exegnulinux

xunilog · 2016-12-05 18:39:01

exegnulinux.org
desktop environment is KDE3 Trinity
June 2016 release indicates based on Devuan

I've booted it. It's solid...
...but I've never seen it included in lists mentioning Devuan derivatives

Most notably (to me), exegnulinux is not mentioned in this recent 45min dyne.org video presentation:
Devuan GNU+Linux presented at FSCONS 2016
(posted to youtube within the past week or so)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMvyOGawNwo

fsmithred · 2016-12-05 20:59:37

Correction:
http://exegnulinux.net

Good call. Must have been an oversight. I know exegnu has been mentioned on the dng mailing list.

The latest build I see is from April. Do you know where there are newer isos?

Last edited by fsmithred (2016-12-05 21:00:35)

dzz · 2016-12-06 13:45:17

There are new isos ready now but I can't upload them till a server problem gets fixed. The currently available isos do dist-upgrade without a problem.

The new isos have less 3rd party packages, a uefi-capable installer and Refracta tools preinstalled. They are originally built from a Devuan debootstrap.

At Devuan's beginning (and shortly before) we relied heavily on temporary hacks, 3rd party repos and custom package recompilations. Much of this was done in conjunction with Refracta (thanks fsmithred). Devuan's public presence was only IRC, heavily spammed by systemd fanboys. I had never properly compiled a deb package before, had to learn quick else accept systemd.

Now Devuan is almost complete, only a few 3rd-party package recompilations are still needed.

Exegnu was actually the first Debian live image with Trinity desktop and possibly the first systemd-free Jessie image. It's base switched to Devuan from day one, therefore was probably the first Devuan-based live-image (or was it Refracta ?)

Whether or not you get on with exegnu depends if you get on with Trinity Desktop. TDE advantages are active development, no systemd dependence, no gtk3 dependence, ram usage comparable to xfce4, old-style amarok...

I don't know why this never got noticed by Devuan. Probably because I'm not very good with updating documentation. It has also an outdated Distrowatch listing as a Debian derivative.

Last edited by dzz (2016-12-07 00:19:39)

xunilog · 2016-12-06 18:32:00

FWIW, the only other current debian + trinity efforts I'm aware of:

Trinity desktop, debian-based without systemd: http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com (most recent release: august 2016)

Trinity, debian-based, but shipping systemd in their current release:
GALPon MiniNo http://minino.galpon.org/en
Q4OS http://minino.galpon.org/en

dzz · 2016-12-06 22:10:05

xunilog, you're right about q4os (except the url is https://q4os.org/). Thanks for pointing that out (q4os is relatively new)

GALPon MiniNo http://minino.galpon.org/en .. I can't see any mention of TDE

Yes, there are TDE images for pclinuxos (I read also that pclinuxos rejected systemd). However, (unless I missed something,) pclinuxos is an rpm distro, nothing to do with debian except it uses apt for (rpm) package management.. http://www.pclinuxos.com/about/

Last edited by dzz (2016-12-06 22:24:36)

fsmithred · 2016-12-07 15:21:03

@dzz:
I announced a devuan-based refracta release on Oct. 30, 2015. Before that, there was a Refracta with xfce based on systemd-free debian jessie that you put together while I was stalling. Before that was a systemd-free debian-based refracta with openbox that would not have happened without your help. You were the trailblazer in those interesting times.

I don't know the timelines on the other devuan derivatives, but I am glad that we all exist, and I think it's good that we have this place to meet and compare notes.

aitor · 2016-12-11 17:45:50

Xunilog, Minino uses Lxde and Gnome 2:

http://minino.galpon.org/en/screenshoots

Cheers.

