KLV-Airedale-beta+ Released, Ready for Download

[geo_c]

I'm putting this link here, because I seem to have done this installing KLV-Airedale-beta14 on my EFI USB drive, and I'm NOT blaming KLV, but I figure you guys will know what I should do next:

Details here:
viewtopic.php?p=58245#p58245

[wiak]

I'm putting this link here, because I seem to have done this installing KLV-Airedale-beta14 on my EFI USB drive, and I'm NOT blaming KLV, but I figure you guys will know what I should do next:

Details here:
viewtopic.php?p=58245#p58245

Sounds serious, and sorry to hear you have such a problem. Hope someone can help you with that. I can't sorry; I know how to set up a gpt arranged drive and then use it with grub2 (but only via the help of the grub2 install work of others). I'm afraid I wouldn't myself know how to rescue such a drive when something has gone wrong with it. In such situations I would be resigned to re-partitioning and re-formatting from scratch or hoping one of those who provide grub2 installation utilities knew some fix tricks. KLV-Airedale has never involved itself in matters of how to partition disks or get grub2 on them - it is just an OS distro to be installed thereafter and use grub2 grub.conf facilities. When I want to make frugal installs to a new machine (be that Puppy, or KLV or whatever), I always resort to either: using a usb install of Fossapup and following its frugalpup utility to partition the disk and install Puppy grub2 version (along with puppy.cer for cases I want to use on secure boot machine), or:

for machines that already have something on them but no grub2, for example my recently purchased HP laptop which came with Win 10 Pro on it. For that case I used an official Ubuntu or official Ubuntu derived (Zorin) usb stick to install that Linux as a full install in a dual-boot situation. However, whilst that underlying system used GPT, that basic arrangement was already set up and working correctly. I just shrunk the Win 10 partitioned, re-partitioned the unallocated part thus free and formatted with ext4 for my purposes; I left the main GPT stuff alone. KLV itself wouldn't break GPT operation - its just an OS that ends up written to one of the Linux-formatted partitions, but gparted or similar disk partitioning tool could alter everything of course, but from your description it sounds more like some actual corruption has occurred on the drive itself for some reason or another. On gpt thread you have started you'll need to try best you can to list exactly what you were doing (command by command) at the time the drive GPT corruption occurred, but it might just be a case of sudden drive failure or power spike or similar - yes, a drive works fine for years but it can and does suddenly fail. I have lost three drives over the years, two being SSD and one of these SSD failures occurred recently (though no KLV on it), and I lost absolutely tons of development code (only some of which I had backups for) so I sympathise and hope your issue is more easily fixable than mine was (wasn't). But, I certainly agree that kind of failure is nothing to do with KLV per se, and important that you stated so, though other things you did whilst setting things up for its installation (such as gparted work) could certainly cause issues (but surely not actual GPT corruptions which sounds more like some firmware/hardware related failure?). However, I really don't know much myself about these matters, so may be more trivial to fix than I myself would worry. Hope you get a good response - more you know about what you were doing command by command at the time of failure, and partitioning info and so on, the better.

Googling (which I'm sure you've done) does suggest some possibilities:

I googled with search terms: linux restoring corrupted GPT partition

https://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/repairing.html
https://www.rodsbooks.com/fixparts/
https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=1052294
https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... -gpt-table
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GPT_fdisk

EDIT: I see now from your gpt thread you have already been trying gdisk and posted some detailed results.

[geo_c]

@wiak Thank you. Yes I'm definitely not blaming KLV. I just did the usual copy the folder to sdb2 and run grub4dos. Perhaps I should have checked 'do not re-write MBR.' But as you say it's just as probable that it was a hardware, or cable failure. It seemed to happen for no particular reason, as I could still see the partitions and data after running grub4dos, but not in g-parted, so perhaps a hardware failure corrupted the gpt file. After unmounting, unplugging, and replugging the drive, then I couldn't get it to appear in pmount.

