14.1 for 64-bit only

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Scooby
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Re: 14.0 for 64-bit only

Postby Scooby » 22 Nov 2013, 13:14

simargl wrote:then gettext from /usr/bin should have
higher priority because in PATH /usr/bin comes before /bin. Or is that correct?


Made a quick test and indeed that is correct.
/usr/bin takes precedence over /bin

john3voltas
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Re: 14.0 for 64-bit only

Postby john3voltas » 22 Nov 2013, 21:49

Hello Simargl. Please consider this an open letter to you.
And please bear in mind that I don't mean to bother you and there is no pun intended. This is just me voicing my frustration.

simargl wrote:Just I won't work on 32-bit anymore, that is reasonable because what would my motivation - it would require compiling kernel for i686, replacing some binaries in initrfs, converting i686 packages , keeping them on my disk but why?

That is a very interesting question.
Since the very beginning, still in archpup's days you've said that you were building an OS for your needs, on your computer(s).
That is not the usual dev approach. Usually devs stand up saying that they are building an OS for them but with a community in mind. They will usually state what the project is all about and sometimes they even plot a roadmap of what they intend for the future of the project.
In such sense I guess I see why you currently don't have the "drive" to keep doing 32bit versions anymore. :roll:

simargl wrote:Those people would anyway use what distrowatch recommends and that is not alphaOS, but some ubuntu derivative.

Then I guess you are not acknowledging that you have here several board members that have more than a couple of 6 or 7 year old computers with only 1 or 2GB RAM that they would love to run alpha on. :cry:
We are not distrowatch average joes and we are certainly not interested in running buntoo or it's derivatives otherwise we wouldn't be here, we would be on buntoo boards.

IMHO the project has been zigzaging way too much and this way I don't understand it.
Let me give you a couple of examples.

We had a cool text editor: l3afpad. Then you decided that Geany was more up to the standards of alpha. But then (IIRC in the same week) you decided to create your own text editor in Vala, which is great but this just makes stuff a bit confusing with so many changes in such a small amount of time.

Another example: we had a wiki and It started to get populated. Then some douchebags decided to spam it and you removed the wiki. You said we didn't need it, that we could use the forum instead. Then a couple of days later you added a new wiki but the old posts are now gone... :|

Another example is the SFS vs LinuxLive. All in all, at this stage, there is hardly any evidence of what the project can benefit from using linuxlive. If this was a mature and stable project I'd probably agree that wasting time on linuxlive was a good option. But the way I see it we are still on early beta stage with several major issues to deal with. :roll:

Another example: the 32vs64 bit. When you started the project you only had 32bit versions and some of us asked for 64bit versions. Now you only have 64bit versions and some of us are asking for 32bit versions. I guess that in light of what you wrote in your previous quote, it is understandable that you don't have the "drive" to make both.

But that's what I believe is the main issue with alphaOS right now: you being the sole developer of the project.
It is hard on you because you have to do everything and it must take you a lot of your precious free time.
Then if you had more people helping the project could go faster, could have less impact on your personal life and you could assign tasks like "this guy takes care of 32bit and that other guy takes care of 64bit".
Of course you would need skilled people to work with you and unfortunately most of us (like me) lack those skills.
Yet I am quite sure that there are still a couple of skilled users that could help you IF you wanted and IF they had the time.
But I'm not so sure if you want to go that way, or if you ever did want to take that road in the first place. :|

I gave you a couple of examples of zigzaging. Let me tell you why.
You see, while the project was zigzaging there were several major issues that didn't get fixed, maybe because you can't replicate them or maybe because you were working on zigzaging stuff or maybe there was another reason that I can't see right now.
We have to face it: alphaOS has major issues with wireless networking and for what I understand it is lacking lots of drivers/firmwares (or whatever is needed) to get some peripherals recognized and working in alpha, like e.g. my DVB-T usb stick.
Besides there are still (ACPI?) issues that affect the CPU fans, sometimes not working at all and sometimes only working at full speed. I thought this was only happening with my laptop but I have easily replicated this on a couple of other laptops. So either I am doing something very wrong or other people simply are a) not listening to their laptop fans or b) are working with different computer architectures than those of my laptops.
If you asked me I would say that these are priorities and zigzaging is probably nice and it is probably beneficial in the long run BUT it is not essential for the project right now.
I will keep my interest in alphaOS but I probably won't feel so excited as I felt when I was using archpup 12, that didn't have a single issue of those mentioned before. Unfortunately that one is now unusable because it can't sync with repos and also because it is now unmaintained.
One last word: please don't get mad at me. I simply don't agree on some of your recent decisions but I am very grateful for you having shared (and still sharing) your project with us. ;)
I feel that there is a huge potential on alpha which there once was in Puppy too but that faded away on the latter. I hope that in the near future with or without zigzaging you can get alpha to show that potential and also to show stability.
Oh, and I'm sorry for such a long post. My parents brought me up with --verbose :oops:
Cheers mate

