Re: Jenux OS, The "Next Jen!"
So, umm, I found at least one reason Jenux isn't working on some people's systems, at least mine anyway. In fact, if anyone is running it on bare metal and it worked right out of the box, I'd be interested to hear about it since what I found is, well...
OK, so if you let it partition your drive for you, it creates two boot partitions, one of which is an EF00, and the other an EF02. They are EFI and BIOS boot partitions. Not only that, but upon installation of Grub, the script installs three versions it looks like. How its doing that, I have no idea, but its installing i386_pc i386_EFi or something and another oen which is X86-64. So now you have two partitions and three bootloaders. I didn't really look in depth to see what was going on, in fact, this is edging outside my knowledge base a bit, but I'm just reporting what I saw. The EFI spec basically says that finding bootable devices and so forth is basically up to the vendor. I therefore, posit that in some cases, and I would estimate the likelihood to be quite high, that the EFI is just failing to find a possible boot situation amidst the mess.
There are ways to detect which mode you're booted into and have the script install the appropriate bootloader and create the correct partition type.
So, getting the software to work in a VM is less headachy because if all else fails, you can just modify your VMX file and get it up and running, but I actually would like to run this on a physical machine. That's why I'd be curious if anyone's actually gotten it working, because I'd be amazed. The only way I could see that it would be possible is to boot into legacy mode and the BIOSboot partition appears first, then maybe it has a chance lol, other than that... meh.
The installation script also doesn't attempt at all to catch errors. I saw several failures, and the script moved right along as though nothing had happened. First thing, after the prompt about encrypting, and I answered no (I have a story about how encryption failed me badly) It went on later to start encrypting home directory, which by the way, I did not want to do. Anyway, that failed because of CHOWNing some file, but the installer just went on about its merry way. I also recall something else, but it escapes me now. Let it suffice to say that installing Arch is an intricate process. I wouldn't entirely say It's difficult, as all that you need is on the wiki, and you can cross-reference to find what you need among the articles. Sure, for the Linux newbie it would be, but isn't that why Jenux exists, or is the mission statement to be something else. At any rate, it is intricate. A lot of things need to happen, and they need to be done at the right time and in the right way. So an installation script can't just ignore errors. I also find it a bit disconcerting that it does so, in hopes that no one would notice? It's not as if I keep the speech on, but if something crops up, I want to know about it. And if it's too much to provide backup routines to try to actually fix the error, the script should be suspended and allow the user to drop to a shell, then correct the problem. If that happens, and whatever issue cropped up is now fixed, the user could then resume the script and all would go along as it should.
I'm also a bit concerned that none of this is mentioned that I've seen. In other words, to let someone know this isn't production ready (it clearly isn't) and that it's alpha software.
I want to put it out there that I respect what the author is doing here, and that I"m not writing this to bash the product, but to try and make it better. If all the kinks could be ironed out, this could definitely be cool, but right now, it's really not ready for daily production use, there are just too many loose ends.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
