tatizaffaroni

  • Nov 20, 2024
  • Joined Aug 30, 2017
  • In Test cycle 2024.09 ISO
  • In Ladybird browser added

    A new, Qt6 based browser is added to repositories, Ladybird
    It is not ready for everyday use (pre-alpha state), but it is a complete independent browser, development started 5-6 years ago (I have been following them all along) and is now in such a state that it can open many websites.
    Expect about a monthly rebuild to better follow the progress, what it looks like now:

  • In notes about flash drive install of KaOS

    Just a few minor observations.

    Background - I have two other distros (Linux Mint and KDE Neon) installed in their own partitions,
    and use rEFInd for booting. The install was overwriting a 3rd distro partition, an EXT4 one
    that had contained (a not really ever used) ubuntu.

    1. with the KaOS flash drive installed in a USB port, and booting to rEFInd, rEFInd has 3 new items in
      its boot screen. All had the KaOS icon. Which one to choose?
      The 3 were:

    2. EFI/kiso/kdeosiso.eft from KAOS_EFI

    3. EFI/boot/loader.efi from KAOS_EFI

    4. fallback boot loader from KAOS_EFI
      I picked the more normal looking middle one.

    5. rEFInd selection - since I had it already installed, I wasn't sure what to do:

      • set for refind, which may install another?
      • set for no boot loader, hoping it would use my existing rEFInd?
        Not wanting to risk unbootable, I picked rEFInd.

    6. the Overview screen showed my install options were Libreoffice and Pipewire,
      even though I had DEselected these. I went back to check and yes, they were
      still deselected. (Later, after booting to the installed system, I did find
      that, correctly, they were NOT installed.)

    7. on booting after the install, I noticed two things on the rEFInd screen:
      a. unlike on booting from the flash drive, rEFInd showed NO KaOS icon, instead using the Penguin.
      b. it lost the icon for one of the 2 distros I had already installed (KDE Neon), substituting
      the Penguin. (My guess is that this one resulted from a new install of rEFInd.)

    Yes, the install did work, and the installer was quite professional looking. Just thought
    I should report what I saw.

  • In Terrific, just terrific.

    Been lurking here for a while, but decided to install the latest ISO (April '24) WITHOUT the proprietory Nvidia driver. Like many of you, I have watched the development of the open-source drivers for a while, and it encouraged me to try KaOS without the chance of breakage due to the driver.

    Works beautifully.
    Sleep, updates, all work as expected.

    I will add that I must work in Microsoft's space a good deal. For that I use MS Edge as a Flatpak, and have everything from Office 365 to voice-to-text working very well. Pipewire has helped make my audio routing for external microphones, headphones, and speakers easy for conferencing. Wayland now works very well on this old Intel i5 6600/Nvidia 950 system.

    Bravo to the developers and testers.

  • In it would make sense to remove XORG?
  • In it would make sense to remove XORG?

    And forgot to mention, all is packaged right now so anyone can still choose to run Plasma 6 with X (older Nvidia cards for example, cannot use Wayland with non-free), so the Plasma desktop has hard depends on many xorg libraries & apps, that won't change until no-one needs to run the plasma_x11 option instead of (default) wayland.

  • In Test cycle 2024.03 ISO
  • In Test cycle 2024.03 ISO

    Download KaOS_Test

    First, minimal test ISO is uploaded for the March stable ISO release.

    This ISO represents a new toolchain, updates to many base packages, major new Nvidia version, a change in kernel config regarding touchpads, and of course, the KDE Megarelease 6 is included.
    One odd thing happened during the ISO build, for which there is no answer yet, the EFI boot image kdeosiso.img (needed for Live boot) went from about 36Mb to over 360Mb, testing will be needed if this effects the ISO, and answers will need to found why this happened.

    As always, early test ISOs are minimal, very few apps, just a web-browser, file manager, text editor, GUI package manager. The non-free Nvidia drivers are included since they are a big part of what needs testing, especially the move to 550 will need attention from those who have the hardware to test this driver.

    Plan is to have Frameworks 6.0.0, KDE Applications 24.02.0, Plasma 6.0.x and Linux 6.7.xx on the final ISO.

    The ISO is using packages from the build repo, but that repo is not enabled, so if you decide to install, make sure to add the build repo to your pacman.conf.

