Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

Ron · 2018-09-24 19:17:56

I want to test out the Trinity Desktop and that has given me a few questions. Exe GNU/Linux uses the TDE, but the latest download for it is dated 2017-12-26. Does anyone know if this version is based on Jessie or Stretch?

Also, what do you consider to be safer: A) Installing Exe GNU/Linux next to my Miyo / Mate install as a dual boot, or B) installing Trinity on my existing Miyo / Mate install?

fsmithred · 2018-09-24 19:50:12

I know the 2017-12-15 amd64 exegnu iso is jessie. I assume the i386 is the same.

Dual-boot first. If you want TDE on ascii, you could upgrade the exegnu or you could add TDE to a fresh ascii install. There are instructions for devuan at the TDE site. Mixing TDE with Mate in the same installation might cause some conflicts with session managers. Doing this on a test install would be the less stressful way to go.

Ron · 2018-09-24 23:33:13

fsmithred wrote:

Dual-boot first. If you want TDE on ascii, you could upgrade the exegnu or you could add TDE to a fresh ascii install. There are instructions for devuan at the TDE site. Mixing TDE with Mate in the same installation might cause some conflicts with session managers. Doing this on a test install would be the less stressful way to go.

That's what I figured . . . dual boot is safer. But it is more of an annoyance.

If I decide to go ahead and do the dual boot, that leads me to another question. What is the difference between Devuan's live .iso and the installation .iso? The reason I ask is because I tried straight Devuan first before any derivatives, and the install just did not run smooth (I mean after the install, not the install process). I really don't remember if I downloaded the live .iso or the installation .iso. Could it be that if I installed from the live .iso (is that even possible?) that was the cause of it not running good?

Last edited by Ron (2018-09-24 23:34:31)

fsmithred · 2018-09-25 01:47:09

The installer isos use debian-installer. It pulls packages either from the repository or from the dvd and installs them into the new system. The live isos use refractainstaller, which copies the running live system to hard drive. If you're familiar with installing debian, then you would know whether or not you used d-i when you installed devuan before.

Installing from the live takes about 10 minutes. Installing from packages (netinstall or dvd) takes a bit longer. You could have a good or bad result with either method, depending on your hardware and what you do with the install.

Ron · 2018-09-25 03:13:51

Thanks for the help fsmithred. Possible last questions:

1) If I decided to dual boot with Exe GNU/Linux, how would I update it to Stretch?
2) And, how to add the correct repos for current updates?

golinux · 2018-09-25 04:00:07

Ron wrote:

Thanks for the help fsmithred. Possible last questions:
1) If I decided to dual boot with Exe GNU/Linux, how would I update it to Stretch?
2) And, how to add the correct repos for current updates?

These two links should answer your questions:
https://files.devuan.org/devuan_ascii/Release_notes.txt
https://devuan.org/os/etc/apt/sources.list

I don't know that anyone has tried to upgrade exe-gnu jessie to ascii (stretch). Would probably be a good idea to do it in a VM first. Trinity does have several mail lists that might have an answer to your question in the archives.

Ron · 2018-09-26 02:35:48

Okay, I guess that's out. I'll have to think what I want to do.

BTW, is Exe GNU Linux no longer being maintained?

MiyoLinux · 2018-09-26 07:37:43

I have read this thread with great interest. As such, I took it upon myself to see if Exe Gnu could be upgraded to ASCII. The test was done in Gnome-Boxes, and after all was said and done...after upgrading the Devuan part and upgrading the TDE part, I have an up-to-date Exe Gnu based on Devuan ASCII and TDE Stretch.

I'm very UNFAMILIAR with the Trinity Desktop Environment; however, it appears that everything is working as far as I can tell in my limited experience.

Tomorrow, I plan to try this on actual hardware. If successful, I will share what I did.

Disclaimer #1 - As I said, I know very little about TDE. What may appear normal (and working) to me, may not be so to an experienced TDE user.
Disclaimer #2 - It took me several steps to upgrade. I don't know if I did it correctly or not. I've never dealt with multiple sources before (Devuan and TDE sources). The method I used may not be the best.
Disclaimer #3 - Despite Disclaimers #'s 1 and 2, I like tryin' stuff...so I tried it...and it appeared to be successful 'n stuff.

