Manjaro build server progress!

Yesterday on my day off I went and had breakfast and coffee. I brought my chromebook with me to do some work or at least some research on getting a working Manjaro build server that ran on another Linux distribution. At first I was a little confused at what was required.

Originally I was advised that all I needed was pacman. Great I thought, pacman is in my repositories, I’ll get pacman installed and this will be done in no time!

I proceed to take a look into manjaroiso thinking I am going to be building this in the native environment, It became apparent quite quickly that it will be a large task in order to get everything installed that I required to do the build. Things were certainly looking bleak, It certainly seemed like I was venturing forth into dependency hell at this time. I was told that if the system has pacman it will work so I kept my head high and continued brainstorming.

Well if I cannot get this stuff going via the host system maybe a chroot is more appropriate! Trying to create a chroot I ended up destroying the host system. Chroot scripts I usually use/create clean up after themselves, This one did not and I rm -rf $CHROOT_DIR without even thinking about it. That was enough with /proc /sys and /dev mounted to kill the install enough that SSH would not allow me in anymore…

I reinstalled the Host and got it up and running yesterday/tonight. Tested the Chroot again and everything ‘almost’ worked. Everything seemed to install but I got errors when trying to install things with pacman saying it did not know where /var/cache/pacman/pkg was located. Usually this means the directory does not exist, I investigated with ls /var/cache/pacman/ and the pkg directory was shown. I also ended up with an error stating that the disk was full directly after the first error. The df -h command said the disk had 23 Gigabytes free.

I scratched my head, Founding this behavior sort of perplexing. I knew something must be missing but I was not sure what. I am still not sure what I am missing but I believe if I use pacstrap to set up the chroot that it may work correctly. The pacstrap command is not within the pacman package. I had to do my research into what Arch package contained pacstrap, Finally I found that it was the arch_install_scripts package that contained pacstrap. This was one of the packages that I had assumed I may have to build while getting overwhelmed by the dependency hell scenario stated above.

Everything required by this package was in the repositories so I decided to toss them onto my system. It appears that rather than having to build 10ish ebuilds that I would only require 1 in order to have pacstrap bootstrap the build directory correctly.

I still need to learn how to create a ebuild for this package, The dependencies are building as I type this and I am gearing up for learning how to create an ebuild!

If I am correct then this process is about 100x easier than I had originally calculated.

BONUS!

Wrong jumper!

The jumper I got is way too big for what I needed to coreboot my chromebook, I am going to have to keep an eye out for a jumper that will work!

Thus being the case when I have time I may work on manjaro crouton still. I am not happy about this though.

Funtoo, Manjaro crouton, Chromebook.

Funtoo has access to pacman without requiring unmasking of software so can do the same build stuff with manjaroiso easily. I believe the end result will be a more stable system for a server. I switched both the build server and my other server over to Funtoo in hopes that I can eventually learn how to use distcc, which distributes the compilation over multiple boxes.

ChromeOS will not operate the type of VPN that I want to use and with the breakages in crouton I do not know if it is worth maintaining long term. So I guess I am announcing that I am no longer going to maintain it, at all. If someone wants to fork it and merge the fixes that have been put in upstream it will probably fix it. So many things do not operate properly and it all seems like a daunting task where it started out as a fun task to see ‘if’ I could do it.

I have been seriously considering doing a coreboot on my Chromebook and just punting ChromeOS with the possibility of dual booting Chromium OS in the future if possible. This makes sense of why I am dropping maintenance for manjaro crouton, I will not be able to test it anymore as I did in the past. With newer chromebooks moving over to seabios the crouton project no longer makes as much sense to me as it once did.

I went to a computer hardware store, asked if they had a spare jumper I could have. I have all the equipment required to coreboot+seabios the chromebook and install some Linux distributions. I have done the research on how to perform the task both on the developers website and a few useful videos by johnny phung on youtube which I will link below.

It is recommended to fully read and comprehend all information available before attempting this task on your Chromebook. There is not a lot of information available and johnny phung is nearly the only person I could find with much information on this, his videos and posts lead me to the developers website.

Although the first link I will provide is to his Windows video it is relevent to the Linux side of things because he does not redundantly explain how to flash the bios with coreboot and seabios and he expands on a few commands that verify that everything is set correctly for the bios flash.

Coreboot windows video – Watch until 12:50. He uses alumium foil, I would only use a jumper for this. Got an old computer or hard drive sitting around? Grab a jumper off that!

Coreboot Linux video – There is the link for installing ubuntu but really any distribution would work, I am probably going to have 2-3 different installed distributions going or maybe 1 binary based and 1 source based. I have not decided yet what the plan is but I have a pretty good idea how to get a well compiled source based distribution to run on binaries as well and that would be quite ideal for a little Chromebook without much power to compile for itself.

 

crouton Manjaro – Builds are busted.

