Easy Bookworm early testing

[BarryK]

Just to let you guys know, right now I'm building Easy Bookworm.
Debian 12 Bookworm has reached "soft freeze" so time to give it a go.

I can't find an exact date for Debian 12 final release -- just "mid 2023".

There are two ways that Easy Bookworm can be deployed; either as a complete standalone release, or just a bookworm.sfs that will run in a container in the Kirkstone series.

Debian 12 will have the 6.1.x LTS kernel.

One thing that I am very curious about is that Debian has adopted "usr merge" for version 12, where /bin, /sbin and /lib are symlinks into /usr
I intend to keep the traditional /bin, /sbin and /lib folders, so it will be interesting to see if any issues occur.
Well, I do expect issues, would like to find out if can work around them, or be forced to adopt usr-merge.

[fredx181]

One thing that I am very curious about is that Debian has adopted "usr merge" for version 12, where /bin, /sbin and /lib are symlinks into /usr
I intend to keep the traditional /bin, /sbin and /lib folders, so it will be interesting to see if any issues occur.

Could be possible perhaps without the "usr-merged" system but some packages nowadays depend on the package usrmerge or/and usr-is-merged.
See here (and further) for report (but DebianDog Bookworm uses apt/dpkg only as package manager, so probably not really comparable with EasyOs) viewtopic.php?p=70499#p70499

[BarryK]

fredx181,
Thanks for the link to interesting discussion about usr-merge.

I have got bookworm desktop up and running, without usr-merge, and no problems at all.

Easy uses pkgget (ppm), which installs the DEbs as-is. I looked inside lots of DEbs and they still seem to be using /bin etc.

[BarryK]

Have got it working. Desktop, network-manager-applet in the tray connects to Internet, firefox works.

Tested various things, working so far.

Except for one big problem -- libreoffice won't start.
It just hangs at startup. I used strace, and it has executed a 'futex' operation, meaning that it is waiting for something.
What that something is, I don't know. Don't even get the splash window.

Tried and tried all sorts of things, no go.

So I give up. FreeOffice works.

Anyway, I'm cutting down the package-list, as it is too big. So will leave out a office suite.
I'm inclined to just release a bookworm*.sfs, which will run fine in a container -- so you will have Easy-bookworm desktop in a container, and can use the PPM to install pkgs from the debian bookworm repo.
There is no need for the bookworm*sfs to have all the apps that are already on the main kirkstone desktop.

[BarryK]

Back in May 2022, is the very first attempts building Easy Bookworm:

Version 0.3:
viewtopic.php?t=6003

Version 0.1:
viewtopic.php?t=5952

I remember now, couldn't get libreoffice to start then also.

[BarryK]

Trying to keep Easy Bookworm size down, I replaced Audacious music player with zigbert's pMusic.

The EasyOS noarch repo has pmusic 5.6.0, very old, and it works but the icons didn't display.
So I grabbed the latest, version 6.9.3:

viewtopic.php?t=5801

Great, the icons now display ok.

@zigbert
Thanks zigbert, for keeping up with maintaining pmusic for all these years.

For those who don't know, zigbert has been a Puppy app developer from the early days. He is a master at using gtkdialog to create beautiful GUI apps.

[don570]

Note to BarryK...

Zigbert has done a lot of work updating Gtkdialog tips.
viewtopic.php?p=82433#p82433
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