Ultima Linux 8.4/Beta 1

NOTE

The information in this article pertains to a future release of Ultima Linux, and may be subject to change depending on the progress of development.

Ultima Linux 8.4 Beta 1 (released for x86 July 22, 2008, and for AMD64 July 27) is a development/testing release for what will eventually be Ultima Linux 8.4, and the first Ultima release based on our completely new from-scratch codebase.

Beta 1 is considered such largely due to its completeness rather than stability: Some functionality, such as network server and development code, is not fully implemented. This release has been tested internally by the Ultima developers, and should be stable enough for most home/personal use. That said, be prepared to encounter bugs, and do not rely on this release for any production use.

The main focus with the Beta 1 release is (a) testing the new codebase, ultima-scripts, etc.; (b) finishing work on the 8.4 desktop; and (c) attracting public interest/new developers/possible funding to the project. It is targeted mainly at developers and technical users but should also be usable – with some limitations – for “mere mortals”.

Overview

The beta release was first available as an x86 Edition LiveCD only; the disc contains approximately the equivalent to previous releases’ “Desktop” edition, although the software selection is slightly larger. Some packages, such as games and the development toolchain, are not provided on the disc (for size reasons) but will be available from the package repository.

The package selection in this release is somewhat larger than in previous releases, to avoid possible dependency problems and to allow for testing a greater amount of software; the final selection will likely be more traditionally “slimmed down” before release.

An AMD64 release was not originally planned, but was made available because of the “overwhelmingly positive reception” of the x86 CD.

Included package sets

Series	Excluded Packages
Base
Console
Firmware
Kernel	kernel-headers, kernel-source
KDE	kdesdk, kdevelop, koffice
Libs	glibc, glibc-debug, glibc-profile, jmf, jre
OpenOffice
Scripting
X11
X11Apps	gimp-help

Features

Implemented

At this point, between 2/3 and 3/4 of the system has been implemented, including the new compiler/C libraries; base system and command-line utilities; X11R7.3, with ATI and NVIDIA drivers; KDE 3.5.9; and most desktop applications, including Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, The GIMP, etc.

Most of the changes to the underlying codebase – including the ultima-scripts and the LiveCD installer – have also been finalized at this point. These should probably be considered “feature-complete,” and most additional development will focus on bugfixes and other such minor changes.

Unimplemented

Most server applications have not been updated yet, and some development tools (such as automake/autoconf; debuggers; etc.) are not implemented. These will be worked on during the beta period, and will be made available in a later beta and/or through the package repository.

Hardware-specific notes

NVIDIA graphics adapters

See NVIDIA.

Known issues

NOTE

Please DO NOT post bug reports on the wiki; report any problems on the “Bug Reports” forum.

Amarok and UnionFS

Amarok may lock up during the initial collection scan when running from the LiveCD (or from a frugal install to hard disk). ~~This appears to be an upstream bug involving its interaction with UnionFS, but whether this is Amarok’s or UnionFS’s fault is presently unknown.~~ This bug does not affect a standard hard disk installation.

Update: This has been confirmed as a UnionFS bug; see this forum thread for more information. Because of the size of the LiveCD vs. the severity of the issue, the Beta 1 CD will not be patched and re-uploaded, but a fix will be made available and integrated in the next beta release. Martin Ultima (talk) 21:15, 24 July 2008 (CDT)

ATI “fglrx” driver

ATI’s proprietary fglrx did not work on my system (blank screen, mouse did not respond, required use of “magic SysRq” to reboot). This has happened before with (manually-installed) past versions of the driver on the same system. Mine is a Radeon Xpress 200 on an HP dx5150 MT. Would appreciate if anyone can confirm this on other hardware; preferably send patches, not bug reports.

Open-source radeon works, but unusually limited (1024x768) resolution.

Update: New fglrx from ATI’s site works; going to include updated version in next LiveCD. Martin Ultima (talk) 23:29, 28 July 2008 (CDT)

CD-ROM eject on shutdown

(Will be corrected in future update)

CD-ROM permissions

CD-ROM devices (including burners) are incorrectly assigned to group disk rather than cdrom. Adding your user account to the disk group (through kuser or otherwise) is a temporary workaround which should allow CD burning and other functions to work.

Default user account

The default user account is incorrectly placed in its own eponymous user group (i.e. multima:multima) rather than the correct users (i.e. multima:users. This should not greatly affect most users, but can be corrected manually if desired, and will be fixed in the next beta.

/dev/cdrom and /dev/dvd symlinks

(Will be corrected in future update)

Disk encryption on AMD64

The default statically-linked cryptsetup may encounter a segmentation fault when running the luksFormat command (for example, when preparing an encrypted /home partition in the installer). The solution is to use the dynamically-linked cryptsetup for this stage. In the case of the installer’s encrypted /home, run in a terminal:

cryptsetup.dynamic luksFormat -s 256 -y /dev/hda2

replacing hda2 with your /home partition; then close out of the initial terminal window during this phase of the installer.

This problem does not appear to occur on the x86 Edition, nor does it occur when mounting an already-formatted partition with the static cryptsetup. A fix will be provided in the next beta release.

GRUB installation

GRUB may not install correctly when using the ext3 filesystem. Manually installing GRUB using grub-install results in an error:

The file /mnt/hd/boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly.

A similar (possibly the same) problem has been observed in previous Ultima releases when using ReiserFS as the root filesystem. So far this problem has not been observed with XFS or JFS filesystems.

If the GRUB configuration phase of LiveCD installation runs without activity for more than approximately five minutes, it may be necessary to kill the GRUB process and install manually by running in a terminal

sudo su
killall -9 grub-install grub
grub-install --force-lba --root-directory=/mnt/hda1 /dev/hda

replacing hda1 with your target partition, and hda with your boot disk. It is not known at this time what causes this problem.

This forum thread discusses known GRUB problems with the 8.4 Beta 1 release, and possible solutions (including manual GRUB installation, or using a different bootloader such as LILO).

HPLIP system tray

(Python: Undefined symbol XInternAtom when running hp-systray; correct in future update?)

Installation to logical volumes

Installation to a logical volume as the root filesystem currently does not work (we are currently unsure whether this is a bug in the Wolvix Control Panel, ultima-init-scripts, or another part of the system altogether). This has not been tested with logical volumes on non-root filesystems.

Note that this does not apply to other device mapper volumes, including encrypted volumes created with cryptsetup.

Windows partitions (FAT/NTFS)

The probe script is installed as /usr/sbin/probe-windows-parts, but /etc/rc.d/rc.M expects it as /sbin/probe-windows-parts. This will be corrected in the next release; meanwhile, manually running the command should add the correct entries to /etc/fstab.

Additional notes

Package repository

Slapt-get is pre-configured for the “stable” package repository, and should be fully usable after running slapt-get --update. However, to access the 8.4 code (“current”) you will need to uncomment the following line in /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc:

#SOURCE=ftp://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/ultima/ultimalinux-current/x86/

(Substitute amd64 for x86 for the AMD64 Edition.)

Important Warning

The “stable” repository contains much older packages than “current” (or the Beta 1 LiveCD). You should NOT attempt to upgrade installed packages unless (a) you have configured the “current” repository, and (b) you are absolutely certain it is safe to do so. The Beta 1 LiveCD already contains the latest available Ultima packages, so a distribution upgrade is not required.

It is, however, safe to install “extra” packages such as Opera from the “stable” repository.