Re: [gentoo-user] Dolphin and side pain not updating when mounting drives
Dale wrote: > Howdy, > > I been noticing this for a while now. It started maybe a couple months > ago. At first, I figured it is a bug and will be fixed but now I wonder > if it is just me. As some know, I have a lot of hard drives. Sometimes > I unmount those drives and naturally Dolphin returns to the first > directory that it can see. I expect that. It has always worked that > way and it should. Thing is, when I mount those drives again, while I > can navigate in the main window, the folders panel does not update even > after I enter the newly mounted directories. On occasion, it does. > Most of the time it doesn't. Example. I have path /a/b/c/d/e and then > files. The mount point, encrypted or not, starts at c. If I unmount, > Dolphin returns to b. When I remount, whether it is a encrypted drive > or not, the main window updates when I click on c directory but the > folders panel never shows the little arrow or expands as it normally > does. Even if I navigate in the main window all the way to the e > directory, the folders panel never 'sees' the newly mounted > folders/directories. It used to expand as I navigate through directories. > > There are rare times when it does update once I navigate into a > sub-directory but it is rare. Usually, the only way to make it work > correctly is to start a new instance of Dolphin and duplicate the tabs > and close the old instance. Once it fails to update the newly mounted > drive, I can't find a way to force it to update. Again, it behaves this > way on a hard drive whether encrypted or not. > > Is anyone else seeing this sort of behavior? I've looked to see if there > is some new setting for this but I can't find anything, obvious at > least. It's kind of annoying since sometimes I have about a dozen tabs > open usually to different places that I'm trying to organize files in. > Sometimes I have to use the back button to see where it was. Can be time > consuming. > > If someone else is seeing this, let me know I'm not alone even if you > don't have a fix. If this is a bug, it may need to be reported. Most > likely to KDE I'd guess. > > Thanks. > > Dale > > :-) :-) > I have a little update on the side pane not updating after mounting a hard drive. Let's say you have a directory structure that looks like this: /mnt//a/b/c/d When you logged out or unmounted the drive, you were in directory b, c, d or further down even. Sometimes even directory 'a' may be enough. If you open a new tab and go to the mount point, right under /mnt in this case, and hit F5 to reload/refresh, it tends to pop up as it should with the added directories in the side pane. After that, you can close that tab and go back and refresh the others which should show the complete path and such in the side pane. I've only done this a few times so I can't say it works 100% of the time. However, it has worked the several times I've done it in the past couple weeks. This may be a bug or is caused by some setting somewhere. I don't know for sure the cause. It did start after a update a while back as mentioned above. Whatever the cause is, maybe this is a workaround. It may not even be Dolphin. It could be something Dolphin uses to get the directory info. I'm just glad to figure out a workaround. Sometimes I have several tabs open to different locations and losing those locations would cause issues. I may have things I need to process but not know where or what those are if I lose the info in the pane and have to restart Dolphin. Thanks to all that tried to help. Maybe this will help someone else who googles this up. ;-) Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: How to set up drive with many Linux distros?
On Mon, Feb 26, 2024 at 4:45 PM Grant Edwards wrote: > > On 2024-02-26, Wol wrote: > > On 26/02/2024 20:51, Grant Edwards wrote: > > > >> The simple answer is to quit wasting time trying to multi-boot like > >> that and just buy a dozen USB flash drives. > >> > > And then, if USB isn't the default boot media, he might as well sort out > > UEFI boot, and multi-boot that way. > > Except that every time I've found a write-up about multibooting a lot > of Linux distros with UEFI, it turns out that it doesn't actually work > very well and is more work to maintain than what I'm doing now. > > -- > Grant I have no experience beyond three operating systems on a single machine but if you grabbed just 2 or 3 USB flash drives then I would think you could test it pretty easily. I believe the UEFI boot procedures are storing a unique ID for the disk or the partition you are requesting. If you have a unique ID that's different for each flash drive it would (hopefully) find the one you're looking for which should be relatively simple. I would suggest you use the boot ordering feature and make the system hard drive last in the list. If no USB devices are plugged in it would default to your system drive. If a flash drive is plugged in it should find its ID and boot that first. I do not know if, for instance, you had 20 different drives listed in your BIOS whether it would be a lot slower to boot but you could test that yourself. Good luck, Mark
[gentoo-user] Re: How to set up drive with many Linux distros?
