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

[James Cameron]

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 08:03:02AM +0100, Martin Guy wrote:
> 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

Other Linux desktop environments have moved to Wayland, but that's not
an option for Sugar yet, needs development.

https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/issues/778

> - 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.

That's probably how ALSA works on your laptop.  It is fixed on OLPC OS
by adding alsactl and amixer commands to startup scripts.  It can be
fixed longterm on your laptop by changing ALSA defaults upstream.

Other Linux desktop environments have moved to PulseAudio, but that's
not an option for Sugar yet, needs development.

https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/issues/936

PulseAudio handles initial levels more gracefully than does ALSA.

> 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.

Thanks for your work.

> 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

It's a Wiki, and you can edit it.  I see you have an account.  I would
like to see this TOAST offered, as the process that led to it (thanks
Ruben!) includes testing that gates release, which is something that
Fedora SOAS does not do, as shown by the most recent release which
doesn't start Sugar.  And it's not the first time that has happened.

> 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
> >

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.netrek.org/