A very rough and sloppy attempt at using Limine Installer with Fatdog64-812

[baldronicus]

Hi @BarryK et all.

Following some posts made in the thread superchook had started (https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=6396), I thought I would make a half-baked attempt at installing Limine Installer in Fatdog64-812.

It seems best to give the initial result first to save you having to suffer through my notes, even though it is out of order.

Result:

Opened a terminal (emulator?) and tried "limine-installer".
A "LimineInstaller...check dependencies" (this is not a verbatim quote of the text that appeared) error dialog box came up, indicating that the "lsblk utility from util-linux is too old, does not understand PTUUID."

So I didn't get any further with the default Fatdog64-812 attempt.

GSlapt was opened, and the default version of util-linux in Fatdog64-812 appears to be util-linux 2.31.1-x86_64-1 (util-linux 2.31.1).

I didn't notice any later packages on ibiblio, but I wouldn't rely on my poor checking. Thanks.

Background- only given in case I messed up something (apart from the obvious) along the way.

First off, I should mention that I don't know what I am doing! I have not read any of the background info regarding Limine bootloader/manager, only parts of some forum posts.
Nor have any dependencies been checked in advance. I figured I would just try to "wing it" with a default Fatdog64-812.
Further, this is only being trialed with respect to a humungous initrd setup.

A 64 bit laptop, set to boot UEFI only, is being used for this. It already has a Debian installation on it.

The files limine-3.13-amd64.pet and limine-installer-1.2.pet, made available by BarryK, were downloded from the forum.

A flash drive that had been set up using the Universal USB bootloader (usb-mbr.img version), from Fatdog, was used to boot Fatdog64-812.

GParted was used to resize a data partition and set up two (2) test partitions for Fatdog64.

The files initrd and vmlinuz for Fatdog64-812 were copied to the top level of the first new partition (fdlitst1).

A directory (fatdog64-812lt) was set up on the second new partition (fdlitst2), and the same files were copied to that directory.

Once the file copies had stabilized, the partitions were unmounted so that only the live Fatdog64-812 instance was being used.

The copies of the downloaded files were brought across on a data USB drive.

Each file was converted to a .txz format file, using the right-click "Convert to New Package Format" selection.

The limine-3.13-amd64-x86_64-PET.txz was then installed using a right-click and "Install Package". The system indicated that the installation was successful.

The limine-installer-1.2-x86_64-PET.txz file followed. Again, the system indicated that the installation was successful.

The window was then closed, and the USB drive unmounted and removed.

The Result, given above, follows from here.

Thanks.

[superchook]

Hi baldronicus,
I have managed to get Fatdog64-812 booted from a usb stick using the limine bootloader that comes with easyOS 4.3. The method was as follows.
1) Download the image file easy-4.3-amd64.img and "dd" it to a 32G Lexar usb 3 stick. This produces a bootable stick with two partitions, the first formatted as fat16, of 7 MiB with the flags boot,esp set and the second formatted as ext4 of 800 and something MiB with the label "easy2".
2) you could enlarge the second partition using gparted but in fact I moved the contents namely easy.sfs, initrd and vmlinuz to a temporary location and deleted that partition. I then added two new partitions of 13 MiB each, the first formatted as ext4 and labelled easy2 and the second formatted as ext3 and labelled STORAGE the remainder of the stick was formatted as fat32 and labelled SNEAKER. (after the old term "sneaker net" )
3) I created a number of directories in these partitions. The second partition now contains the directories AtomicPupXXII, Backgrounds, dpupstretch-7.5, easyos, Fatdog64-812, friendly-fossa64, lost+found, myeasyos, MyFatdog64-812 and the file UUID (a one line text file containing the uuid of the partition). The third partition contains Mike Walsh's Google_Earth_portable and the directories Guydog, lost+found, PLOP, s57-2018, someone_local and someone_else. The latter two directories are currently empty but are intended to be the home directories of two users one for OS's configured for a hardware clock running in local time and the other for a hardware clock running in UTC.
The file limine.cfg in the first partition is attached. All the OS's boot up as required except the two in the third partition, s57-2018 and Guydog5.0.1. I must enquire on the EasyOS forum to find the correct menuentries for them.
HTH,
Ken

[superchook]

Oops I forgot the limine.cfg which was the whole point of the post
I have had to rename the file to limine.txt to get it accepted.
You will have to change the uuid according to what you find for your stick.

