Refracta Development, Scripts, etc.
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6.0.5 Feedback

Wed Apr 27, 2011 3:49 pm

fsmithred, very nice work on the new installer scripts. I liked the change username and both root and username passwords. You explained the how and why very well. Much improvement in this latest build. I'll add more to this thread as I tweak it, if needed.

Re: 6.0.5 Feedback

Wed Apr 27, 2011 4:27 pm

Found a small oversight.
On the top panel, beside the volume control widget is a blank icon for nvidia Display Settings. Must be leftover from your personal build?

Re: 6.0.5 Feedback

Wed Apr 27, 2011 4:44 pm

Yup. The nvidia-settings on the panel is mine. I thought I got rid of that, but I guess I just got rid of the icon. Now that I think about it, that's a leftover from my lenny builds, because I can't even use the nvidia driver that's in squeeze. Well, that's a good place to put the launcher for nvidia-settings if you decide to go that way. Consider it a built-in suggestion.

There are probably some other little things I missed, too. One that I know about is that I changed the panel launcher for the web browser to use firefox, but I forgot to change that in the release notes. Didn't change the version reference in the Release Notes, either. (Reminds me of my suse days - the documentation with the release was always a major version number behind.)

Thanks for the feedback.

Re: 6.0.5 Feedback

Tue May 31, 2011 4:54 pm

Good results here with 6.0.5, few faults/errors noticed apart from what's already mentioned and seem quite minor

Installation done via ISO (extracted-to-partition squash, vmlinuz, initrd) and live-booted from grub-legacy. Bootloader configured manually. Fast.. under 10 minutes to install on my xp3200 box

The (new-) installer error log shows something I don't see the reason for:

Code:
Usage: grep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]...
Try `grep --help' for more information.
Usage: grep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]...
Try `grep --help' for more information.
mke2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
rsync: readlink_stat("/home/user/.gvfs") failed: Permission denied (13)


live.log still exists (haven't looked closely at the default rsync-excludes yet)

User "realname" did not get set

Locale (en_GB.UTF-8 here) and keyboard had to be set manually.

Re: 6.0.5 Feedback

Wed Jun 01, 2011 3:51 pm

The grep errors come from redundancies in the cleanup function. They're normal. The errors on mke2fs seem to be due to the output of that command going to stderr, I think. They're also normal and shouldn't be related to any problems. If you look at the parts of the script where dd gets used, you'll see that I temporarily turn off error logging - that's so the output will show in the terminal instead of going into the error log. You could do something similar with mke2fs if you wanted.

The rsync error will be eliminated in future versions by simply adding /home/user/.gvfs to the excludes file. I've already tested that, and it works.

BTW, I'm not really here. Moved my hard drive into the backup machine, and I think the motherboard on my main machine is dead. Still need to test it with a different vid card to see if I get any output, but I'm not hopeful. And my room is a serious cluster fsck of boxes, clothes and computer parts right now. Will be unpacking and sorting for awhile. Have fun while I'm gone.

Edit: Check in the menu under System, Set Timezone and Keyboard (or something like that) and tell me if it does everything you want. Also, let me know if those changes persist if you make a snapshot. Thanks.

Re: 6.0.5 Feedback

Thu Jun 02, 2011 1:05 am

Using live iso:

The timezone and keyboard tool work in gui, however the clock doesn't change till after relogin. Don't know yet if it persists in a snapshot, don't see why it should not, will look later

I tried setting in the (isolinux boot screen) cmdline, timezone=Europe/London locales=en_GB.UTF-8 and keyboardlayouts=uk (re: man live-config)

I soon discovered this will not work because /lib/live (live-config scripts) does not exist. If it does, "live-config" must be in the cmdline to use any of them, it is not in Refracta

I thought this was necessary for a live system, does Refracta work differently?

"dpkg -l | grep live" returned nothing, yet apt-get install live-config returned "live-config is already the newest version" Same for live-boot. No dpkg-diverts for it were found

So I'm curious, what happened to live-config and live-boot?

Re: 6.0.5 Feedback

Fri Jun 03, 2011 1:24 pm

I just copied the boot lines from whatever Dean was using, and I don't know if there's a reason he left out "config".

Here are boot stanzas from refracta 6.0.5 and from a debian-live image I built for comparison
Code:
label live
   menu label Refracta (default)
   kernel /live/vmlinuz quiet nomodeset
   append initrd=/live/initrd.img boot=live ip=frommedia noxautoconfig nosudo noautologin nouser union=aufs

label live
   menu label Live
   kernel /live/vmlinuz
   append initrd=/live/initrd.img boot=live config hostname=live-squeeze  quiet



No clue what happened to your live packages. Here's what I see in 6.0.5
Code:
[email protected]:/home/user# dpkg -l |grep live
ii  live-boot                            2.0.15-1                        Debian Live - System Boot Scripts
ii  live-boot-initramfs-tools            2.0.15-1                        Debian Live - System Boot Scripts (initramfs-tools backend)
ii  live-config                          2.0.15-1                        Debian Live - System Configuration Scripts
ii  live-config-sysvinit                 2.0.15-1                        Debian Live - System Configuration Scripts (sysvinit backend)
ii  live-initramfs                       2.0.15-1                        Debian Live - System Boot Scripts (transitional package)


I'm having internet connection problems, and I'm answering this from memory of what you wrote, so maybe I missed something. Hope to get that straightened out soon.

Re: 6.0.5 Feedback

Fri Jun 03, 2011 1:30 pm

I don't know why /lib/live is missing. It's in my debian-live build, and I built this version of refracta originally from a debian-live build. Will need to research that some more.

I get the time to set correctly by synchronizing with a time-server. That piece uses ntpdate.

Re: 6.0.5 Feedback

Sat Jun 11, 2011 11:05 am

I don't know why I got that dpkg-l result, I definitely did once but can't reproduce it now

It's probably just me, not fully understanding that refracta is built with a pre-configured user. Live-config scripts seem to be mostly for a new system-generated user as in usual debian-live. So although /lib/live is missing in refracta it probably makes no difference.

A snapshot, made with Live-config reinstalled, has a brief error message on boot that "default user" is not found if "config" or "live-config" is on cmdline but I suppose that's understandable. The scripts don't get run if "noconfig" is given
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