MiyoLinux · 2018-09-27 07:33:42

Okay...after a few hiccups, I have an updated Exe GNULinux on hardware.

Where to start?

EDITED TO ADD: This is by no means an official guide to upgrading ExeGNU from Jessie to ASCII. This is what I did, and it worked for me...and worked in spite of me. As you'll read, I had some hiccups along the way.

1. Installed the system and then updated/upgraded it...then rebooted.
2. Changed the sources.list to deb.devuan.org and changed jessie to ascii.
Also added the ascii-updates and ascii-security repositories.
3. After referencing the TDE website, I changed the TDE sources in /etc/apt/sources.list.d from jessie to stretch.
4. Ran an apt upgrade and apt dist-upgrade (TDE recommends aptitude full-upgrade, but dist-upgrade does the same...as far as I know)...then rebooted.

Everything seemed fine. I opened Synaptic, and none of the buttons at the top were visible. Using the tool bar, out of curiosity, I ran a "Mark all upgrades". It showed 30-something upgrades. That agreed with what I saw in the terminal; in that, 30-something packages would NOT be upgraded. Of which...synaptic was one of them...as was xorg and several xorg related items. However, it wouldn't let me upgrade any of them. So, I started a the top of the list trying to upgrade one at a time. It was a no go. Kept getting errors. One of the packages was a lib, and when I marked it to upgrade, it wanted to remove several of the trinity items. Don't ask me what I did, but I finally got Synaptic to upgrade. After that finished, I closed Synaptic and reopened it...and...all of the buttons were then visible. So, I tried the "Mark all upgrades" again, and this time, they all upgraded with no problem.

As far as I can tell, everything is working. Logout, shutdown, reboot (or whatever they're called in Trinity) are working. Had to install my wireless firmware, but it would never show in Wicd. However, I was able to use Ceni (already included) to connect to my wifi).

This was a fun experiment, and I'm glad I gave it a go! Here's a screenshot after everything was done and finished.

Last edited by MiyoLinux (2018-09-27 07:57:30)

Ron · 2018-09-27 17:02:54

Thanks for sharing MiyoLinux. I don't think I'm that brave though. It's times like this I wish I had a spare computer to experiment on.

fsmithred · 2018-09-27 19:03:51

Ron wrote:

Thanks for sharing MiyoLinux. I don't think I'm that brave though. It's times like this I wish I had a spare computer to experiment on.

Two possible solutions for that. 1. Do it in a virtual machine. 2. Install to a usb thumb drive just like you would to a hard drive.

Ron · 2018-09-27 21:37:22

I think the best way for me to go is to do a dual boot, and use Miyo since I already do the same thing with it for Mate.

BTW, does anyone know if ExeGNU's creator is a member of the forum?

Last edited by Ron (2018-09-27 21:38:41)

golinux · 2018-09-27 23:46:38

Yes, dzz is a member but I have not seen him in over a year. Last forum visit was 2017-04-05.

dzz · 2018-10-25 00:45:10

Well, my apologies for not posting lately nor having any spare time at all for this stuff, "real life" situations here have been ******* relentless..

There shouldn't be any real problem for anyone already running the Exegnu Jessie to dist-upgrade in the usual way. Nor should installing TDE to a base Devuan be difficult. You might however be best to install just the base and build it from there; the "metapackage" is, IMO, bloated. TDE can run with other DE/WM's installed (I mostly prefer TDE but also use xfce and openbox)

Anyway, I did a 64-bit Exegnu Ascii live image with the latest TDE. Built it fom a fresh devuan bootstrap so it should be cruft-free (jessie dist upgrade leaves lots). There is a script to do the entire job that way, if anyone is interested (i.e. direct from bootstrap unlike refractasnapshot)

To my surprise it came out <700MB with mostly the same package set as before except Audacity, which seems to now bring qt4/5 deps.

Previous images used some 3rd party no-systemd packages and some I built myself. This one, I'm pleased to say, is just Devuan and TDE. A few custom extras (rather than alternatives) are included e.g. exegnu-installer and the latest Refracta tools.

I packaged and used consolekit2 before but now elogind is working fine, including suspend for user. I reluctantly had to give up on excluding libsystemd0.

I haven't tested it it much, all I got now is one old intel core2 laptop. Anyone who wants to test, thanks in advance, please say what is wrong, what is missing, what doesn't work right (or just what does!)