It seems from my reading that it may be recoverable, as the partitions are still discoverable when gdisk reads the backup table.

I will simply need to proceed with a good working knowledge of what commands and options to run and in what order before I blow it for good!

I'll continue my thread in Utilities: viewtopic.php?p=58245#p58245

[williams2]

DOS partitions and GPT partitions and super-floppy (no partitions) are all incompatible with each other.

What does fdisk -l say? Is Disklabel type: gpt or dos?

Do you have a mountable file system on /dev/sdb (whatever your drive is)
If so, you should not have any partitions.
If so, any partitions can conflict with it (accessing the same space as the super-floppy file system.

If you have got gpt partitions and/or dos partitions and/or it is set up as a super floppy,
you are not the first person with this problem.
I do not know whether this is Puppy's fault, or an other Linux OS that is doing this.

[geo_c]

DOS partitions and GPT partitions and super-floppy (no partitions) are all incompatible with each other.

What does fdisk -l say? Is Disklabel type: gpt or dos?

Do you have a mountable file system on /dev/sdb (whatever your drive is)
If so, you should not have any partitions.
If so, any partitions can conflict with it (accessing the same space as the super-floppy file system.

If you have got gpt partitions and/or dos partitions and/or it is set up as a super floppy,
you are not the first person with this problem.
I do not know whether this is Puppy's fault, or an other Linux OS that is doing this.

Wow! That's news to me. I been using this setup on USB hard drives for maybe 10 years. The fdisk -l gdisk -l output describing the drive can be found here: viewtopic.php?p=58245#p58245 The disk label type according to fdisk is gpt

Like I say, I've been using this setup for a long time and it has always worked, that is I create a 'head' NTFS partion1 on the top, and a data NTFS partion4 on bottom, that way I can plug the drive into a windows machine and see the data drive. Partion2 is ext4 with pup installs, and Partion3 is the ext4 data partition. So I work off sdb2 and sdb3 in puppy, and then grsync the data to sdb4 for traveling or using windows machines.

It has always worked well, like I mentioned, this particular drive has been functioning for at least 2-3 years, maybe more. I don't remember, I've had it awhile. Maybe I just lucked out and it finally caught up with me.

[geo_c]

gdisk utility worked! I've got the drive back. Thanks @williams2 and @wiak Sorry to derail the KLV thread!

[geo_c]

Back to KLV, which I'm booted in currently.

So I'm installing applications using OctoXBPS, and some things aren't there. So I'm wondering if I can compile. Does beta-14 have developer tools, or do I need a dev.sfs?

Also this may have already been addressed, but how do I get mounted .sfs applications to mount again on reboot?

[one]

@wiak Thank you. Yes I'm definitely not blaming KLV. I just did the usual copy the folder to sdb2 and run grub4dos. [...]

@geo_c

I think you should NOT use grub4dos on a GPT disc - use grub2config instead.

peace

[rockedge]

@geo_c To have SFS files load at boot, place the SFS into the KLV directory and rename it with a number like this:
20some_file.SFS

Screenshot.png (36.41 KiB) Viewed 1712 times

For development install the following :

Code: Select all

xbps-install -y base-devel git cmake

optional but I use these:

Code: Select all

xbps-install -y perl python

That should get you going on compiling. Make sure you look around https://voidlinux.org/packages/ and look carefully. Sometimes the name of a package that is in Ubuntu or Debian will be different in Void Linux.
Update the repos in OctoXBPS via the menu.

[rockedge]

@fredx181 Tested the Openbox SFS version.......I love it. Works great and is a great option for desktops of the KLV series. I am interested now to see if it would work on in a similar way with KLV-Boxer.
Which has a basic JWM - Rox pinboard desktop setup, the best overall in low consumption of resources and performance, in similar KLV builds.

I have been revisiting KLV-Boxer because my Zoneminder install script works 100% on it and recently compiling Zoneminder in KLV-Airedale-beta14 is failing. I've spent days now trying to get Zoneminder going again in beta14 with no success as of yet.

