Author Topic: Final call for TP3 (Read 41482 times)

gabs5807 · « **Reply #60 on:** March 18, 2019, 01:08:55 pm »

Quote from: idc

Quote from: Adam Boardman
<snip> I could write either of these up in more detail if needed. Its also occurred to me that you don't need to name the new LV in the config file as that is set from the cmdline inside the boot image which was one of the issues I had before where the config was making a different LV to the one the boot image was going to try to boot.

gabs5807 - given your current selection of boots (your using all of them) you'll have to sacrifice one, I'd probably drop TWRP to start with myself... but whatever you use the least.
</snip>

Hi Adam,
My new sd card is now arrived. And I realised (thanks to your mention) that I can of course use a USB stick to hold the files. The offer of a more detailed write up—a bit more hand-holding— would therefore be of great help to me. (I haven't messed with LVM partitions before) I have sailfish on boot 1 (i.e. default), and Android at the last boot (holding esc and silver button together). Ideally, I would like to avoid having to reinstall the Android.
Available, then, I have 40GB devoted to 'Linux' (i.e. Sailfish at present—I'm sure this could be reduced to 16GB or less, leaving 24GB to Debian); and 16 GB to Android. I have 128GB sd card (currently in vfat or xfat—still in its packet—what's the best way to format this to make it available to Debian). And I've a 16GB USB stick, which sounds like the way to get the bemoan-config.txt and .img onto the whole thing.
For the initial step, of resizing the Sailfish partition, I presume I need to be in something other than Sailfish—so presumably, as I only have SFOS and Android on my gemini as yet, that has to be done when I'm booted into Android, is that right? So I presumably need to install some sort of terminal? Or is there another route ...?
Gabriel, did you manage to find time this weekend? How did it go?
Looking forward to trying it out.
All the best,
Ian

@idc: Hello Ian, sorry i'm not able to test it .
My wife use the PDA for some work and she was on the run during this weekend .
I hope i can manage it soon.

By the way, i see that jolla is releasing the next version soon (see tjc ).

Best regards

Gabriel

idc · « **Reply #61 on:** March 18, 2019, 07:06:48 pm »

Adam, thank you very much for the extra handholding instructions.
I had a go tonight. Followed the instructions as presented above for option 2, seeking to install to the sdcard from a USB stick plugged into the planet usb-hub (substituting devel-su for sudo 'cos using Sailfish).

One oddity was at the lvm vgcreate stage, where the output from your command above was as follows:

/dev/mmcblk0rpmb: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 0: Input/output error
/dev/mmcblk0rpmb: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 4128768: Input/output error
/dev/mmcblk0rpmb: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 4186112: Input/output error
/dev/mmcblk0rpmb: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 4096: Input/output error
Physical volume "/dev/mmcblk1p1" successfully created.
Volume group "planetlinux" successfully created

I hoped this was a success despite the odd 'read failed' errors.
Then I plugged my prepared usb stick with files (included edited config) at top level, and rebooted.
Debian immediately presents the swoosh symbol and the message:
PANIC: Installable image not found on external drive

It just occurred to me that perhaps my thumb drive needs to be formatted as ext2 rather than the vfat it currently is. Might that be the reason it isn't being recognised? My first thought was that the problem might be because my usb thumb drive is plugged into the planet usb hub and perhaps that isn't being detected? I haven't got a usb-c thumb drive that I can plug directly into the righthand USB-c port, so I may have to have a go at option 1 next.

However, it is late here now, so I thought I'd report the above first and sleep on it. I'll see what I can manage tomorrow. (And welcome any advice, if the above errors suggest that I did something wrong somewhere along the way.)

Thanks again for all your help here and all the best,
Ian

PS Gabriel, thanks for your message too. Looking forward to hearing how you get on when you have the chance. :-)

PPS In case it helps with troubleshooting, I can say that rebooting into Sailfish, the USB drive is recognised by Sailfish OS, so I don't think it is a problem with the drive—unless, as suggested above, it needs to be formatted as something other than vfat. (My Mac also recognises it.)

Adam Boardman · « **Reply #62 on:** March 19, 2019, 05:24:23 am »

Interesting, I tested it using a USB-c converter and a vfat memory card, I didn't try it with planet adapter in the mix. I don't see why it wouldn't work with that combination.

