Thread for AV Linux 2020.4.10 Issues

[GMaq]

Thanks for documenting some issues with AV Linux 2020.4.10. Any chance of updating the ISO with a fix not to make a redundant install on /lib/live/mount? Or is there a way to avoid creating /lib/live/mount when doing an install? If I can avoid this install I can install to a smaller partition.
Also, a tried to install the avlinux-assistant_12.0-buster1-3_all.deb with "dpkg -i" and it said there was a missing dependency on winetricks.
So I installed winetricks with synaptic which fixed the problem. Is there a better way to install this deb?
Thanks for all the great work.

Hi varpa,

I'm pondering what I can do to fix the issue and I may reach out the the guy who made the forked SB version but it seems he just did it for his own use and has no interest in maintaining it: https://francoconidi.it/systemback-1-9- ... -10-18-04/

dpkg does not install or satisfy additional dependencies so I suggest using Gdebi which will automatically pull in Winetricks as long as you've recently refreshed your packages lists..

@varpa

Well some good news! I managed to contact the guy who forked Systemback and explained the problem to him and offered to make a donation to his blog/site if he would look into this bug in Systemback and he agreed to look into it and fixed it! I just finished testing and everything is working like it did before and now there is still the option for NVMe installs so hopefully it's a win win for all users of Systemback..

I will do a few small fixes (ie latest Hydrogen, EQ10Q binaries from the developers site, update the User Manual) and then release a fresh "fixed" ISO in the next week or so..

[trummerschlunk]

Thanks for all your great work!

I checked out the isotester and really like it. Unfortunately I have no luck installing AVLinux on my Dell XPS9830. It has an NVME disk and even if I follow all the steps from the manual closely (the UEFI way), it says that it can't find the disk or the disk is busy.

Did anyone get this to run?

Thanks!

[martibs]

I've installed the lowlatency kernel package:

Code: Select all

dpkg -l | grep lowlatency
ii  linux-headers-5.4.28avl2-lowlatency      5.4.28avl2-lowlatency-22                amd64        Linux kernel headers for 5.4.28avl2-lowlatency on amd64

But even after running update-grub, it does not create a boot option for the lowlatency kernel:

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grep "menuentry 'Debian" /boot/grub/grub.cfg 
menuentry 'Debian GNU/Linux' --class debian --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-simple-4bc3b8a1-af76-4649-a699-7d23ccc0ecf2' {
        menuentry 'Debian GNU/Linux, with Linux 5.4.28-rt19avl2' --class debian --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-5.4.28-rt19avl2-advanced-4bc3b8a1-af76-4649-a699-7d23ccc0ecf2' {
        menuentry 'Debian GNU/Linux, with Linux 5.4.28-rt19avl2 (recovery mode)' --class debian --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-5.4.28-rt19avl2-recovery-4bc3b8a1-af76-4649-a699-7d23ccc0ecf2' {

I'm dualbooting with a Ubuntu install on the same machine, so I was expecting some issues with AVLinux actually installing the boot loader on the EFI, but I was expecting it to at least discover it's own kernel during update-grub.

I also have an issue with some very ugly fonts in Firefox on certain web pages (like Bandcamp and Facebook). I guess this is a known Debian issue?

I chose to change the ID of my user from 1000 to 1001 in order to harmonize with the existing Ubuntu installation on my system. I used the ChangeUID/ChangeGID scripts, and they worked great. However, upon invoking the ChangeGID script, I was notified that the vboxadd group already had been given the 1001 GID. I decided to simply up the GID of the vboxadd group to 1002, but to my surprise, I was notified that the www-data user was moved to the new vboxadd(1002) group:

Code: Select all

id www-data
uid=33(www-data) gid=1002(vboxadd) groups=1002(vboxadd)

I would like to commend the authors on a very nice and thorough documentation! And also question the decision to activate the pcspeaker module...

[GMaq]

@martibs

I had another report about another kernel not showing up when installed but I can't reproduce that issue here, in fact I just switched from 5.4.28 RT to lowlatency in my AVL development VM because Virtualbox really seems to hate RT Kernels and it installed and showed up as expected.. Without some more context I'm not sure what to suggest at this point.

See this, may be helpful?: https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... wn-in-grub

For the ugly Firefox Fonts I'm not sure if it's a Debian thing, a Firefox thing or what but here's what worked for me.. In the Firefox preferences menu in the upper right corner of the Firefox window select 'Preferences-->Languages and Appearance--->Fonts and Colors-->Advanced and then deselect Pages loading their own fonts.. You may want to change the font size from 16 to 14, not a perfect solution but it improves the look of most common sites considerably.

FF-Prefs.png (21.54 KiB) Viewed 1955 times

FF-fonts.png (32.1 KiB) Viewed 1955 times

As far as the PC Speaker module, it was never explicitly added, it just started showing up somewhere along the line and is such a minor annoyance I really pay no attention to it..

Lastly I would almost guarantee you are the only person other than myself to ever use the UIDGID scripts..They are not really used often or maintained so the fact that they mostly worked is a revelation to me..