My next step is to install the .xbps version.

Really well done Fred. KLV-Airedale wouldn't be what it is without your work and ideas.

[wiak]

xwin contains code that is needed by Puppy.
In the Ubuntu startx there is no code that works with Puppy's idiosyncrasies.

If you try to startx using Ubuntu's startx, that is asking for trouble.

I don't think KLV-Airedale uses same mechanism to do autologin as Puppy Linux, though I may be wrong. I presume it uses Void Linux startx, though perhaps that has been modified.

[geo_c]

Probably of interest to a very limited few if any, but I just compiled Calcurse-4.8.0 for KLV-Airedale. I had to install ncurses and dependencies.

If there's a way to make a KLV package for it, I'd be happy to give it a try.

[rockedge]

I don't think KLV-Airedale uses same mechanism to do autologin as Puppy Linux

This is true. There is no Puppy Linux mechanism involved. startx is the correct command in KLV, and xwin does not exist at this time.

Since KLV-Airedale is a mostly a WDL (WeeDog) genetically and not a Puppy Linux.

[geo_c]

Question, how do I get other file managers like ROX, Xfe, Midnight Commander to see mounted drives? Thunar says my attached USB drive is mounted, but all that shows up in /mnt in the other file managers is ~/home, /layers, and /sda1.

[fredx181]

Question, how do I get other file managers like ROX, Xfe, Midnight Commander to see mounted drives? Thunar says my attached USB drive is mounted, but all that shows up in /mnt in the other file managers is ~/home, /layers, and /sda1.

The drive you booted from should be in /mnt, the partitions mounted from Thunar should show in /run/media/root/ .

[geo_c]

Question, how do I get other file managers like ROX, Xfe, Midnight Commander to see mounted drives? Thunar says my attached USB drive is mounted, but all that shows up in /mnt in the other file managers is ~/home, /layers, and /sda1.

The drive you booted from should be in /mnt, the partitions mounted from Thunar should show in /run/media/root/ .

Oh face-plant! That's right, I already figured that out once and forgot!

[geo_c]

When I run the OctoXBPS package manager, should I choose 'Install Updates' from the menu? I ask because it looks like doing so would be updating builtin packages. I'm wondering if that risks breaking things, or if in fact this update feature is one of the great advantages of KLV-Airedale.

[rockedge]

@geo_c You can update if you wish. Also a complete system update in a terminal:

Code: Select all

xbps-install -Suy

Or using OctoXBPS and Install Updates is okay.

Shouldn't break anything. If you do see a problem please report because I did have a lib conflict that I couldn't seem to resolve on a test install recently

[wiak]

@geo_c You can update if you wish. Also a complete system update in a terminal:

Code: Select all

xbps-install -Suy

Or using OctoXBPS and Install Updates is okay.

Shouldn't break anything. If you do see a problem please report because I did have a lib conflict that I couldn't seem to resolve on a test install recently

I haven't reached a final conclusion about this matter either. I just suck it and see, but should spend more time analysing what 'might' go wrong. In practice it seems that -Suy is fine on first creation, but I do wonder if a major update occurs to a core lib (such as glibc) if that might sometimes create a situation where the system 'breaks' in the update process. I had same thoughts when I used to update packages in WDL_Arch64; in practice I was generally surprised just how successfully such updates tended to be, but now and then if I didn't update major system regularly I did end up with something 'not quite right'. I'm not completely sure; I suspect pseudo fullinstall might be best for major update situation, but I haven't really thought much about why that might be (or not) anyway.

