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Midas

Member

Registered: 2017-12-15

Posts: 167

Devuan based Windows Installer Q4OS TDE

On an ongoing series of experiments with Q4OS Windows Installer, I'm reporting my findings here for the benefit of whomever may be interested.

Before I start, please bear in mind that I am in no way a Linux power user, just someone who likes to test how far he can go in adapting existing solutions to his own needs.

1. I started this with a clean install of the Q4OS Centaurus under Windows with the Windows Installer available from https://www.q4os.org/downloads1.html#downloads_winsetup;

2. After finishing this step, I ran the "Desktop Profiler" from the "Welcome Screen" in order to install TDE, which is the environment I am more familiar with and, I assume, simpler in terms of overall dependencies.

3. After finishing and verifying that everything was working and there were no errors -- I ran 'sudo apt-get update' and 'sudo apt-get upgrade' just to make sure -- I devoted myself to follow the guide supplied at https://devuan.org/os/documentation/dev … to-beowulf;

4. The first issue I found was with the sources.list instruction, since Q4OS '/etc/apt/sources.list' is actually empty because the Debian repositories sources reside in fact in '/etc/apt/sources.list.d/20_debian.list' -- so I renamed the later and populated the former in accordance with the instructions;

5. I did the following steps (including the one about installing wicd-gtk), and immediately got a very long and intimidating list of unneeded packages, followed by the advice of using 'apt autoremove' to get rid of them, which I didn't follow for fear of completely messing up the DE (more on this bellow);

6. Installing the 'eudev' package was another nerve wrecker, since it virtually erased anything KDE, but I went ahead and did it anyway;

7. Next, came rebooting to get 'sysvinit' in charge and I really expected this to be the moment I'd throw the towel down, but to my surprise the system rebooted to a rather different login manager and then to a somewhat changed but entirely recognizable TDE, although I got the first errors in the process -- a need to press CTRL-D to resume the boot process and a complaint about missing firmware preventing initramfs-tools from concluding sucessfully on account of an error with '/etc/initramfs-tools/hooks/shutdown_hook.sh';

8. After the next few steps, and as I declined to install either XFCE or Gnome, I was dropped to a command prompt on reboot, so I had to search for the adequate package to get the TDE installed back (it's 'q4os-desktop-trinity', btw);

9. I also had to manually install a couple of missing or needed packages, chiefly the 'rtl_nic' firmwares I had to download manually from https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/ke … ee/rtl_nic and copy to '/lib/firmware/rtl_nic' to make the corresponding error go away;

10. To sum it all up, although I have a working desktop -- I'm using it right now to write this post in Firefox -- a few errors remain, I have to press CTRL-D to bypass a checking error with the '/mnt/hosts/debian/root.disk', I have to go through logging in at the command prompt and then issue the 'startx' command, and I can't seem to figure the solution for the 'initramfs-tools' error seen in the screen dump below, I consider the experiment to be a success overall.

[sudo] password for user:
Hit https://q4os.org/q4repo q4os-3-0-cn InRelease
Hit https://q4os.org/qtderepo buster InRelease
Hit http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf InRelease
Hit http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-updates InRelease
Hit http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-security InRelease
Hit http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-backports InRelease

user@q4os-pc:~$ sudo aptitude upgrade
The following partially installed packages will be configured:
  initramfs-tools
No packages will be installed, upgraded, or removed.
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 0 B will be used.
Setting up initramfs-tools (0.133+deb10u1) ...
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.133+deb10u1) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-4.19.0-9-amd64
E: /etc/initramfs-tools/hooks/shutdown_hook.sh failed with return 1.
update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-4.19.0-9-amd64 with 1.
dpkg: error processing package initramfs-tools (--configure):
 installed initramfs-tools package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 initramfs-tools
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
Setting up initramfs-tools (0.133+deb10u1) ...
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.133+deb10u1) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-4.19.0-9-amd64
E: /etc/initramfs-tools/hooks/shutdown_hook.sh failed with return 1.
update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-4.19.0-9-amd64 with 1.
dpkg: error processing package initramfs-tools (--configure):
 installed initramfs-tools package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 initramfs-tools

Final note: I didn't try running the script in http://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=1592 because I assumed if it wasn't working with Devuan ASCII, it also wouldn't work with Devuan Beowulf.

