Beowulf on Lenovo X200s - several minor regressions compared to buster

kuleszdl · 2020-06-12 12:20:28

Hi,

yesterday, I installed Beowulf with openrc on a Lenovo Thinkpad X200s (firmware: coreboot 4.12) and observed a number of annoyances that did not occur in Debian buster:

- LUKS password entry is not visible during bootup, the password has to be entered "blind" (I suspect KMS initialization of display and asking for password are in wrong order?)
- Volume control is broken (volume keys do not work) and when launching it manually it only says "connecting to PulseAudio"
- there was no desktop background (I am using LXQt)
- the window bar had a strange basic theme that is not typical for LXQt.
- the system takes a long time to shutdown (fixed by replacing the script cryptsetup-functions from this thread: https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2690&p=2)
- delayed startup due to network not being ready (I removed the dhcp-line for eth0 from

/etc/network/interfaces

as network is managed by LXQt's network manager anyways

Apart from that everything seems to work nicely so far. If someone has a fix for the first issue I warmly welcome any suggestions.

Last edited by kuleszdl (2020-06-12 12:48:30)

Head_on_a_Stick · 2020-06-12 16:35:17

kuleszdl wrote:

- LUKS password entry is not visible during bootup, the password has to be entered "blind" (I suspect KMS initialization of display and asking for password are in wrong order?)

I really don't know anything about LUKS but if your theory is correct then you can try to enable an early KMS start by adding the name of your video card kernel module to the list at /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and then update the initramfs to include it:

# update-initramfs -u -k all

kuleszdl wrote:

- Volume control is broken (volume keys do not work) and when launching it manually it only says "connecting to PulseAudio"

This has come up a few times recently, for example: http://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=22481#p22481

I think the desktops now rely on a systemd user service to initialise PA but you can get the same effect by adding this line to a file at ~/.xsessionrc:

start-pulseaudio-x11

There is an XDG autostart file for PA but perhaps LXQt doesn't run those automatically, I don't use LXQt so I'm not sure about the specifics.

kuleszdl wrote:

- delayed startup due to network not being ready (I removed the dhcp-line for eth0 from
/etc/network/interfaces
as network is managed by LXQt's network manager anyways

If you're not using ifupdown then disable the networking service:

# update-rc.d networking disable

At least I think that's how you disable a sysvinit service, @community please correct me if I'm wrong here.

rolfie · 2020-06-12 18:49:09

kuleszdl wrote:

- LUKS password entry is not visible during bootup, the password has to be entered "blind" (I suspect KMS initialization of display and asking for password are in wrong order?)
- the system takes a long time to shutdown (fixed by replacing the script cryptsetup-functions from this thread: https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2690&p=2)

To the second problem first: that fix is required since the patch did not make it into the repository in time. Its fixed with Chimaera.

To the first topic: what exactly do you mean by "LUKS password entry is not visible"? Please explain.

I have got Beowulf/openrc working luks encrypted with LVM, separate /boot, in EFI mode with grub. The luks password is requested after the kernel is loaded and the LVM is detected not to be present. The password entered then isn't displayed. I got no problems, and I did not have to modify any settings.

rolfie

kuleszdl · 2020-06-13 17:18:17

@Head_on_a_Stick: Thank you, I will try the mentioned suggestions!

@rolfie: Yes, I saw that it's fixed in Chmaera. And by not visible I mean the following: When booting up, I only see "loading kernel .. loading initrd" and then nothing, like the system hangs. But when I enter my password, it continues to boot and I see the password prompt - but only afterwards, not when I'm actually asked to enter the password.

I use unencrypted /boot + encrypted root (not separate home) without LVM, EFI or other additional stuff. Just this dead-simple setup.

kuleszdl · 2020-06-13 19:13:17

Update: Adding the video module (in my case: i915) and running update-initramfs as described by @Head_on_a_Stick did the trick - many thanks! One annoyance less. Of course it would have been better if it worked ootb, but it's very nice to see that some issues can be solved with the help of the community.

I will try to fix the audio issues next.

Tatwi · 2020-06-14 21:02:35

Pulse Audio:
/etc/pulse/client.conf.d/00-disable-autospawn.conf
- comment out the following line and reboot:
autospawn=no

Found that elsewhere and it worked for me.

berni51 · 2020-06-16 09:06:04

Thx to @Tatwi - your PulseAudo hint also works for me. Now one of the several small bugs is gone.

Maybe anybody has a hint for my shutdown problem. On an Intel NUC beowulf will not shutdown the hardware when using the shutdown from the menu. It stops the system, but the hardware is still alive. A shutdown from the shell withsudo shutdown -P now however works perfekt. So whats wrong in the depth of beowulf?

Berni

kuleszdl · 2020-06-18 10:59:31

@Tatwi: Your suggestion helped with fixing the audio - I am now also getting on-screen notifications when using the hardware buttons. I am always amazed how great the Devuan community is! Without the tweaks, I would have ditched this installation right away as it had too many issues and now it runs great.

One (more?) remaining issue I still struggle with: Shutdown sometimes (but not always) takes quite long and hangs when shutting down anacron. Not sure if this is related to the disk encryption or anacron itself. Any ideas about that? Could it be another issue, such as having network manager manage the LAN connection but no network cable attached?

And even one more: Muting the audio using the hardware button does not work.

Last edited by kuleszdl (2020-06-18 11:03:07)

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#1 2020-06-12 12:20:28

Beowulf on Lenovo X200s - several minor regressions compared to buster

#2 2020-06-12 16:35:17

Re: Beowulf on Lenovo X200s - several minor regressions compared to buster

#3 2020-06-12 18:49:09

Re: Beowulf on Lenovo X200s - several minor regressions compared to buster

#4 2020-06-13 17:18:17

Re: Beowulf on Lenovo X200s - several minor regressions compared to buster

#5 2020-06-13 19:13:17

Re: Beowulf on Lenovo X200s - several minor regressions compared to buster

#6 2020-06-14 21:02:35

Re: Beowulf on Lenovo X200s - several minor regressions compared to buster

#7 2020-06-16 09:06:04

Re: Beowulf on Lenovo X200s - several minor regressions compared to buster

#8 2020-06-18 10:59:31

Re: Beowulf on Lenovo X200s - several minor regressions compared to buster

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