Linux Lite 5.0 RC1 Released

[WytWun]

Menu, Accessories, Fonts - may crash or freeze first time, then maybe do the same the next 1 or 2 times. Can take a while to eventually load. Appears to settle after that.

First time accessed: appeared to start and display fonts then window disappeared (presume a crash)
Subsequently: appeared to start and work as normally I would expect a fonts utility to work

Aside: noticed some apparent duplicate fonts (e.g. Cambria, Comic Sans) - has rationalisation been considered?

[Jerry]

Bug found, need confirmation please.

Menu, Accessories, Fonts - may crash or freeze first time, then maybe do the same the next 1 or 2 times. Can take a while to eventually load. Appears to settle after that.

[Jerry]

my posts about the installation headaches with this machine have been to document them and any solutions or workarounds I've found for the benefit of others who might encounter similar problems.  These sorts of issues will hopefully be pretty uncommon except for similar machines.

Agreed.

[WytWun]

As noted here this machine doesn't recognise any Etcher flashed 5.0rc1 USB stick as bootable.

I did read that originally. It's extremely hard to accept that one machine cannot recognise any Etcher flashed drive. I'm not saying it's not true, understand that. It should not be showing up as 'ubuntu' in your boot-from-device menu, I also have an entry called 'ubuntu' but I select the actual name of the USB drive to boot from it ie. 'External USB Hard Drive'. That works no problem.

The 100S F12 boot menu with no USB drive present or with a USB drive that is not recognised as UEFI bootable (there's a single Linux Lite installation on this machine, nothing else - don't know why "ubuntu" is appearing twice):


The 100S F12 boot menu with a UEFI bootable USB drive present:


I checked a few 64 bit Linux distro ISO's from my collection to see whether Etcher could create USB installers for them bootable on this machine - sadly only a few have 32bit UEFI support .

The ones that would boot from Etcher flashed USB sticks:
- Mageia 7.1 Live XFce x86_64
- MX 19.1 x64
- a Linuxium Intel Atom specific re-spin of Ubuntu 20.04
- Rescatux 0.73

The ones that weren't recognised (in addition to Lite 5.0rc1):
- Clonezilla Live 2.6.6-15 amd64
- GParted 1.1.0-1 amd64

Clonezilla and GParted both boot when flashed with Rufus in "file copy" mode, same as Lite 5.0rc1.

The 100S has Insyde H2O(tm) UEFI firmware.  There are later firmware packages available than it's running which might improve the behaviour, but the available packages seem to be only installable from Windows which isn't something I'd consider re-installing at this point.  If I find a way to update the firmware from Linux I might attempt it but at the moment I'm not bothered as I can deal with the issues I've encountered.

BTW: While it would be great if the issues I've reported were fixed - if you can work out solutions - my posts about the installation headaches with this machine have been to document them and any solutions or workarounds I've found for the benefit of others who might encounter similar problems.  These sorts of issues will hopefully be pretty uncommon except for similar machines.

[Jerry]

As noted here this machine doesn't recognise any Etcher flashed 5.0rc1 USB stick as bootable.

I did read that originally. It's extremely hard to accept that one machine cannot recognise any Etcher flashed drive. I'm not saying it's not true, understand that. It should not be showing up as 'ubuntu' in your boot-from-device menu, I also have an entry called 'ubuntu' but I select the actual name of the USB drive to boot from it ie. 'External USB Hard Drive'. That works no problem.

[WytWun]

How did you burn the ISO, with Etcher?

As noted here this machine doesn't recognise any Etcher flashed 5.0rc1 USB stick as bootable.

[iAnART]

hi! sorry for my question. still noob here.

is it possible to use the Linux Lite 5.0 RC1 kernel 5.x to the previous version?

[Jerry]

Observations:
- the Grub boot menu still says "Ubuntu" instead of "Linux Lite" (did you say this should be fixed for the final Jerry?)

No, I gave instructions for how to alter.

How did you burn the ISO, with Etcher?

[WytWun]

I attempted to install this RC on my 32bit UEFI Lenovo 100S which has been problematic with previous versions.