Midas

Member

Registered: 2017-12-15

Posts: 167

Re: Devuan based Windows Installer Q4OS TDE

That error with 'initramfs-tools' is keeping me from installing anything via GUI tools; whenever I try I get the following error after a while:

"Package system is in a non consistent state, it has to be recovered manually. Installation cannot continue now. Cleaning and canceling ..."

Things work fine in Konsole, despite the error.

I guess I'll have to abort now and go back to the vanilla Q4OS sooner or later.

EDIT: well, I seem to have managed to solve it by following https://askubuntu.com/questions/1136480/

What I really did...

Noting that the error pointed to '/etc/initramfs-tools/hooks/shutdown_hook.sh' (see below), I deleted that file as shown in the answer at https://askubuntu.com/a/1141915 and ran the other commands. This seemed to work. Let's see if it survives a reboot.

E: /etc/initramfs-tools/hooks/shutdown_hook.sh failed with return 1.

EDIT2: Well that's the end of it, it didn't survive a reboot, as I got a "No init found. Try passing init=bootarg" error. Case closed, then.

Last edited by Midas (2020-06-17 20:13)

bin

Member

From: U.K.

Registered: 2016-01-28

Posts: 1,298

Re: Devuan based Windows Installer Q4OS TDE

That's interesting - you get to learn all sorts of stuff with this kind of exercise - well done!

Take a look at exegnu which uses Devuan Beowulf - the equivalent of Buster - and TDE development versions. https://sourceforge.net/projects/exegnu … o/testing/
Do not run the installer - full stop. If you want to install use a spare drive that can be zapped to start with.

Midas

Member

Registered: 2017-12-15

Posts: 167

Re: Devuan based Windows Installer Q4OS TDE

Thanks for your encouragement, mr. bin, I appreciate it.

ExeGNU (http://exegnulinux.net/) was the first I tried, in fact -- ran it live from a Ventoy USB (https://www.ventoy.net/) -- but I must confess that I was rather under-whelmed as most the niceties and polish from Q4OS were absent. Would you be able to customize it like Q4OS?

Last edited by Midas (2020-06-18 16:09)

bin

Member

From: U.K.

Registered: 2016-01-28

Posts: 1,298

Re: Devuan based Windows Installer Q4OS TDE

You're welcome - I've been constructively breaking linux since 1997 and I still have a box of pieces somewhere -

I think if I wanted to do this I'd start with the Devuan netinstall iso. As you'll have seen exegnu is a couple of versions ahead of TDE 14.06 and you'd just wind up with a dog's dinner of versions.

Once that's installed I would install mc (Midnight Commander) from their repo. This is an invaluable tool for a non-GUI environment (and GUI as well) as it gives you the old DOS style Norton Commander twin pane file manager and editor. Under sudo you can edit system configs - especially apt sources!

Then I would add the Q4OS repos and try installing q4os desktop. This post will be of interest.https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=1592 - I don't think there's been any movement since then, but it explains why installing using the desktop package is probably the better route.

It's possible the Q4OS team may want this moved to General Discussion as it's outside the remit of the main support section.

Midas

Member

Registered: 2017-12-15

Posts: 167

Re: Devuan based Windows Installer Q4OS TDE

Great tips, thank you very much, I'll be sure to try that sometime soon. B)

My current beating horse is the latest Ubuntu Mint MATE, also setup through Wubiuefi (https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi/).

Thread has been moved -- no quibbles whatsoever with me.

Last edited by Midas (2020-07-02 13:01)