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Re: 14.1 for 64-bit only

Postby simargl » 23 Nov 2013, 09:57

I think change to Linux Live was change to better, because it's faster, more efficient, easier to maintain and to implement our ideas and changes. Since I want to work on just one arch, for the future it's better to be 64-bit, and some other distributions like Chakra and Crux are also 64bit only. Systems based on Arch with so new libraries and kernel, already are not best choice for too old computers, with possibly not compatible drivers.

john3voltas
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Re: 14.1 for 64-bit only

Postby john3voltas » 23 Nov 2013, 15:11

simargl wrote:I think change to Linux Live was change to better, because it's faster, more efficient, easier to maintain and to implement our ideas and changes.

Yes, sim, I am sure it is all those things but those simply aren't visible, at least not for the average joe.
But I am quite sure the old squashfs system would still allow us (you) to implement your ideas, don't you think so?
Let's say that it is indeed a nice addition but it just wasn't mandatory right now, right?

simargl wrote:Since I want to work on just one arch, for the future it's better to be 64-bit...

There you go, you don't want to work on more than one arch.
You thought about it all by yourself and you decided that more than 50% of the current PC's won't be able to run a maintained version of alpha.
What can I say, it's you project, it's your time and it's your work. You get to do what you want with it.

simargl wrote:...and some other distributions like Chakra and Crux are also 64bit only. Systems based on Arch with so new libraries and kernel, already are not best choice for too old computers, with possibly not compatible drivers.

But we're talking about alpha. We're not talking about Chakra or Crux because we would be on their forums if we were talking about them.
Sometimes I think I'll open the forum just to realize that you've suddenly ditched GTK and adopted Qt or that you turned alpha into a 10GB iso file because you changed your mind. You are entitled to do all that but in all honesty it doesn't seem fair that you are not discussing some stuff with all our users. Heck, we're not so many, right?
You know, I'm not saying I've got time (because I don't) but I'm quite sure that I could be useful if you shared alpha's innings with me/us. Like, how can we build it from scratch, how we can recompile a kernel, how we can debug issues like the wifi issues that some (many) of us have experienced.
If we were more independent on all those things I'm sure some of us could give you a hand and the project would still be yours and in the end you would still pull the strings if you wanted to turn left or right or even go backwards.
For instance, debian has a side-project called debian-live in that you can basically build your own debian livecd with just the stuff that you want. I'm not sure if Linux Live works the same way (or similar) but that's a very nice feature to have. But only when we squash all the major bugs. You might not need it - heck, I even hate it myself - but wireless networking is a must have on any OS.
I even tried to get help from Archlinux on their forums and IRC but they kicked me saying that I wasn't using Arch and that they don't help side-projects :(
So I keep my word on it, I encourage your work but right now I disagree on some details of your project.
Cheers mate

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Re: 14.1 for 64-bit only

Postby simargl » 24 Nov 2013, 17:27

Is wireless working now in 14.1? Because this new version has kernel config like Slax with more drivers enabled, bigger vmlinuz and (much) smaller number of modules in initramfs than before. Should have more devices supported, Scooby reported that wireless works for him without any problem. And don't worry, no more drastic changes are planned :mrgreen:

john3voltas
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Re: 14.1 for 64-bit only