I've done some more testing with this obstreperous device so an update...

Yet another update...

The failure during the install turns out to be during writing the Grub configuration file to the ESP.  Because Grub can't find a configuration file during boot, but is able to determine the root device and everything else it needs it displays the grub> prompt.

After finding this Grub 2 rescue how-to, I was able to find the information required to use the linux, initrd and boot commands (see the Booting From grub> section of the how-to) to boot the installed OS.  Once booted, I opened a terminal and used sudo update-grub to create the missing Grub configuration file, and the subsequent reboot was completely normal.  In fact I'm posting this from 5.0rc1...

NB: because this machine has an eMMC drive rather than HD or SSD, I had to use /dev/mmcblk1p? rather than /dev/sda? for the root option to the linux command.

Observations:
- the Grub boot menu still says "Ubuntu" instead of "Linux Lite" (did you say this should be fixed for the final Jerry?)
- changing from the light to the dark theme from the welcome system didn't appear to give any feedback that the change had been applied, though when I opened an application it had.
- in the course of resolving this I tried booting a few other EFI capable distros - some could be booted from a dd style USB flash but others would only boot with a Rufus "file copy" flash.  I've not been able to determine what this machine's firmware doesn't like about the dd flashed images that it won't boot though.

[minesheep]

@minesheep and my libblockdev-crypto2 fix?

@minesheep please do:

Code: [Select]

sudo apt install libblockdev-crypto2
systemctl restart udisks2.service
and report back if that fixes it, I'll put it in the Final is it does.

Yes your fix is working. I also noticed the wrong passphrase is finally "incorrect passphrase" the old was "operation not permitted". For some reason trying with wrong password now takes nearly forever. Not sure if it was taking long previously. However entering correct passphrase in graphical LL5.0RC1 with your fix only takes normal amount of time.

[Jerry]

@minesheep and my libblockdev-crypto2 fix?

[minesheep]

Lite software was probably non functional due to bad network connection.

VirtualBox and Audacity installs fine from Lite Software here on RC1.

FYI - I just successfully installed Virtualbox with Lite Software. Works fine on my system.

[minesheep]

I copied the 5.0 rc1 to 2gb usb drive with dd (live usb). I don't have 5.0rc1 installed (no permanent install). I have most of stable installations on larger usb drives of 16-64gb (including LL 4.8 ) https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/tutorials/how-to-install-linux-lite-to-usb-stick-not-ready-yet!/

[minesheep]

When running from live usb system It is no longer faster to boot directly from flash drive than from RAM and copy LL to ram unless md5sum skipping

https://askubuntu.com/questions/829917/can-i-boot-a-live-usb-fully-to-ram-allowing-me-to-remove-the-disk

Lets say that:
my usb takes 60 seconds to read about 1,5gb (LL install media)
my RAM takes 1 second to read about 1,5gb (LL install media)
my computer boot into the LL loading stage in about 10seconds
my usb takes about 15seconds to read about 350mb (LL essential files to boot up)

Then:
booting normally with LL 4.8 takes about 25seconds (with toram disabled and md5sum disabled)
booting with toram with LL 4.8 takes about 70seconds (with toram enabled and md5sum disabled)
booting normally with LL 5.x takes about 70seconds (with toram enabled and md5sum disabled)
booting with toram with LL 5.x takes about 71seconds (with both toram and md5sum enabled) md5sum checking can be done in ram

However using toram boot parameter with less RAM than needed result in crash while booting (out of RAM)

[icedigger]

I always install with the 3rd party option checked

If it means anything for both 4.8 and 5.0rc with the alienware doesn't fully boot with the open source nvidia driver.

For 4.8 it boots every 3 or 4 times.
Switching it to the nvidia driver fixes it without issues.

For 5.0rc it does not at all.

It is an alienware 13 r3 laptop w/7300hq cpu, intel 630 + nvidia 1050ti gpus.

I hope this info helps.

I'd love to be able to include the nvidia drivers on the ISO but that would cause it to bloat in size. What happens when you select to Install 3rd party drivers for graphics and wifi during install? If you're connect to the internet, it should pull those in and install them.