On 2024-02-26, Wol wrote: > On 26/02/2024 20:51, Grant Edwards wrote: > >> The simple answer is to quit wasting time trying to multi-boot like >> that and just buy a dozen USB flash drives. >> > And then, if USB isn't the default boot media, he might as well sort out > UEFI boot, and multi-boot that way. Except that every time I've found a write-up about multibooting a lot of Linux distros with UEFI, it turns out that it doesn't actually work very well and is more work to maintain than what I'm doing now. -- Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel questions. Availability and upgrading from old kernel.
Dale wrote: > Howdy, > > I did my update and noticed the message about changes to kernel > packages. Depending on how I read it, it sounds like gentoo-sources is > still available just that older versions are no longer updated as long. > If I read it a different way, it sounds like gentoo-sources is about to > stop existing. That last one doesn't sound right. I can't imagine it > just going away since there are Gentoo specific stuff in there, openrc I > think being one option lurking about somewhere. I think there is others > but been a while since I been poking around in there. gentoo-sources is > hanging around right? > > Currently I'm running 5.14.15 gentoo-sources kernel. It works but is > old. No new types of hardware. Most stuff I buy is older just because > it tends to be more supported anyway. I tried a good while back to > upgrade to 6.1.55 which sort of boots I think but something doesn't work > and all I get is a console. It's been a while since I tried it but it > did fail several times. I did the upgrade the usual way. I used make > oldconfig and went through all the answers which are mostly no since I > still have old hardware. Is there a better way than oldconfig? Is > there a way to start from scratch and list all the stuff that is on in > the old kernel and then compare that to the newer kernel so I can just > enable what is different but I need? I'd rather avoid going through all > the menus hoping I recognize everything. I forget what I went to the > kitchen for. Remembering kernel options from years ago is likely to not > end well. :/ > > Is it possible that version of kernel had bad bugs that made it a bad > idea with hindsight? I plan to upgrade to the newest version in the > tree if I try again. > > Any thoughts? Ideas? > > Thanks. > > Dale > > :-) :-) > Update. As some know, I rarely reboot. Today, I rebooted. I had to replace UPS batteries. I had a problem but will start another thread about that shortly. I finally got a newer kernel that works. Awesome I'm on version 6.7.1-gentoo now. I figured out what wasn't working before, the mouse. I had a pointer but it wouldn't move. I found the mouse stuff on the wiki and for some silly reason, the needed options wasn't enabled in the kernel by default. Why someone wouldn't set a mouse to enabled by default is beyond me. I suspect the defaults came from the kernel sources not Gentoo devs tho. Anyway, I rebooted and despite my other problem I had to fix, everything works now. I'm gonna try to update more often but not booting very often makes that kinda hard. :/ At least I got a few years to worry about upgrading kernels again. ;-) Thanks to all. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: How to set up drive with many Linux distros?
On 26/02/2024 20:51, Grant Edwards wrote: On 2024-02-26, eric wrote: I agree, using the custom.cfg file would not work if needing to boot different kernels of the same OS and those kernels were being updated. The simple answer is to quit wasting time trying to multi-boot like that and just buy a dozen USB flash drives. And then, if USB isn't the default boot media, he might as well sort out UEFI boot, and multi-boot that way. Cheers, Wol
[gentoo-user] Re: How to set up drive with many Linux distros?
On 2024-02-26, eric wrote: > I agree, using the custom.cfg file would not work if needing to boot > different kernels of the same OS and those kernels were being updated. The simple answer is to quit wasting time trying to multi-boot like that and just buy a dozen USB flash drives. -- Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: How to set up drive with many Linux distros?
On 2/26/24 11:01, Grant Edwards wrote: On 2024-02-26, eric wrote: On 2/26/24 04:57, gentoo-u...@krasauskas.dev wrote: You could also write a script that keeps all the distros up to date from within whichever one you're currently booted by mounting subvolumes to /mnt or wherever, chrooting in and running the update. To avoid grub not being able to point to a newly updated kernel on one of the OS's installed, I use a "custom.cfg" file in all my /boot/grub/ directories for each OS where the "linix" and "initrd" point to the symbolic links of the kernel and init files which point to the newly updated files on most major distributions like ubuntu, arch, suse, and debian. The name of the symbolic links stay the same over upgrades. It works great when using UUID to identify the partition that has root and I can always boot into any of the OS's installed no matter which one hijacked the MBR. Except I generally have multiple kernels installed for each of the distros, and need to be able to choose which kernel to boot. There are also various other boot options (e.g. "safe mode") offered by some distros that I occasionally need to use. I agree, using the custom.cfg file would not work if needing to boot different kernels of the same OS and those kernels were being updated. Regards, Eric
[gentoo-user] Re: How to set up drive with many Linux distros?