You could also try re-partitioning your SD card so it has both the LVM partition and a vfat one and then put the install image+config on the vfat part and try that. This might be useful as some folk have reported that having a memory card without a vfat partition causes android to keep offering to reformat a corrupted card.

I also got lvm errors from the internal memory, didn't seem to cause any problems though.

idc · « **Reply #63 on:** March 20, 2019, 04:17:03 pm »

Hi again, and thanks again for your help here. I was a bit busy yesterday evening, but I ordered a couple of usb-c to usb-a converters, which arrived today, and once home I had another go. To be precise, I repartitioned the sd card, as suggested, with an LVM planetlinux partition (102GB) and a small vfat partition for Android (18GB), but I left the config and linux files on the usb stick and plugged that in via the usb converter instead of the planet adapter.

Certainly, I think it went further today. Some three hours after I rebooted with the silver button held down, the Debian swoosh is still visible, along with the message, 'Gemian booting - /dev/planetlinux/gemian'. Does this mean that it completed the copying/installing and is trying (but failing?) to boot? Or do I now need to hold escape to turn it off and force a reboot? Just wanted to check, as 3 hours seems to be a bit longer than you were expecting it to take. I didn't take note of the initial message and haven't watched it for all 3 hours, so I'm not sure if it is giving the same message as when it started, or whether there was an intermediate message saying something along the lines of 'copying' or 'installing'.

Anyway, I thought I'd feedback. I have to go out now, but will plug it in and see whether it has changed at all when I get back in another couple of hours (which will be a full five hours or more since I started it off with the reboot).

Thanks for any thoughts you have. And thanks for all your work on this!
All the best,
Ian

Adam Boardman · « **Reply #64 on:** March 20, 2019, 05:17:25 pm »

The sequence should have been:
Gemian Installing - ...
Resizing filesystem ...
Gemian booting - ...

The installing part took ages, the others were quite quick. I'd not give the booting more than two minutes before deciding something has gone wrong?

But yes try a reboot and also try mounting the /dev/planetlinux/gemian from within sailfish and see whats on it, size etc.

idc · « **Reply #65 on:** March 20, 2019, 08:35:00 pm »

Thanks for your quick reply, Adam. Just to report that rebooting seems to have done the trick. (In other words holding down esc for ten seconds and then rebooting with the silver button held down.) I've logged into Gemian. I haven't yet done much looking around, but I had a go at apt-get installing gemini-desktop. No package by that name: I guess that is an alternative image, right?

I still need to do all the initial config, so if there is a list of recommended things to do first to set things up in a useable fashion, I'm grateful for pointers. It is late now so I'm going to turn in, but excited to have Sailfish and Gemian running at last.

Many thanks and all the best!
Ian

Adam Boardman · « **Reply #66 on:** March 21, 2019, 04:49:53 am »

Glad you got it working, might be a typo but I thought it was gemian-desktop. The kinds of things to configure are listed on the TP2 page on the wiki. Though some of that might be done already.

idc · « **Reply #67 on:** March 21, 2019, 12:41:09 pm »

Thanks. That's very helpful. You are quite right, I'd typo'd in gemini not gemian—it was pretty late at night! Once entered it went ahead (with a couple of errors, which I'll look into soon).

FrankS · « **Reply #68 on:** April 30, 2019, 04:55:51 pm »

Quote from: Adam Boardman

I messed up those images, so some new ones apologies if you downloaded them already.

You'll need an SD card/USB memory stick with a partition containing:
gemian-config.txt
gemian-stretch.img.xz (gemian-desktop-minimal, you may wish to install gemian-desktop/gemian-desktop-wifi for a fuller set of apps)
You may omit NEW_LV_SIZE from the config to allow the new volume to take the remaining space after the home partition is reduced in size. Though having both smaller and then online growing whichever happens to need extra space first might be a nice way to use the system.

You may also omit LV_TO_REDUCE_NAME from the config if you already have enough space available in your volume group.