[baldronicus]

Hi @superchook . Thank you for the info (including the limine.cfg data).
I have copied the text of your posts, and downloaded the limine.txt file, for future reference. I hope this is OK.
(As an aside I take it that the 13 MiB partitions are actually 13 GiB ones- and, no, I am not trying to be smart or anything, my posts are littered with typos. It is, I guess, just a way to let you know that I have actually read your posts.)

To be honest the above attempt was only made as, I think, step might currently be both hardware and time constrained, and I was curious to see how far an idiot such as myself might get (essentially if an uninformed, lazy, fool, such as myself, could get it going, then others should have little difficulty, in other words, a lowest common denominator test ).
It was a half-baked and half-hearted attempt, and Limine Installer does deserve better.
Further, on re-reading some of the posts BarryK had made in your earlier thread, I think I might have done a very good job of misinterpreting things, and intentions, and not tried what was desired. Indeed, I think your efforts have been much closer to the mark.

Whilst I did purchase an early EasyOS USB drive from OSDisk before they stopped taking orders for software (which goes to show how early a version that was), I haven't really tried it much.

From the forum, I think a lot of people have found a lot to like about EasyOS.
I guess it might be an idea to take a look at 4.3 (?). However, I don't think that aarnet still mirrors EasyOS, or Fatdog, for that matter, or maybe not updated stuff. It has been a while since I last checked, so I guess I should have another look.
Although my ISP operates a mirror, I don't think that they have ever mirrored either EasyOS or Fatdog.
Which means I will need to hammer ibiblio directly, or maybe nluug. I am not sure about using nluug from Australia (I guess I am showing my ignorance again ).

However, I have to admit that I have found Fatdog64 and the usb-boot-mbr.img based USB drives to be very nice, handy and useful. Hence, I don't feel a great imperative to "go looking", if you know what I mean.

Thanks again.

[baldronicus]

Hi. Apologies if this is not really the correct place for this, but it does relate to booting Fatdog, and I intended to reference the info in the first post in this thread.

I ended up downloading EasyOS Dunfell 4.3, and using Limine Installer from that to install Limine bootloader/manager on the laptop, that was still set up the same way as described in the first post in this thread. I am not sure which versions of Limine and Limine Installer are in 4.3 by default, but I presumed that they were probably current.

The Limine Installer worked, and detected Debian and one Fatdog instance (the set up on sda5, where the Fatdog files were under a directory on the partition). Intriguingly, the Fatdog files that were loose in the top level of partition sda4 did not seem to be detected (unless, maybe, the later detected (sda5) instance resulted in the overwrite of the initial one, for some reason, before display of the selection options).

The three options presented (UEFI chainload Debian (I think), Fatdog64-812 (sda5) and Debian) were all selected during the installation process.

Upon a reboot the Limine bootloader screen appeared. The boot of Fatdog64 worked, as did the Debian one. The chainload option had some messages come up, but then proceeded to load via the Debian GRUB2 bootloader, as, I think, might be expected. In all cases I only checked to the initial boot and didn't proceed further. Thanks.

[BarryK]

The Limine Installer worked, and detected Debian and one Fatdog instance (the set up on sda5, where the Fatdog files were under a directory on the partition). Intriguingly, the Fatdog files that were loose in the top level of partition sda4 did not seem to be detected (unless, maybe, the later detected (sda5) instance resulted in the overwrite of the initial one, for some reason, before display of the selection options).

The limine-installer script will search for frugal installs starting from one-deep, that is, expected to be in a folder.
/usr/local/limine-installer/ find-installations has this:

Code: Select all

   INITRDS="$(find ${MOUNTPOINT} -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 4 -type f -name initrd | sed -e "s%^${MOUNTPOINT}%%")"

...it then tests if the 'initrd' is bigger than 145125632 bytes, and if so tentatively decides it is fatdog. There are some more tests.

[baldronicus]

Hi BarryK. Thank you for this explanation, Limine Installer, and so much more. Thanks again.