Refracta Snapshot (Excalibur) is Broken

onedevone · Yesterday 12:31:13

Short history (Devuan 5):
a) Previously on ver. 5 in the middle of the lifecycle refracta snapshot stopped working alltogether. Backporting from excalibur testing helped. Users never got the update.
b) Since the very beginning, on Devuan version 5, users had a dummy button for refracta snapshot. Pressing this button in menu, did not start refracta whatsoever. Pressing this button did nothing.
c) Going to Konsole and relogging to root ("su -") did not make refracta snapshot to start. It threw a bunch of cryotic errors.

Current version (Devuan 6):
Refracta snapshot does not work. Immediately, I used sudo -i to start it. Although it goes through the process, ISO cannot be booted. It cannot be booted from external usb stick (dd bs=1M if... of... oflag=fsync), nor from Ventoy (save yourselve some space and money using only one stick) formatted to ext4. Both dedicated stick and external soft cannot boot Refracta Snapthos ISOs.

My assumption (I'm guessing) that linux-live or busybox is not compatible with DEBIAN 12 or both. I tested on two computers (the one, on which ISO was created and onother linux-libre compatible). I tested both sticks (4 tests alltogether). Nothing boots. Worked on Devuan 5. It's a regression.

What is expected happen:
Fix refracta snapthot to work and test if it's booting
a) on Ventoy (reformat the boot partition to ext4)
b) on dedicated (money and space wasted) USB stick (dd)
Test Refracta Snaphsot as this is kind of a showstopper .

greenjeans · Yesterday 13:32:31

Test Refracta Snaphsot as this is kind of a showstopper

Well i'm your huckleberry for sure when it comes to testing Snapshot, lol. It's no exaggeration for me to say i've used Refracta Snashot around 250-300 times in the last year, both on Daedalus and Excalibur, and never once experienced a failure. I have isos available online now made with it, again with both daedalus and excalibur.

FYI Devuan doesn't work properly with Ventoy, there's some threads about that on here.

Last edited by greenjeans (Yesterday 13:34:36)

fsmithred · Yesterday 15:08:22

Check the sha256sum of the iso to make sure the file wasn't corrupted during download. Refractsnapshot starts from the menu or terminal. There's no dummy "button" in the menu or elsewhere.

Possibly you are thinking of a Refracta iso (as opposed to a Devuan iso with refracta tools) which does have a menu entry for refracta2usb that does not actually start the application - it just throws up a window telling you to start the app from a root terminal. That's not a regression. It's always been like that.

If you get errors running an application, one way to get help with it is to allow potential helpers to read those error messages. They sometimes contain useful information.

To run refractasnapshot-gui from a root terminal, you need to just use 'su' instead of 'su -', or else use 'sudo' if you have it enabled, so that root will still be able to use the user's xserver.

Most of the packages in devuan come directly from debian and are not altered. This includes busybox, live-boot* and live-tools. Only the live-config* packages are forked by devuan, and that's to add support for runit. All the refracta tools work on debian, too.

rolfie · Yesterday 15:25:34

FYI Devuan doesn't work properly with Ventoy, there's some threads about that on here.

Thats true for Daedalus. All older iso's work fine on Ventoy, also does Excalibur (again).

greenjeans · Yesterday 15:37:52

Thats true for Daedalus. All older iso's work fine on Ventoy, also does Excalibur (again).

Cool, did not know that as I don't use Ventoy, just did some reading of the threads here about issues.

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#1 Yesterday 12:31:13

Refracta Snapshot (Excalibur) is Broken

#2 Yesterday 13:32:31

Re: Refracta Snapshot (Excalibur) is Broken

#3 Yesterday 15:08:22

Re: Refracta Snapshot (Excalibur) is Broken

#4 Yesterday 15:25:34

Re: Refracta Snapshot (Excalibur) is Broken

#5 Yesterday 15:37:52

Re: Refracta Snapshot (Excalibur) is Broken

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