I do not know what happened but for some reason the audio target is broken. It is going to take a little work for me to be able to fix it. Mainly I need to make some diffs on some files from upstream and merge them together in an operational manner. I am not able to do it at this time due to crouton being broken! I need to do it on my desktop. I will work on it in the next couple days and get it fixed back up again!

crouton Manjaro – status updates

I am in a position where most things have caught up pretty nicely on the Manjaro branch and seem to be stable for me. Although I have not been making posts it does not mean I am sitting idle. I am doing some research on the progression to take next.

I’ve been researching lxc, docker and systemd encapsulation so a better experience can be provided within crouton. If I am correct it will be possible to setup the lxc stuff in a target and have it install correctly that way.

I may take a break from the crouton stuff and do some work on the cutting edge Linux spin of Manjaro. I have had a lot of people interested in when the next image is going to be released and I do not blame them. The old one is… well old, It might not update correctly and people want a known working version instead of having me say… you can try it but it might break, the risk is yours.

Working on the image should not take too much of my time because the majority of the time consuming work has already been done. So for now I am doing research and may speed push out an image in the near future.

crouton Manjaro container update.

It appears google has created a way to do containers within Chrome OS. This is totally awesome because I believe it will be less complex than doing a docker setup. I think the docker setup required you to do a few tricky things to get it working.

Since Chrome OS does not have docker by default and would require some modifications that I would prefer not to do, To even get docker working it looks like the workflow would have been this:
A) create a basic chroot with nearly no tools. Only CLI.
B) Have docker installed on that chroot and start the container from the chroot.
C) you are now in the container.

With minijail this can be accomplished in one step! I find the new stuff I am looking into extremely awesome! I know we can run a really slick setup moving forward and I am really excited to be a part of this advancement!

crouton Manjaro systemd research

I am researching LXC containers and docker as a resource to get manjaro working properly with systemd. This changes the paradigm from just a chroot into something more secure and contained which sounds really neat 🙂

I am going to be doing some research into these tools and how they work in order to get the Manjaro crouton install working better! I do not have a timeframe on getting this working and may start a sub-branch of the manjaro branch to test this out.

 

crouton Manjaro preview and discussion.

Here is a video of the crouton Manjaro Cutting Edge Linux distribution. I’ve currently got it to install to nearly what you see on the screen there. What is running is XFCE, KWIN and cairo-dock.

It runs very well with no lag to be noticed on my chromebook. I hope you enjoy!

 

crouton Manjaro celme configs a semi-working

The configs for the celme target is working however they do need some work still. It is currently a work in progress however it seems to be working. Everything is starting to work very well.

I’ve now got it setup so kwin and cairo-dock load automatically when upon first launch. The session information needs to be reloaded because firefox is being loaded on first launch which is not supposed to happen.

The terminal when launched through cairo-dock now correctly launches the fish shell. A terminal launched from the main menu use the default bash shell.

 

crouton Manjaro celme target changes coming down the pipe

I like the fish shell and as such I am going to use it in the celme target through cli-extra. It is not set as the default shell however the terminal you launch from cairo-dock will use fish. The terminal you launch from the menu will use bash.

I made this decision because fish seems like the easiest shell to set up and I really like using it. I hope you enjoy the changes that are to come. 🙂

crouton Manjaro – celme target has a Mixer!

I got found the correct setup for a mixer on this particular hardware. It works quite well. I removed pnmixer which did not work well on this hardware. I have been updating configs a lot. The fixes will come through a little later because I want to do a big chunk of things before I push it up. I test local and then move it up to github.

crouton Manjaro celme target working.

I am having some odd locale issues that I am not sure how to fix. I have tried a lot of things to fix it and have not been able to do so. The desktop environment installs correctly and the configs get pushed over and work. Some keyboard shortcuts need to be revamped, it is still a work in progress. Things seem to be working decent. I am having issues with pnmixer and that quite likely is caused by the locale issues that I am having.

 

crouton Manjaro celme target test run.

Re-upped the configs that I had modified and I am preforming another test install of the celme target. This target includes xfce, kwin throught he kdebase-workspace package and cairo-dock including cairo-dock-plugins.

I expect there to be two possible results with these configs. It will either work and load kwin –replace and cairo-dock or it will bomb and load xfwm4 instead. We will see once the install is finished. As long as it does not error out then it should be something that can be resolved.

 

crouton Manjaro celme target currently broken.

So when I install with the celme target it attempts to load xfce and fails. I am sure it is in the config but why did it not happen in the previous test install I do not know. I am looking into the solution at this very moment. I know it has something to do with the xfce4-session.xml file but I am not sure what. I may attempt to get this working another way by deleting the file.

crouton Manjaro celme target created

I made some modifications to the core, audio and a few other targets. I created a couple of targets. I made the celme target to stick everything together and update the configs.

Just running through a test run to see how well the install works 🙂