Messages

1

Gemini PDA - Linux / Kali not booting again

« on: January 26, 2020, 11:34:05 pm »

Sorry to break it to you but Kali is more or less unusable These days. Especially since the new libc-bin upgrade uninstalls a lot of the Xserver-xorg-hwcomposer package which is the video drivers on the Gemini. Also installing Libreoffice does not work since it depends on the newer version of libc as well. It is sad since I quite liked Kali on the device. If you go to the Kali Linux ARM builds section you will notice that there is no download image for the latest Kali version on the Gemini. If you are desperate to use Linux it is possible to get Debian stretch or buster running. I have buster running on mine. However it requires a decent amount of troubleshooting to get working and yeah Planet didn't really put much effort into actually supporting Linux on the device. It more feels like a device that is capable of running Linux rather than a device that natively supports it.

Sorry for that. We've finally been able to get our changes accepted upstream:

https://mitya57.me/weblog/2020/01/qt-opengl...-available.html

That's that taken care of.

We're now working on what we hope to be the last roadblock before a new release: the update to systemd =>243 breaks the graphical login. No idea why but working on it. We can't go back to <243 as that will break even more.

2

Gemini PDA - Linux / Kali dependency issues

« on: December 24, 2018, 06:12:01 pm »

Hi ZimbiX,

Hey guys, I'm having some trouble with Kali. Running `sudo apt install kali-linux-full` or `sudo apt upgrade` now results in it being unbootable. iirc I'd had success with both these commands before, but started having trouble a few days ago.

Sorry for that and thanks for letting us know. The latest builds were slighty out of sync for a day or two but it's fixed again.
I'm going to set up a watch job to prevent that from happening again.

The former, I think is because it removes `libhardware2 libhybris libhybris-common1 libmedia1 pulseaudio-module-droid repowerd xserver-xorg-video-hwcomposer` due to an incompatible dependency on a slightly older version of `libc6`. I know hybris is required for graphics, given it's using that as a compatibility later to use the Android driver, so that makes sense.
The latter might be due to an upgrade of `lxc` (that's used for hybris, right?), but I don't know.
I think the fix would be for the packages Re4son supplies to be updated to support the new versions of their dependencies in the Kali repos, or provide compatible versions of them.
After letting the hybris removal go through once, I tried to reinstall the original package versions, but they were not available. Do the Kali repos drop older package versions?
Cheers! =)
apt plans for the commands: https://gist.github.com/ZimbiX/2ea188095de1...88f43913df937b4

That's exactly what happened. A rebuild of libhybris fixed it.


Many thanks,
Re4son