    Debug packages for Calamares are part of all ISOs, run Calamares with gdb if you encounter errors.
    provide the installation log, if you encounter any issue at all

    You can start Calamares from the Welcome app, or run it with:

    sudo calamares -d

    The install log will be created in the home directory of the Live user, see ~/installation.log. It is available after the install in the target system in /var/log/installation.log
    If run from cli, make sure to pastebin the full output, since no installation.log will be copied then, though that log is more complete.

    https://sourceforge.net/projects/kaos-test/files/iso/KaOS-2024.03.01-x86_64.iso
    SHA256Sum:

    94d09bd59f0a1a35644240fdbf5a19d6083b8c44f86888c205ce718dbbfd388c  KaOS-2024.03.01-x86_64.iso

    On this ISO you will find:
    Linux 6.7.7
    systemd 253.17
    gcc 13.2.0
    Qt 6.6.2
    Frameworks 6.0.0
    Plasma 6.0.0
    KDE Applications 24.02.0
    Calamares 3.3.4
    Octopi 0.15.0 with sysinfo & cachecleaner tool

    Known issues:

    • The bottom progress-bar in Calamares reacts to mouse clicks & opens a virtualkeyboard (narrow)
    • In A note about usb key creation documentation from windows...

      Okay, i think i did that the right way. You can verify here and decide if you are happy with it.
      Im definitely happy to contribute more. Im a c++ game dev, that has been working with Linux for over 25 years so im sure i might even be able to contribute better things in the future 🙂
      Cheers

      https://github.com/KaOSx/kaosx.github.io/pull/26

    • In Ten years of KaOS

      Next month will be the ten year anniversary of KaOS, it was launched April 2013 🙂
      Any ideas as to how to commemorate? Special ISO release? News item? Do nothing?

      Please share your ideas.

      • In Public Mirror Offer

        Good Morning,

        I am wondering who I would speak to about hosting a public mirror for this project.
        The mirror server would be hosted in our rack in Kansas City.

        Thank you,
        Anthony

      • In Cannot start Slack flatpak app

        plaken

        Hi there, plaken.

        I've just updated Slack to the latest available version on KCP.
        Check it out.

        Cheers.

        • In Problems with smplayer and mpv player
        • In enable icons and folders on desktop

          You are probably looking to change the layout to folder view:
          right click the desktop > Configure Desktop and Wallpaper > select Folder Layout from the drop down menu (default is set to Desktop).

        • In Test cycle 2021.12 ISO
        • In Initial support for ZFS added

          When KaOS started in 2013, there was some serious consideration to base this distro on Illumos. One of the biggest draws for Illumos was the ZFS filesystem.
          ZFS has been possible on Linux system for a few years now, but licensing issues and no installer support meant it was not an option to use in KaOS.
          Today Calamares received initial support for ZFS, and licensing issues should be no problem if the needed modules are not build into the kernel, but distributed as separate modules instead.
          For now, the only kernel that supports ZFS is the linux-next kernel, since dracut is fully supported by ZFS, anything mkinitcpio based needs to come from downstream.
          This also means, the move to dracut as default initcpio needs to be finalized, it has been default for linux-next since March, with no issues found or reported. Biggest job for that will be the ISO creation, rewrite section to use dracut. The stable linux kernel move is simple, it can use the same settings as linux-next.

          ZFS packages now in the repository:
          https://kaosx.us/packages/packages.php?sortby=&sortdir=&flagged=&page=&repo=&exact=&search=zfs

        • In What to do with Audacity?

          Personally I wouldn't update, if later on, a fork that has been thoroughly tested is deemed a worthy replacement, a switch to use the fork instead would be fine. I don't think there is need to remove it completely from the repo if the changes do not apply to old versions.
          This is merely my opinion, I don't really use Audacity, I've installed it in the past just to play around, the opinions of people who actually use it regularly should be given priority over mine.

        • In OpenZFS

          OpenZFS has shifted its development 2019 with OpenZFS 2.0 to be based on OpenZFS for Linux, since it made such great progress.

          I love to use this for myself, and welcome the option in Calamares as possible choice.

          Thanks a lot

        • In Packagechooser Calamares in QML

          Another modules is ported to QML for KaOS (not presented upstream yet, might stay KaOS only):

          Layout to your liking? Text clear enough?
          Big advantage to have this module in QML is full control over layout, translations can now be done on transifex with the rest of Calamares.

        • In New Year

          Wishing you a happy and successful New Year. Many thanks for providing a great OS.
          What on earth do I put this post under.::