[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Sugar Trisquel image Ready for testing.

[Martin Guy]

First, thanks to all who have made Trisquel On A Stick TOAST a reality
(as well as being the first little-endian recursive acronym I've seen)

It achieves almost all of the goals I had for "Sugar Live Everything":
- It works on 32-bit machines
- It has lots of Activities
- It autostarts if you just turn it on
- It has a joyful splash screen
- It has a language selector at boot
- It uses any Linux swap partitions it finds
and it's far better than anything I could have hoped to make.

Now for the bad news...

- It only has five versions of English and three of Spanish, whereas
  Trisquel usually includes ar bn ca de el en es eu fa fr gl he hi it
  ja mg mn nb ne nl pt_PT ru si sl sq sv tr ur vi zh_CN
- On the text consoles and on reboot for some settings changes, there's
  a login prompt at which one has to guess that the username is trisquel
  and the password is [Enter]. Autologin would be better.

It shares two of the hardware-specific bugs I was working on:
- Xorg's "nouveau" DRI driver bug which makes github.com/login all gray
  and the "branches" menu not work. The simplest and least invasive fix
  is to delete /usr/lib/*-linux-gnu/dri/nouveau_dri.so
  For gory details see github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-live-build/issues/20
- The alsa "Headphone" control is muted, so no sound comes out of
  external speakers. "alsactl init" fixes this but also halves the main
  audio volume, while "amixer set Headphone unmute" makes it work.
  That leaves the Headphone volume at 0 but some sound still comes out
  of the headphone socket.

I guess I'm lucky to use an ancient laptop with a crummy video chip and
broken speakers so I could discover these issues :)

A few ISO-size-reducing hacks could also be applied, removing:
66MB /usr/src/linux-headers
184K /usr/include/btrfs
13MB man-db and /usr/share/man
29MB /usr/share/doc
72KB /usr/share/bug
62MB /var/cache/apt/*.bin (apt-get auto-rebuilds these)
85MB /usr/share/locale (by running localepurge keeping en and es)
These are not enough to make it fit on a CD, but should get it under
1GB instead of being just over. I know you can't now buy a new pendrive
less than 8GB. I'm using a 2GB one so I'm sure some people only have 1.

This is head and shoulders above the previous best Sugar Live system,
Fedora SOAS. Its only serious defect is lack of world language support.

I'm happy my problem is solved and I can now work on something else.

The 32-bit TOAST image is now the best generic Sugar Live ISO there is.
I suggest it be highlighted on Sugarlabs' "Getting Sugar" web page
as the recommended live system (and that the first menu item on
sugarlabs.org->"Get Sugar" be "Live System" or something similarly
descriptive instead of "SOAS", which means nothing to the uninitiated).

    M

On 20/11/2020, Martin Guy <martinwguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Present at http://us.archive.trisquel.info/iso/trisquel-sugar_9.0_i686.iso
>