Postby john3voltas » 24 Nov 2013, 18:04

Sim, I still have issues but maybe wifi has indeed been working a long time ago and I only just found this hack/workaround now. Let me explain.
alphaOS 14.1 boots up (from a windows 7 reboot) and I can see that my laptop's wireless led is OFF.
No matter how many times I press the wireless hard key/button, the darned led doesn't lit up to ON.
I had already told you once about this and I even asked you to include rfkill (which you did). So, I then run "rfkill unblock all" from the bash and the wireless led lits up to ON. When/if it doesn't, I just need to press the hard key/button and it lits up right away.
So, now that the radio is working it's time to run frisbee (or any network manager). When I do so I find out that the wireless networks don't show up on the list. I am forced to restart wpa_supplicant and DHCP and refresh the list. After that, the wifi networks list gets populated and I can pick mine and type the password. Everything goes fine but in the end I still don't have a network connection. Maybe if I were using fixed IP it would be working at this point but I am using dynamic.
Using ifconfig I can see that my wlan0 doesn't have an IP address. BTW, where the heck did iproute2 package go? Arch has discontinued the usage if ifconfig 1 or 2 years ago due to ifconfig's lack of maintenance...
So, still without an IP address on that interface, I have to restart wpa_supplicant and DHCP again (sometimes more than once) and suddenly I get an IP lease.
Let me add that on archpup I didn't need to use rfkill to get the radio working and I would get an IP address. Just tested it and it gave me an IP right on boot up.

As a side note, let me tell you that I find that 14.1 is a very good OS (apart from the wifi issues).
It is still very easy to install, it now has systemd which makes it closer to arch, on boot up my laptop doesn't make a crazy noise when the audio driver or alsa is loaded (archpup didn't but all other alphas up to 12 have been doing that) and it does indeed look a bit faster when booting up.
The mouse theme look/design and the conky theme are both highly questionable but also both very easy to fix.
Now the part of being x86_64 only is still very bad news :(

Scooby
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Re: 14.1 for 64-bit only

Postby Scooby » 24 Nov 2013, 19:04

john3voltas wrote:So, still without an IP address on that interface, I have to restart wpa_supplicant and DHCP again (sometimes more than once) and suddenly I get an IP lease.
Let me add that on archpup I didn't need to use rfkill to get the radio working and I would get an IP address. Just tested it and it gave me an IP right on boot up.


Have you tried wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd manually from terminal

or

started frisbee in terminal and follow what they print about connection handling?

I am not too fond of frisbee. It doesnt give good feedback on whats going on behind the scenes.
A wlan connection can take a considerable time to setup.

Maybe I will try( for my self, Sim decides about AlphaOS) and find alternative on arch
since alphaos anyway is moving away from all things puppy.

meowcats
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Re: 14.1 for 64-bit only

Postby meowcats » 24 Nov 2013, 19:54

simargl wrote:Systems based on Arch with so new libraries and kernel, already are not best choice for too old computers, with possibly not compatible drivers.


Simargl sorry but I think you have gone off the deep end and forgot the main use of your creation. With this attitude why bother making a light OS at all? All new computers come with 4gb+ RAM, USB3, and integrated graphics cards are powerful enough to play modern 3d games.

Also drivers not being compatible with *older* hardware? Hardware support generally does not get removed from the kernel. AFAIK the only time this has ever been an issue was when kernel 3.8 removed support for i386 ( 40Mhz processors straight out of 1985).

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Re: 14.1 for 64-bit only

Postby simargl » 24 Nov 2013, 23:03

meowcats wrote:Simargl sorry but I think you have gone off the deep end and forgot the main use of your creation. With this attitude why bother making a light OS at all?

Can't find better fast and portable system, with pacman and bundles that is why.

meowcats wrote:Also drivers not being compatible with *older* hardware? Hardware support generally does not get removed from the kernel. AFAIK the only time this has ever been an issue was when kernel 3.8 removed support for i386 ( 40Mhz processors straight out of 1985).

In previous post, I meant on nvidia graphics card - had experience with those, once

here is example
Conflict between xorg-server-1.11 and nVidia legacy drivers

john3voltas
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Re: 14.1 for 64-bit only

Postby john3voltas » 25 Nov 2013, 03:51

Scooby wrote:Have you tried wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd manually from terminal

No. I would do it if I knew how to set it up that way. I have to admit that I will always be a n00b on linux.

Scooby wrote:started frisbee in terminal and follow what they print about connection handling?

"That" I will surely do. Tomorrow (Monday), and I'll post my findings.
Scooby wrote:I am not too fond of frisbee. It doesnt give good feedback on whats going on behind the scenes.

Me neither. Between Frisbee and Pwireless2 I'd go with the latter.

Scooby wrote:Maybe I will try( for my self, Sim decides about AlphaOS) and find alternative on arch
since alphaos anyway is moving away from all things puppy.

Weird. Puppy has a lot of small opensource tools which are basically GUIs developed on GTKdialog. They are usually very neat & slick. I don't get it why we would want to stay away from them. Sounds like "wanting to reinvent the wheel".
Sim, could you please comment?


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