You'll need to flash/dd a new boot image:
linux-boot-lvm-gemian.img
This time I have test it, granted on a slightly different setup, I put an SD card in, created a LVM VG of planetlinux (the scripts prefer this to sailfishos though should boot/install to whichever is available), I then inserted a USB memory stick with the config & img files (FAT32 commented out the TO_REDUCE lines as with a fresh VG there is nothing to reduce), flashed the boot image to my choice of bootX and rebooted into that with the appropriate key combination. It took just under an hour for the actual install to happen, uncertain if that is due to the XZ compression applied to the image or the slowness of my SD/USB cards. This does of course mean that you could create the LVM setup on a desktop with a SD card reader and just do the flash/dd of the boot image on the device. I could write either of these up in more detail if needed. Its also occurred to me that you don't need to name the new LV in the config file as that is set from the cmdline inside the boot image which was one of the issues I had before where the config was making a different LV to the one the boot image was going to try to boot.

gabs5807 - given your current selection of boots (your using all of them) you'll have to sacrifice one, I'd probably drop TWRP to start with myself... but whatever you use the least.

Something I've noticed with this fresh image is that the QTerminal console fonts seem to be lacking a bunch of characters, fn+y|u, shift+fn+y|u etc gave you arrow pictures in different directions, now they give nothing. Must be a package missing from the minimal desktop install.

I did a test and put the gemian-config.txt and gemian-stretch.img.xz into filesystem root of my sdcard. dd linux-boot-lvm-gemian.img to boot2. On first boot it said: Panic cannot resize home.

I restartet sailfishos and did the resize manualy: lvm <enter>; lvresize --size 16G /dev/sailfish/home. commented LV_TO_REDUCE_* out and did a restart. It installed debian and booted it.

Next I will restore my old debian (have a tar) into the lvm gemian partition and hope it will boot too.

Very nice start, only resize does not work. Happy to have a lvm gemian.

I had tested 2 other varaints:
1. build an image file of lvm sailfishos and did a loop mount at initramfs. Worked, but on update it writes a nwe boot image to boot and did not find original lvm. I had to build a new boot image myself.
2. moved all from lvm to .stowaways (like before). sailfishos did not show the system storege under settings storage and disabled backup before update. But updates still works. The boot partition was not updated, I had to build the image with stowaways support manualy and dd it.

I think with gemian lvm sailfishos updates will work like they should.

But we still have the update dilemma for this multiboot environment: Every automatic updated operation system tries to write to boot (1st boot partiton).

edit: how it looks atm:
lvscan
ACTIVE '/dev/sailfish/root' [5.86 GiB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/sailfish/home' [16.00 GiB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/sailfish/gemian' [16.00 GiB] inherit

FrankS · « **Reply #69 on:** May 02, 2019, 03:45:33 pm »

sailfishos and gemian are working fine with lvm.

Funny: under settings storage I now have an 'unmounted memory card (ext3) gemian'.

ArchiMark · « **Reply #70 on:** May 24, 2019, 04:48:17 pm »

Hi Adam,

Been awhile.....any news on TP3?

Just curious....

Thanks,

Mark

Adam Boardman · « **Reply #71 on:** May 25, 2019, 07:27:32 am »

I think Nikita sent it to Davide a wee while back and its now on the new v8 partition tool: https://support.planetcom.co.uk/partitionTool8.html

I've not managed to test it yet as I updated my Ubuntu on my desktop and it won't flash any more for me. I'm probably still working on other stuff for a couple of weeks but will probably get back to working on TP4 (buster based) in due course.

ArchiMark · « **Reply #72 on:** May 25, 2019, 12:24:55 pm »

Thanks for the update!

alexmalt001 · « **Reply #73 on:** May 27, 2019, 10:37:27 am »

Looking at that new partition tool, it looks like it is not possible to have Debian in the first 'slot', or to have Debian at all without having one of the android options in the first slot. Has there been some significant change to the newer software that makes it impossible to run Debian and sailfish at the same time as was possible in the previous partition tool, or is it possible (if not recommended) to bypass the partition tool and install Debian standalone as before?

MonkeyControl · « **Reply #74 on:** May 28, 2019, 03:41:55 pm »

Quote from: alexmalt001

Looking at that new partition tool, it looks like it is not possible to have Debian in the first 'slot', or to have Debian at all without having one of the android options in the first slot. Has there been some significant change to the newer software that makes it impossible to run Debian and sailfish at the same time as was possible in the previous partition tool, or is it possible (if not recommended) to bypass the partition tool and install Debian standalone as before?

I think this thread may shed some light on it.
https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=35730

Plus this answer from above.
https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showto...mp;#entry291329

News:

Author Topic: Final call for TP3 (Read 41482 times)