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!

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 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 🙂

 

Updated github configs

I updated the github configs with what is currently on the chromebook. It has had some mods done to it but still needs the keyboard bindings to be set properly to work with a desktop. This means reinstalling and getting rid of the keyboard target.

 

crouton Manjaro – Default desktop environment.

I’ve done it before on my desktop spin of Manjaro… thats right xfce+kwin+cairo-dock. This will be the primary and official desktop environment of my crouton spin.

I took the work I did on the Manjaro Cutting Edge Linux remix, pulled the configs out of it and stuck them on github. Now it should be extremely easy to port them over to being installed by default. This is not exactly the same as the desktop mix I just used it as a starting point since the vast majority of the work had already been completed.

With the majority of the configs out of the way and ready to go I will be setting up a target(or multiple) to install it all. This will come highly customized and ready to use, it really is looking pretty cool right now. I find the functionality to be very good on the chromebook, the small screen and touchpad lend itself well to how I have this setup.

You have dragging to the sides to resize to that side of the screen, you have showing all windows when mousing to the top left, showing the desktop on top right and grid mode when you mouse to the top so you can organize your windows! I would not like this setup on a desktop but for some reason it works very well on something smaller with a touchpad.

 

crouton Manjaro compiz-xfce fails.

For some reason I get a python error when running CCSM after installing compiz-xfce. I posted on the Manjaro forums for an answer. I have not found one on the internet at all. I am going to proceed with setting up xfce-kwin since that is what I use on my desktop. Enlightenment is too buggy for regular usage but would have been optimal.

 

crouton Manjaro main desktop environment

After looking at the desktop environments closely I believe I have made a decision. I was originally going to go with E18 as the main desktop environment for the crouton Manjaro edition since it runs with a very low ram utilization, almost akin to using a stand alone window manager.

E18 seems to have issues I just cannot over look, I find the setup of XFCE + KWIN to be desirable at the moment however I may go with something different and do a old school Compiz setup because I think that may work well in terms of being light weight if it is set up as a stand alone wm.

The compiz that comes with Manjaro was designed to work with xfce although I am not sure if I want something that heavy on this system I do have enough ram for it so that may be an option.

I have a feeling to get some good custom WM’s running I am going to need to mess about a lot with some of the enter-chroot scripting.

edit: I do not think I have to mess about in enter-chroot but I may have to modify the launcher for xfce to gracefully choose between kwin, compiz or xfwm4.

crouton Manjaro – more target talk.

I’ve been thinking about how to approach the targets and I think I have a working solution, but I have to look at some code first, Then I will be able to know whether it is going to work or not. Here is how I think I am going to create Manjaro targets. There will be targets for a variety of general software available, these targets can be added manually through the -t flag.  This way automated installs are not removed in favor for interactive installs.

Next there will be a new target created called interactive which must run alone. You cannot run interactive with any other target files because interactive will interactively get all required information to install your desktop environments and differing programs available.

I think this could be easier for new users than trying to choose whats installed. I think possibly making interactive mode the default when there is no target selected would be useful.