Last edited by aitor (2016-12-11 17:46:09)

dzz · 2016-12-22 21:36:41

New Exe GNU/Linux live-images for i386 and amd64 are now available:

http://exegnulinux.net/downloads
https://sourceforge.net/projects/exegnulinux/

These ISO's are originally built from a Devuan bootstrap. Apart from TDE (Trinity Desktop), consolekit2 and a few custom applications (e.g. installer) they are current Devuan Jessie. There is now less need for 3rd party "nosystemd" builds. TDE does not need gvfs (nor anything else GTK).

The installer should support uefi, this is not much tested so thanks in advance to anyone who does.

Thanks to Devuan and to TDE for making this possible. Special thanks to fsmithred (Refracta). Although refractasnapshot was not used to produce this, the research efforts revolving around Refracta towards a systemd-free live environment have been of essential value and influence. Refracta tools are included here but not much tested yet with TDE.

BTW, for the record, Refracta probably was the first proper Devuan (-derivative) live-image. My TDE builds were heavily reliant on 3rd party system packages in Devuan's early days and TDE itself is not actually in Devuan repos.

Last edited by dzz (2016-12-22 21:40:21)

fsmithred · 2016-12-23 22:24:47

The new exegnulinux looks nice. I just installed it on uefi. Ran into a couple of minor problems, but it works.

First I dd'd the iso to usb, and it wouldn't boot on uefi. There's only one partition in the iso.

Then I used refracta2usb to make the usb, and it did boot on uefi. Chose uefi mode in the installer and let it install the bootloader. Installer told me that the grub install failed, but the log shows that grub claimed success. I rebooted. Exegnulinux is now the first entry in my boot menu, and I think it found all the other installations. (It's a long list.) It works.

BTW, now I understand why you add 'nocomponents=xinit' to the boot line. The desktop was psychedelic without that. Also required union=aufs which doesn't seem to be required on all jessie builds.

dzz · 2016-12-24 03:00:35

I got only qemu to test the efi stuff at the moment and my cpu doesn't do virtualisation. It's slow.

Reason why you needed union=aufs is probably because the iso's boot intrd is from newer live-boot (the one in the squashfs is original) and modified to support rw mount of the live-media partition. I must do a new iso with that changed asap.

Preinstalled is grub-efi (not grub-pc). I found so far it works for bios machines if grub-pc-bin is also installed. Whether that's something to do with your grub error I don't know yet. It seems the relevant "-bin" package does most of the work, both can exist on the same system and the right one gets called automatically. None of my search trawlings came up with the definitive answer.

I can't just now test why dd to usb failed for you. All my usb drives are in use (dd means trash all). The iso as a cd image does boot uefi mode in qemu (for me). However, qemu has limitations.. it's very particular about the naming of the efi image.

At some point I want to switch to refractainstaller for this stuff. That might need a small, extra custom script for TDE. For now my installer makes a useful "test donkey".

I clocked a live session of this running with 99MB ram today. Not so bad for a fully-featured DE including an office suite, on a live image <700MB which has no systemd dependency (not even libsystemd0)

Thanks enormously for that feedback. I hope some of these uefi observations (and/or anything else regarding Exegnu) can help Refracta or anyone else doing Devuan-based live-images.

fsmithred · 2016-12-24 14:11:10

Further testing:

Iso boots uefi in qemu and virtualbox.

Re-imaged usb with isohybrid. Hardware boot fails (doesn't find a bootloader at all.)
So I tried booting from the hard drive - at grub menu I dropped to grub prompt:

set root=(hd0)  #usb is first drive, tab-complete shows no partitions
chainloader +1

gives error something like "Invalid EFI path..."

So then I tried

set root=(hd0)
linux /live/vmlinuz boot=live union=aufs nocomponents=xinit
initrd /live/initrd.img
boot

and it boots normally.

(note: 'union=aufs' is also needed if you use encryption.)

I found the same as you with the grub-*-bin packages. In Refracta, I started with grub-efi then replaced it with grub-pc but didn't autoremove efibootmgr or (whatever else came with it). The grub-efi packages are included in the iso. There is a refractainstaller-uefi (yad) included in the iso. For a uefi install, when it gets to the grub install, it opens a terminal in a chroot in /target and allows you to install the grub-efi packages, which then install the bootloader to the efi partition. It works, but it needs some refinement.