Finally, special thanks to fsmithred (for your amazing work with live-image development), Adam Borowski (for all your systemd-free packaging in the early days), the TDE project (who forked kde3, which was abandoned for something unrecognisably different) and most notably the perseverance with init freedom, of all involved in Devuan.. and for this excellent Ascii release.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/exegnulinux/files/iso/

fsmithred · 2018-10-25 22:27:23

Welcome back, dzz! Good to see you in action again. I hope all is well.

New exegnu boots and installs fine. Boot screen says 'Debian'. Installing base-files might change that to Devuan. Putting something in /etc/lsb-release will also work.

Removable media show up on the desktop, but won't mount in konqueror. Error message:

No supported mounting methods were detected on your system.

No boot splash on uefi boot in the installed system. (That one is my fault - an extra "/" in refractasnapshot.)

Refractainstaller did not disable autologin. Log shows an error for

sed -e expression #2 char #3: unterminated s command

.
I looked at it, and it appears to be terminated correctly. Maybe the ^ on ^AutoLogin needs to be escaped. I'll try that.

All in all, the new exegnu looks good. I'm a little envious that you got it under 700mb. I couldn't do that with refracta this time.

Edit: Found it. There's an extra "sed -i -e" on line 1406 of refractainstaller-yad.

dzz · 2018-10-26 22:44:28

Thanks fsmithred for testing this. Will sort these and any other glitches found and do a new version at some point. This was done from Jessie using a fresh devuan bootstrap (ascii) base, I don't yet know if the ascii debootstrap version fixes any of this.

Boot screen says 'Debian'

Probably because /etc/default/grub needs the "GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR" line changed from Debian to Devuan before update-grub is run.

BTW, I see in /etc: debian_version and devuan_version. This probably means other Devuan systems get listed as Debian since, although upstream osprober now supports Devuan, it will find debian_version first. Delete all instances of it!

Removable media show up on the desktop, but won't mount in konqueror.

Cant reproduce that yet, still investigating. My only removables are FAT pen drives, in case that makes any difference

Refractainstaller did not disable autologin.

Needs a post-install script to sed edit /etc/trinity/tdm/tdmrc as the exegnu-installer does. Maybe it has but with errors like you said.

one tip on iso size.. xz compressed initrd saves ~20MB (edit /etc/initramfstools/initramfs.conf)

If anyone a live-media partition mounted RW, there is an updated initrd patch somewhere on the sourceforge page (/files?). Debian's live-boot doesn't support that. Maybe useful for refracta2usb.

Ron · 2018-10-27 01:10:09

Thanks for your work!

fsmithred · 2018-10-27 18:17:43

Mounting removable drives: I needed to add user to plugdev group. User was only in groups user and netdev. It works fine now.

Iso would not boot in virtualbox in bios mode, only in uefi mode. Isolinux menu has 'union=aufs'. It boots with that removed.

I committed the changes to the installer, but I don't know when the packages will be built.
https://git.devuan.org/devuan-packages/ … aller-base
https://git.devuan.org/devuan-packages/ … taller-gui

dzz · 2018-10-28 13:18:53

Thanks again fsmithred for testing this (and the adjustments to refractainstaller) and to all others who took an interest in TDE. A new iso with those points fixed is now posted.

Ron · 2018-10-28 19:38:00

Thanks dzz.

Last edited by Ron (2018-10-28 19:38:12)

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#1 2018-09-24 19:17:56

Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#2 2018-09-24 19:50:12

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#3 2018-09-24 23:33:13

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#4 2018-09-25 01:47:09

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#5 2018-09-25 03:13:51

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#6 2018-09-25 04:00:07

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#7 2018-09-26 02:35:48

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#8 2018-09-26 07:37:43

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#9 2018-09-27 07:33:42

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#10 2018-09-27 17:02:54

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#11 2018-09-27 19:03:51

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#12 2018-09-27 21:37:22

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#13 2018-09-27 23:46:38

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#14 2018-10-25 00:45:10

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#15 2018-10-25 22:27:23

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#16 2018-10-26 22:44:28

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#17 2018-10-27 01:10:09

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#18 2018-10-27 18:17:43

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#19 2018-10-28 13:18:53

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

#20 2018-10-28 19:38:00

Re: Testing Exe GNULinux / Trinity Desktop

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