[martibs]

@martibs

I had another report about another kernel not showing up when installed but I can't reproduce that issue here, in fact I just switched from 5.4.28 RT to lowlatency in my AVL development VM because Virtualbox really seems to hate RT Kernels and it installed and showed up as expected.. Without some more context I'm not sure what to suggest at this point.

See this, may be helpful?: https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... wn-in-grub

The solutions on that SE is to run the grub-install to actually install the GRUB, but the problem lies with the update-grub, which doesn't discover the lowlatency kernel and put the entries into the grub.cfg in the first place. I'll look into it a little later, don't actually need the ll kernel right away.

For the ugly Firefox Fonts I'm not sure if it's a Debian thing, a Firefox thing or what but here's what worked for me.. In the Firefox preferences menu in the upper right corner of the Firefox window select 'Preferences-->Languages and Appearance--->Fonts and Colors-->Advanced and then deselect Pages loading their own fonts.. You may want to change the font size from 16 to 14, not a perfect solution but it improves the look of most common sites considerably.

Works

[varpa]

GMaq, thanks for following up on the Systemback redundant installation problem. I'm looking forward to the new ISO so I can install to my SSD disk which only has a 20GB partition.

[anahata]

New ISOs are on the usual mirrors now:
http://download.linuxaudio.org/avlinux/ and
https://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/avlinux/

[ZestieBumwhig]

@sirjohndfox @GMaq It's the damndest thing! Two-finger scroll works all of a sudden! I guess something in a recent update? My touchpad is properly identified as "ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad." Huzzah!

[martibs]

I'm considering activating Secure Boot on my system running AVL using this guide. Are there any known issues related to Secure Boot?

[vj_trollkind]

Issue resolved!
I'll just leave this here as a monument for my noobness when it comes to laptops and if anyone else might stumble over this.

I burned the 2020_5_10 to a DVD and booted into Live on my 10y old Win 7 laptop (already has about 50GB unpartitioned space prepared) to install from there but while I could log in with the given credentials, neither systemback nor GParted accept avl64admin as a Root password so I can't really do much.
I didn't fiddle with anything in the system so far, so I don't know where I went wrong. It seems the updated iso should still use the same credentials as the 2020_4_10? (Which I haven't actually tested because I was waiting for a USB key to arrive but went with DVD now for simplicity anyway)

<edit>
I rebooted to test if it wasn't just CapsLock, as unlikely as it would have been and I realised my keyboard is mapped super weird. Some normal letters are numbers so avl64admin was written as av364ad05n. I'll try to fix that or write the password with different keys.

<edit2>
No luck with some of the generic "Acer Laptop", "Asus Laptop" layouts. The basic problem is that AVL thinks that the right half of my keyboard is a Numpad. I'll research more on that tomorrow.

<edit3>
Oh, I just never was aware that the Numpad functionality is standard and didn't notice the light blue numpad letteration on my laptop. Did take me a while to find the NumLock key but I can now type normally again. I don't know if it is Linux specific that it starts with NumLock in that state, I just never ran into that issue before.

[vj_trollkind]

My next issue:
I really like the manual, it goes into every step and is well illustrated but after preparing the partitions with GParted and using SystemBack to install my options are a bit different than in the manual. As a reminder, I'm in a Live session booted from DVD.
In the Systemback menu my Storage Directory is also /home but I have the options "Live system create", "System upgrade" and "Exclude" available too unlike in the Manual. Also the "Create new" option under Point operations. No restore points are in my list, like in the manual, there's just the empty one marked. When I go through System install, it doesn't say "Live image" but "Currently running system". When I let that run through on a 20GB partition it eventually failed because it ran out of space. Which is weird since it's the 2020_5_10 version, so it shouldn't take twice the size and the partition in the manual is only 15GB.

[GMaq]

@vj_trollkind

Hmmm so you're booting the latest 2020.5.10 and it's saying "Currently Running System"? Can you tell me if you're booting in UEFI or BIOS Boot mode?

[vj_trollkind]

Bios, it's an old laptop.

<edit>
I'll try again today, to see if I went wrong at some point but I did multiple tries a few days ago and always ended up at "Currently running system".

[martibs]

My system tends to freeze up, most likely due to depleted memory. My computer has 8GB of RAM, and it usually runs on 50-80% of capacity, with swap not being utilized.
I suspect that the system freezes whenever more memory needs to be allocated than are available either as unused RAM, or buffers/cache. Instead of swapping out pages, the system freezes. I'm trying to figure out why this happens, and I've come across this parameter: vm.min_free_kbytes.
It is set to 11230, which seems low after reading a bit about it. Has this setting been tuned for AV Linux, or is it the Debian Buster default?

[GMaq]

Hi,

That is not a parameter I have ever touched, so it is not a tuning thing..

Are you using the RT or lowlatency kernel? On my system here (amd threadripper 24 core) I get occasional freezes with the RT kernel, I switched to the lowlatency kernel to run Virtualbox (it doesn't like RT at all) and I have still had rare freezes but not nearly to the degree I got with the RT.. No hard evidence to support this but just casual observation. This is a new system so maybe it just doesn't like Linux kernels in general..?

My studio machine (Intel i5 quad) doesn't freeze ever even with the RT kernel so hardware is quite variable..

Perhaps install and try the lowlatency kernel if you haven't already..