-viewer) that I sometimes use.
So, I tested it. Works

Screenshot from 2024-04-18 13-42-19.png (364.22 KiB) Viewed 4791 times

[wiak]

So I've continued to play around with a new small KLU_Noble distro in which I have removed snap support since I don't like it. Can easily be reinstalled of course...

For the moment I'm experimenting with a Wayland/pipewire/Sway variant since it is pretty small and my family (my son anyway) are fans of Sway (except I am far from familiar with the key combinations for that nowadays...).

I really like to make a Ubuntu KL, but there is that problem that Ubuntu uses snap for fetching browsers like Firefox or Chromium. As a quick workaround experiment I decided to add Linux Mint repos to apt sources - from the version of Linux Mint that is derived from Ubuntu Noble. Great thing about Mint is that it also avoids snap and provides Chromium as a normal deb package. Anyway, whole distro reasonable small - iso would probably be well under 1 GB, maybe considerably under that size though nowadays I use zstd compression for sfs files, which will increase iso size back up again by about 15% compared to high xz compression. But no, I haven't made any iso, and indeed may never release further distros since some forum members seem very upset and claim I basically destroyed Puppy Linux, which is a lot of nonsense nevertheless ...

So, booted up my little KLU_Noble_Sway variant and did:

nmtui

to connect to Internet, followed by:

apt update && apt install chromium

and it worked. The Linux Mint version of Chromium all seeming to behave perfectly well in that somewhat mongrel arrangement... per attached early-days screenshot.

Used the Chromium to remind myself via search how to use slurp and grim to make screenshot since using Wayland! There are probably better ways, but simple enough as it happens.

I have checked out NoblePup and see it uses some Portable browser variant of FIrefox. Since I guess it provides apt/dpkg I imagine similar Linux Mint repo trick could be used to fetch Chromium for that too - not very pure distro I suppose, but Pups never cared about that much anyway.

[gabtech]

@wiak Forget the puppy hardliners. This is a forum for sharing linux stuff, so kindly continue sharing your new projects for some of us who follow and use your creations.

[wiak]

my life is a bit upside-down at the present @gabtech so the negative approach of some towards me gave me a good excuse, but of course I'll get back onto this eventually. Indeed it weighs on my mind that KL needs a newer Ubuntu-based release, which will I assure you appear sooner or later here since its lack feels like an unnecessary black hole in the KL universe.

[wiak]

my life is a bit upside-down at the present @gabtech so the negative approach of some towards me gave me a good excuse, but of course I'll get back onto this eventually. Indeed it weighs on my mind that KL needs a newer Ubuntu-based release, which will I assure you appear sooner or later here since its lack feels like an unnecessary black hole in the KL universe.

It will hopefully not be long till I do this. It is just one distro release after all and the core commandline version is almost trivial to make as it happens.

One pity about KLA-jamXFCEbase is that I never got round to reproducing how I made that via writing a build script; other matters got in the way, but for KL_Noble I'll try to do exactly that. I didn't build KLU-jam the usual way via build_firstrib_rootfs.sh, but rather started with a very small official Ubuntu cloud release since its developers had done a great job minimising how that is made including keeping the var apt package directory clean after new app installations. Once I bolted FR initrd onto that (using as it happens a Vanilla Dpup huge kernel, but could also have used official Ubuntu kernel/modules, which would work better nowadays to circumvent Secure Boot issues...), I removed snap support and found a dpkg of Chromium to use instead of snap version. With KLU_Noble I will probably instead use the above Linux Mint repo version of Chromium (and likely leave that repo active - so end result may be as much a KL Linux Mint as it is a KLU...

This time round, I currently plan to add an f_plug to the special build script that fetches that Ubuntu cloud image. The purpose of the f_plug is for second stage completion of the build - taking it past that core commandline-only initial build to add a desktop, which could be an X-based desktop like XFCE or a Wayland one (my earliest of that likely being Sway since my son is very familiar with Sway and uses it all the time). So different f_plugs will be able to be used for different desktop choices once myself or anyone else writes these. End result is thus pretty flexible and especially since I'll make the f_plug a normal executable script such that it could be run from an already booted core commandline version (as an alternative to being run during a complete build of one desktop variant or another).

Of course, that flexibility comes at the price of any iso building having to come later. A special iso build script should really be written to automate that since that could be written to work with any KL build.

[Clarity]

... iso building having to come later. A special iso build script ...

Is this comment related to the work that @gyrog is providing, contributing to MOK management?

[rockedge]

Is this comment related to the work that @gyrog is providing, contributing to MOK management?

I think it means the script will complete the build and assemble the necessary components to produce the entire system neatly packaged in an ISO.

We'll have to look further into if expending the energy into the MOK management is worth it at this time.

[wiak]

Is this comment related to the work that @gyrog is providing, contributing to MOK management?

I think it means the script will complete the build and assemble the necessary components to produce the entire system neatly packaged in an ISO.

Yes, that's all I meant. Nothing to do with MOK, which is indeed a lot of effort (useful and necessary effort I hasten to add - at least for those in a situation where turning off secure boot is simply not an option).