There's a reason for installing both grub-efi packages instead of just grub-efi-amd64, even though the -bin package is already installed. But I don't recall exactly what that reason is. Maybe debconf runs? Maybe update-grub runs? Not sure, but it might be in my notes.

dzz · 2016-12-24 18:57:48

Just noticed, I forgot to use "-isohybrid-gpt-basdat" in the xorriso command. That's probably why the isohbrid failed for efi. I'll post a new ISO later but I don't have any way of testing it.

For the record, http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=Isohybrid explains why (and gdisk shows if the image has a valid gpt part, it didn't).

I don't need to do anything about "union=aufs", it's already there in the cfg files. Except to remind anyone interested who didn't know or forgot, the new live-boot default is overlay (but can also do aufs), aufs is removed fom newer kernels, older kernels can't do overlay. Best to specify union type if you use a custom cfg file.

Last edited by dzz (2016-12-24 19:40:18)

fsmithred · 2016-12-24 21:20:22

Run 'fdisk -l' on the iso, and it should look something like these:

# fdisk -l devuan_jessie_1.0.0-beta2_amd64_DVD.iso 
Disk devuan_jessie_1.0.0-beta2_amd64_DVD.iso: 4.4 GiB, 4668088320 bytes, 9117360 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x30c02860

Device                                   Boot   Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
devuan_jessie_1.0.0-beta2_amd64_DVD.iso1 *          0 9117359 9117360  4.4G  0 Empty
devuan_jessie_1.0.0-beta2_amd64_DVD.iso2      9059432 9060263     832  416K ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32)

# fdisk -l refracta8_xfce_amd64-20161013_1314.iso
Disk refracta8_xfce_amd64-20161013_1314.iso: 648 MiB, 679477248 bytes, 1327104 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x25061aae

Device                                  Boot   Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
refracta8_xfce_amd64-20161013_1314.iso1 *         64 1327103 1327040  648M  0 Empty
refracta8_xfce_amd64-20161013_1314.iso2      1314680 1317559    2880  1.4M ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32)

Watch out for newer versions of refractasnapshot. I removed 'union=aufs' from live.cfg so it wouldn't conflict with overlay.

If you upload a rebuilt iso, I'll test it on uefi.

fsmithred · 2016-12-26 22:32:04

Isoyhybrid uefi boot is fixed in exegnulinux_amd64_20161225.iso

BTW, 800x600 doesn't work right on my laptop. Boot messages are scrambled and take up the top third of the screen. I changed the mkefi function in snapshot to use 640x480 for that reason. I hope that works for everything.

dzz · 2016-12-27 15:13:25

Thanks for that info. Assuming you mean the "set gfxmode=" line in (iso-root/)boot/grub.cfg, which gets used in efi mode only.

640x480 does look quite horrible here (qemu). I posted a "dummy" test iso done with "set gfxmode=auto" (32MB, iso boot stuff but no squashfs). I would be interested to know if "auto" works in different cases. Any help to test that, thanks in advance.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/exegnu … z/download

fsmithred · 2016-12-27 19:32:25

set gfxpayload=auto doesn't work, either. The only resolutions that work on this laptop are 640x480, 1024x768 and 1366x768. I tried it with the test snapshot and also with editing the grub entry at boot time. Same result. I'm guessing that there are netbooks that won't do 1024x768. Anybody know for sure?

dzz · 2016-12-27 21:37:29

Could it have something to do with the splash image? In the ISO, it's png, 24bpp RGB.

"vbeinfo" (or is it "videoinfo"?) at grub prompt might give some clue..

fsmithred · 2016-12-28 16:59:41

I can't get vbeinfo to work, but videoinfo shows me the three resolutions that work right plus 800x600.

