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#51 Re: Installation » devuan fresh installation on HP laptop fails to load graphical desktop » 2021-03-14 13:56:21
Modern INTEL processor: can I suggest that you download a modern, live distro such as one from
https://voidlinux.org/download/
as Void kernels are from 2021, [5.10.17], it would be quick way of exploring this issue.
#52 Re: Installation » I just installed Devuan 3.1.0 Beowulf and it's cool » 2021-03-13 15:19:52
Micronaut: "* Network manager and WICD and Bluetooth?"
wicd manages both wired and wireless networks. If you click on the XFCE toolbar icon it will open the wicd control window. My laptop has both, but I switch off wifi as my neighbours houses are too close.
Coming from a VoidLinux background, I prefer wicd to NetworkManager, even though the latter has nmcli command-line controls.
#53 Re: Installation » I just installed Devuan 3.1.0 Beowulf and it's cool » 2021-03-04 21:44:49
Thanks. My router is a bit too permissive for my liking. I prefer to use a custom firewall derived from the work of Amaril Dojr [now called Amanda Santini on github]. I want to stop all unsolicited outgoing traffic [javascript scripts phoning home]. I sort of "get" iptables [past 25 years] and I'm a bit too old [and lazy] to learn about nftables [unless the Poettering-tendency force complience].
netstat showed: cupsd, saned, cups-browsed, avahi-daemon and dhclient; only the last of these will remain once I have replaced xfce4->openbox.
jacksprat
#54 Installation » I just installed Devuan 3.1.0 Beowulf and it's cool » 2021-03-04 20:29:45
- jacksprat
- Replies: 9
I just installed devuan 3.1.0 from
devuan_beowulf_3.1.0_amd64-netinstall.iso
selecting runit as the init system and xfce4 as the desktop. Everything went well, except that it didn't reboot at the end [just froze]; no worry, power cycle brought up a login screen. So far, I haven't even installed a firewall, so unplugged from router for now [unless installing packages].
My "daily driver" distro is Void Linux with runit, lxdm, openbox, tint2, lxterminal, leafpad etc along with custom iptables firewall, custom bwrap+firefox. I can impose these preferences on Devuan [Devuan now has the required packages], with the "slim->lxdm" as a risky change.
I will run Devuan on my spare computer to see how it behaves.
jacksprat
#55 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Microcode to fight Spectre and Meltdown cpu flaws » 2018-08-17 19:52:35
Open hardware is too far in the future for me. I had hoped that older AMD processors would be less of a rats nest than Intel ones, but even the latest Ryzen2 processors are heavily invested in speculative execution. Arm stand a better chance, but even they dabble in attackable speculative execution and are not immune. What a mess..
#56 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Microcode to fight Spectre and Meltdown cpu flaws » 2018-08-17 11:55:35
Just for information, I ran the spectre-meltdown-checker.sh script in speed47's github repo, and it says that the hardware [microcode] does nothing to help with these intel bugs. I have version 0x25 and latest known version is 0x2e. So the only protection comes from the kernel mitigations. Feel old..
#57 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Microcode to fight Spectre and Meltdown cpu flaws » 2018-08-17 11:28:11
thanks, and sorry: I was not reading carefully. When I cut and paste your sources.list file, and do apt-get update, then I can install intel-microcode! /lib/firmware/intel-ucode now exists. and I have to assume that the linux kernel finds this during boot [but I don't know how to interrogate the running kernel to prove this]. Is it safe to also install amd-microcode, or do they interfere?, Anyway, thanks for getting me this far.
#58 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Microcode to fight Spectre and Meltdown cpu flaws » 2018-08-17 10:25:56
I also tried:
apt-get update >/tmp/zzzz
and get error messages on stderr:
W: The repository 'http://gb.deb.devuan.org/merged ascii/non-free Release' does not have a Release file.
W: The repository 'http://gb.deb.devuan.org/merged ascii-backports/non-free Release' does not have a Release file.
E: Failed to fetch http://gb.deb.devuan.org/merged/dists/a … ce/Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 31.220.0.151 80]
E: Failed to fetch http://gb.deb.devuan.org/merged/dists/a … ce/Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 31.220.0.151 80]
E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.
which I do not understand, but maybe they mean something to someone.
#59 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Microcode to fight Spectre and Meltdown cpu flaws » 2018-08-16 23:02:58
thanks. I am struggling to get access to these packages. My /etc/apt/sources.list file now contains:
deb http://gb.deb.devuan.org/merged/ ascii main
deb-src http://gb.deb.devuan.org/merged/ ascii main
deb http://gb.deb.devuan.org/merged/ ascii/non-free main
deb-src http://gb.deb.devuan.org/merged/ ascii/non-free main
deb http://gb.deb.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-backports/non-free main
deb-src http://gb.deb.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-backports/non-free main
deb http://gb.deb.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-security main
deb-src http://gb.deb.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-security main
deb http://gb.deb.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-updates main
deb-src http://gb.deb.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-updates main
Yet when I try
apt-get install intel-microcode
I get nothing. Also
apt policy intel-microcode
says that it is unable to find the package. I must be doing something wrong, but can't see it [at the limit of my experience here].
#60 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Microcode to fight Spectre and Meltdown cpu flaws » 2018-08-16 10:46:28
thanks: I used Synaptic to select all repos, but the only "non-free" ones were marked "cdrom:[devuan_ascii...]" and would not be selected. The only package that looked appropriate was firmware-linux-free, which was already installed.
#61 Hardware & System Configuration » Microcode to fight Spectre and Meltdown cpu flaws » 2018-08-15 19:28:52
- jacksprat
- Replies: 15
I am sure that the latest Devuan 2.0 Linux kernels contain the patches to counteract these processor flaws. However, I keep reading that these also require new Microcode to be installed.
Does Devuan do this in the "initrd.img-4.9.0-7-amd64" file processed by GRUB at boot time? I looked inside this cpio.gz compressed file system, but couldn't see any references to microcode. I also couldn't see anything in the sysvinit or openrc init scripts that are related to microcode.
Is there a way to see what microcode is present in a running kernel from the Devuan command line? The only message from "dmesg" that refers to microcode is something like
microcode: sig=0x206a7, pf=0x10, revision=0x25
Now that new Spectre-like bugs are being published, what are the mechanisms in Devuan for keeping us safe?
thanks, jacksprat
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