Certainly I do suspect updating is a possible disadvantage of layered frugal installed systems generally - full install distros don't need to worry about layering issues (which is why I imagine pseudo full install such as WDL system can do 'might' be more reliable at major update times, but that's just a gut feeling I have without analysed basis really). I could imagine update messing with initrd mounted parts of the system, since the initrd isn't itself being updated and any modules loaded at that time haven't themselves been updated automatically - hence allowing kernel updates can certainly be problematic. Same issues apply to any frugal installed distros of course, which is why using a huge kernel (that doesn't need additional initrd modules) is a particular advantage to minimize the need to also update the initrd internals when kernel updated). This kind of discussion merits a thread of its own, and lots of discussion, and test results....

[fredx181]

@fredx181 Tested the Openbox SFS version.......I love it. Works great and is a great option for desktops of the KLV series. I am interested now to see if it would work on in a similar way with KLV-Boxer.
Which has a basic JWM - Rox pinboard desktop setup, the best overall in low consumption of resources and performance, in similar KLV builds.

I have been revisiting KLV-Boxer because my Zoneminder install script works 100% on it and recently compiling Zoneminder in KLV-Airedale-beta14 is failing. I've spent days now trying to get Zoneminder going again in beta14 with no success as of yet.

My next step is to install the .xbps version.

Really well done Fred. KLV-Airedale wouldn't be what it is without your work and ideas.

Thanks Erik, it will probably need some modifying if using in KLV-Boxer, if I can help, just tell me.
Here's updated package openbox-klv-1.0_1.x86_64.xbps:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/vt8 ... .xbps?dl=1
Some small changes/fixes, e.g. shows more icons in the menus now that were previously missing and cleaned up some incorrect keybinds.
Still some icons missing in the Menu though (for the specific xfce applications), that's because menu-cache (or ... ?) doesn't like the icon names with org.xfce..... e.g. org.xfce.terminal.png.

[wiak]

@fredx181 Tested the Openbox SFS version.......I love it. Works great and is a great option for desktops of the KLV series. I am interested now to see if it would work on in a similar way with KLV-Boxer.
Which has a basic JWM - Rox pinboard desktop setup, the best overall in low consumption of resources and performance, in similar KLV builds.

I have been revisiting KLV-Boxer because my Zoneminder install script works 100% on it and recently compiling Zoneminder in KLV-Airedale-beta14 is failing. I've spent days now trying to get Zoneminder going again in beta14 with no success as of yet.

My next step is to install the .xbps version.

Really well done Fred. KLV-Airedale wouldn't be what it is without your work and ideas.

Thanks Erik, it will probably need some modifying if using in KLV-Boxer, if I can help, just tell me.
Here's updated package openbox-klv-1.0_1.x86_64.xbps:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/vt8 ... .xbps?dl=1
Some small changes/fixes, e.g. shows more icons in the menus now that were previously missing and cleaned up some incorrect keybinds.
Still some icons missing in the Menu though (for the specific xfce applications), that's because menu-cache (or ... ?) doesn't like the icon names with org.xfce..... e.g. org.xfce.terminal.png.

It's a nice approach. A similar JWM/Rox type xbps would complete the range and the additional files add hardly any bloat and don't use any RAM when not themselves being activated. Saves building extra distros just for different desktop environments, and since upstream Void is a rolling distro there is no need to build new KLV-Airedales every half year or so since no such thing as new 'releases' upstream. That frees up dev time for polishing and improving the distro itself (including its build plugin and so on).

[geo_c]

I thought it might be a good idea to link a discussion of browsers and graphics, hardware acceleration from another thread:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 424#p58424

And as I'm dealing with Brave Browser's audio routing in Pulse Audio, I thought this link would be helpful:
https://docs.voidlinux.org/config/media/pulseaudio.html

[geo_c]

Sorry to flood the board with questions, but I do have a question about terminals in KLV.

Xfce terminal is nice, but on some terminal applications I get question marks or nonsense on some character displays. In particular Elinks, Calcurse, and Wordgrinder. These applications display correctly in UxTerm.