I just tried it with a splash that's 640 x 480, 8-bit/color RGB, non-interlaced png, and 800x600 still does not work. (garbled boot text). That appears to be the same as the grub splash in the exegnu iso. (according to the file command). I think I need to do some more tests.

Edited to correct "works correctly" to "still does not work."

Last edited by fsmithred (2016-12-28 17:13:44)

xunilog · 2017-01-01 03:01:02

the only other current debian + trinity efforts I'm aware of

haven't booted it, but I just read that "SparkyLinux LXDE: minimalISO version" includes trinity desktop.
ok, happy new year

"added new desktops to MinimalISO and APTus: Lumina, Trinity and PekWM"
http://linux.softpedia.com/progChangelo … 79542.html

MiyoLinux · 2017-12-22 02:30:51

Here's a new review of EXE GNU.

https://youtu.be/VWCAF7LNmtI

dzz · 2019-03-07 17:16:20

New ExeGNU ISO's out now.. ascii i386 & amd64, also a "testing" (beowulf) amd64

The beowulf "testing" ISO was unfortunately not possible to get <700MB without losing too much functionality. If you use it, know that you must maintain it yourself, it's probably already outdated!

Thanks to all who helped make to make this possible and in advance to anyone who wants to test it.

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

hd_scania · 2019-04-29 01:56:48

I'm happy using Trinity on the stock Devuan with Plasma, Trinity, Xfce

omnio · 2019-07-24 11:50:22

dzz, would you consider sharing the things that you learnt while making exe linux by creating a wiki page with advices and tweaks for the users who "manually" install TDE on Devuan? I saw the wiki already has a link but it sends to an empty/non-existent page: https://friendsofdevuan.org/doku.php/de … lling5-tde

fsmithred · 2019-07-24 13:00:06

The TDE wiki has a page for installing on devuan:
https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Devuan_ … structions

mckaygerhard · 2020-01-21 19:00:39

omnio wrote:

dzz, would you consider sharing the things that you learnt while making exe linux by creating a wiki page with advices and tweaks for the users who "manually" install TDE on Devuan? I saw the wiki already has a link but it sends to an empty/non-existent page: https://friendsofdevuan.org/doku.php/de … lling5-tde

i was working in provide specific things and tips for devuian in that wiki but one day all the things goes to the garbage.. so i let that shit in that way.. only empty pages..

The officially official Devuan Forum!

#1 2016-12-05 18:39:01

exegnulinux

#2 2016-12-05 20:59:37

Re: exegnulinux

#3 2016-12-06 13:45:17

Re: exegnulinux

#4 2016-12-06 18:32:00

Re: exegnulinux

#5 2016-12-06 22:10:05

Re: exegnulinux

#6 2016-12-07 15:21:03

Re: exegnulinux

#7 2016-12-11 17:45:50

Re: exegnulinux

#8 2016-12-22 21:36:41

Re: exegnulinux

#9 2016-12-23 22:24:47

Re: exegnulinux

#10 2016-12-24 03:00:35

Re: exegnulinux

#11 2016-12-24 14:11:10

Re: exegnulinux

#12 2016-12-24 18:57:48

Re: exegnulinux

#13 2016-12-24 21:20:22

Re: exegnulinux

#14 2016-12-26 22:32:04

Re: exegnulinux

#15 2016-12-27 15:13:25

Re: exegnulinux

#16 2016-12-27 19:32:25

Re: exegnulinux

#17 2016-12-27 21:37:29

Re: exegnulinux

#18 2016-12-28 16:59:41

Re: exegnulinux

#19 2017-01-01 03:01:02

Re: exegnulinux

#20 2017-12-22 02:30:51

Re: exegnulinux

#21 2019-03-07 17:16:20

Re: exegnulinux

#22 2019-04-29 01:56:48

Re: exegnulinux

#23 2019-07-24 11:50:22

Re: exegnulinux

#24 2019-07-24 13:00:06

Re: exegnulinux

#25 2020-01-21 19:00:39

Re: exegnulinux

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