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 sticking to stable.

I messed about with setting up being able to choose the repository you want on install and it did not work well doing it at the early steps of install. It has become obvious that switching the repo branches between stable, testing and unstable is better done at a later stage of the installation.

This is something that can be incorporated later on as an add on to the base system. I think my best course of action is to do a little work on the configs. Get the bash prompt looking nice by default. Do some touch ups on the Synaptics config. Nothing fancy no full DE config set ups yet.

The next step would be to get some targets going so I can choose what is installed prior to hitting the system and having to pacman it all in.
I did play around in an installed system and it was pretty fun, I got Steam installed but the fonts did not work, I figured out which fonts package I needed by trial and error installing one at a time to see what fixed it. This means I can add that font by default to the target for install and Steam will work for other people off the bat!

 

crouton Manjaro branch changing

Installing a branch does not actually change the branch. I am unsure whether the user results with all packages having the proper branch or not.

I ran a pacman-mirrors -g -b testing; pacman -Syyu and it loks as if there were a few upgrades required. I am not really happy with this by I may just leave stable as the default and have the user switch to a different branch at a later time because it is a matter of if something isnt broke do not fix it.

crouton Manjaro – Looks to be working well.

The project is operational.  I am so happy the entire install > X process is finished.

Here is what I see as being left: Creating a way to choose stable, testing or unstable repository, This is easy to do, It is a case of doing an echo and a read of a variable. Next is doing a test install of each desktop environment on each repository. I could in theory do a mass install of all the environments and see what works. This may be the easier route if nothing breaks anything else.

Then I can start doing what I really enjoy. Designing some neat interfaces to go with it by creating some custom targets.

Porteus – Power in your pocket.

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I am working on gathering content for a porteus line of posts. Porteus is a portable usb based distribution that also works off of hard drives. It is based upon Slackware and runs in a modular manner. It is easy to migrate a Porteus system from one partition to another, or even to another computer completely.

Porteus (operating system) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Installation is easily done from linux or windows. You can even run it from your current windows installation. It’s small, coming in at under 300 megs including 2 desktop environments. XFCE + LXDE or KDE 4.8.4 + LXDE. It comes in light and has the capability of great customization.

You can find more information about Porteus here: http://www.porteus.org