My question is two fold: How do I either correct the character encoding in XfceTerm or change the colors and other settings in Xterm?

and on the positive side, here's my report on beta14:
Installed on two laptop hard drives (one SSD), and one SSD USB drive, all functioning consistently and smoothly.
This is just about at 'daily driver' status for me as I have the following applications running:

• Xfe.sfs

• rainlendar2

• Claws Mail

• Brave Browser-portable

• Ungoogled Chromium portable

• LibreWolf appimage

• elinks

• lynx

• Sylpheed

• wordgrinder

• GIMP-portable

• Musescore appimage

• Zoom portable

• LibreOffice.sfs

• Personal gtk themes and desktop icons

[rockedge]

@geo_c There are ways to modify xfce4-terminal. I will look more into it and see what we can do.

@wiak, @fredx181 I totally agree that the different desktops be offered as packages and not specific KLV distros. Although there is some advantage to the seperate builds though in the fact that each can be more specificly customized to that particular desktop system.

Here is the KLV with JWM -Rox pinboard as the desktop. Almost outfitted to the same extent as KLV-Airedale-beta14, and using fredx181's pup-volume-monitor XBPS package.

Screenshot(3).jpg (71.57 KiB) Viewed 1788 times

[wiak]

@geo_c There are ways to modify xfce4-terminal. I will look more into it and see what we can do.

@wiak, @fredx181 I totally agree that the different desktops be offered as packages and not specific KLV distros. Although there is some advantage to the seperate builds though in the fact that each can be more specificly customized to that particular desktop system.

Here is the KLV with JWM -Rox pinboard as the desktop. Almost outfitted to the same extent as KLV-Airedale-beta14, and using fredx181's pup-volume-monitor XBPS package.

I wonder if possible to have a KLV-Airedale release that didn't include any desktop environment, but instead customised individual xbps addons for each of XFCE, Openbox/tint2, and JWM/Rox or whatever? I imagine that would just be a matter of leaving out XFCE packages in original construction, but maybe too unfriendly at initial boot?

[rockedge]

@wiak I have such a KLV that has no desktop but also no Xorg or Wayland and I have a PLUG to make one.

Not the friendliest at boot. I used it for a headless Zoneminder box. I imagine there could be desktop system add on's and pick one, add it to the mix and out comes KLV with the desired desktop. Lots and lots of details between here and there though.....

First need a viable JWM - Rox pinboard option.

[wiak]

@wiak I have such a KLV that has no desktop but also no Xorg or Wayland and I have a PLUG to make one.

Not the friendliest at boot. I used it for a headless Zoneminder box. I imagine there could be desktop system add on's and pick one, add it to the mix and out comes KLV with the desired desktop. Lots and lots of details between here and there though.....

First need a viable JWM - Rox pinboard option.

Yes, I wasn't referring to that headless type of configuration, useful though that is for the likes of Zoneminder box. Just simple Xorg or Wayland with desktop option added by user via xbps. Each xbps desktop addon requires a lot of hard work of course, though xfce and openbox/tint2 would likely be easy since already available/used now as configured options.

[rockedge]

@wiak Ahhh yes, quite right, not really the same BUT....easy to modify. Only need to find a a very simple desktop to bridge the gap until the actual chosen package is engaged.

Some mechanism to make it not so "command line" I suppose, but enough to get to the next stage for a user.

[fredx181]

Other options may be:
- ISO containing all Desktop variants to choose from, but one is default, so then in the Menu e.g. Start XFCE, Start Openbox, Start JWM etc...
- ISO containing only one default Desktop, e.g XFCE, and have in the Menu the options to download and install several other Desktop variants from .xbps packages.

[rockedge]

@fredx181 I like the 2 options. The choice will be the one most reliable to enable. Add the 3 desktop options as xbps pakages in the ISO and have a default desktop looks to be a solid beginning.

Interesting would be, to test a mechanism that would download the chosen desktop package that then installs.

First perhaps have 3 types already present with the choice on the main menu to start with to test the starting configurations that each desktop requires to: 1. work reliably 2. look good and be relatively easy to customize.