On 2024-02-26, eric wrote: > On 2/26/24 04:57, gentoo-u...@krasauskas.dev wrote: >> You could also write a script that keeps all the distros up to date >> from within whichever one you're currently booted by mounting >> subvolumes to /mnt or wherever, chrooting in and running the update. > > To avoid grub not being able to point to a newly updated kernel on one > of the OS's installed, I use a "custom.cfg" file in all my /boot/grub/ > directories for each OS where the "linix" and "initrd" point to the > symbolic links of the kernel and init files which point to the newly > updated files on most major distributions like ubuntu, arch, suse, and > debian. The name of the symbolic links stay the same over upgrades. It > works great when using UUID to identify the partition that has root and > I can always boot into any of the OS's installed no matter which one > hijacked the MBR. Except I generally have multiple kernels installed for each of the distros, and need to be able to choose which kernel to boot. There are also various other boot options (e.g. "safe mode") offered by some distros that I occasionally need to use. > https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=315584 Interesting article, thanks. After reading up more on UEFI, it looks like that would be even more work and more mess. So, there seem to be two options: 1) Stick to the dual-stage chainloading scheme I'm using now (though I'll probably switch from DOS to GTP disklabel). That way after selecting which parition (distro) to boot, I get all the boot options normally offered by that distro's install. Installing a distro involves letting it install to MBR and BIOS-boot, installing grub manually to the root partition, then restoring MBR and BIOS-boot. 2) Use a single master grub to boot any distro. I think I'd need to write my own OS-prober. All of the distros I care about seem to now be using grub2 now. Instead of looking for kernels and initrd images and adding them to the master grub.cfg, I would probe for grub.cfg files, and for each one found incorporate the entire set of choices in that .cfg file as a submenu in the main grub.cfg menu. I think that in order to generate the distro's grub.cfg files, I still have to allow the distros to install grub to the MBR and BIOS-boot (or to a second disk that I don't care about), then restoring MRB/BIOS-boot.
Re: [gentoo-user] How to set up drive with many Linux distros?
On 2/26/24 04:57, gentoo-u...@krasauskas.dev wrote: You could also write a script that keeps all the distros up to date from within whichever one you're currently booted by mounting subvolumes to /mnt or wherever, chrooting in and running the update. To avoid grub not being able to point to a newly updated kernel on one of the OS's installed, I use a "custom.cfg" file in all my /boot/grub/ directories for each OS where the "linix" and "initrd" point to the symbolic links of the kernel and init files which point to the newly updated files on most major distributions like ubuntu, arch, suse, and debian. The name of the symbolic links stay the same over upgrades. It works great when using UUID to identify the partition that has root and I can always boot into any of the OS's installed no matter which one hijacked the MBR. https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=315584
Re: [gentoo-user] How to set up drive with many Linux distros?
Since this is a fairly custom task, I would approach it with a custom
solution.
- GPT
- systemd-boot
- One /boot partition
- One BTRFS-on-LUKS partition (formatted using the distro with the
oldest kernel)
- {@root,@home,@var,@srv,@opt}-{distro1,distro2,distro3} subvolumes
- Potentially {@distro1,distro2,distro3}-{downloads,documents,pictures}
subvolumes, if there's a usecase for that
- Bootstrap all the distros manually. Arch and Gentoo do that by
default, debian land has debootstrap, not too familiar with rhel
universe, but at the end of the day everything's a file :)
You could also write a script that keeps all the distros up to date
from within whichever one you're currently booted by mounting
subvolumes to /mnt or wherever, chrooting in and running the update.
You could also replace systemd-boot with efibootmgr to use UEFI boot
directly, but I would advise doing that after the everything is working
correctly as it's much easier to experiment using a good old bootloader
edit function.
BTRFS requires _some_ maintenance, but imho it's reasonable - run a
deduplication and defrag job on a scheduling tool of your choice and
you're good to go!
$0.02
