Refracta Development, Scripts, etc.
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golinux

- golinux
- Posts: 663
- Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2012 1:23 am

## Snapshotinstaller worked!

Thu Aug 08, 2013 5:00 am

. . . with a few glitches. Today I finally got back to playing with Linux. A while back, I had made an image of my Squeeze install. It booted fine on the original hardware. But when I tried to put it on another machine, I got the dreaded blinking cursor - original install had nVidia driver and dkms kernel. So I F1'd, nano'd xorg.conf, nuked it, ran startx and it booted. A miracle that I could actually remember all this after so many months.
Created space with gparted and labeled it. Since this was an experiment, I chose the first option to install on one partition. Didn't take too long and it booted. My customized grub screen even stayed intact. The fstab the the installer created was minimal - needed a rework including nuking the swapfile. The label that I assigned somehow got lost in the process. IIRC one of the other install options would have kept it intact.
Only unsolved issue so far is that it won't suspend properly. Well, it suspends but power keeps running. Have to hit the big button to power down. I'm gonna try noapic as a kernel option next time I'm over there. Any thoughts on that?
On a different topic . . . I tried the wheezy stable live disk and the VLC included on it plays my video isos properly. I'm gong to install it to see if I can get the whole constellation of media apps working since I have never gotten everything to work properly on refracta. If that fails, I may give jessie a whirl. Sad that I might not be able to use refracta as my base setup.
fsmithred

- fsmithred
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- Joined: Wed Mar 09, 2011 9:13 pm

## Re: Snapshotinstaller worked!

Thu Aug 08, 2013 9:54 pm

Nice work. I remember when I started using commands without looking them up first, and this may sound really geeky, but it was exciting. Not as exciting as the first time I tried downhill skiing, but there was a similar sense of accomplishment.
Any formatting or labeling you do in gparted will be overwritten by the script. A future version will probably have a "do not format" option. Current versions (gui only) do let you use disk labels.
I think suspend needs power, because the state of the system is stored in memory. Maybe you want hibernate, which saves to disk and should power off the machine.
Uh, the wheezy stable you tried was debian-live? Refracta doesn't have vlc, but it's one of the first things I add to my own installations. I can play dvds fine here, the dvd menu works. Extra packages needed for that are libdvdnav, libdvdread4, and libdvdcss2 (last one from deb-multimedia).
golinux

- golinux
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- Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2012 1:23 am

## Re: Snapshotinstaller worked!

Fri Aug 09, 2013 2:34 am

> fsmithred wrote:Nice work. I remember when I started using commands without looking them up first, and this may sound really geeky, but it was exciting. Not as exciting as the first time I tried downhill skiing, but there was a similar sense of accomplishment.

Yes, it was really satisfying to accomplish that without having to look up one command.

> fsmithred wrote:Any formatting or labeling you do in gparted will be overwritten by the script. A future version will probably have a "do not format" option. Current versions (gui only) do let you use disk labels.

No problem. I just relabeled it with gparted from my refracta install.

> fsmithred wrote:I think suspend needs power, because the state of the system is stored in memory. Maybe you want hibernate, which saves to disk and should power off the machine.

refracta has no problem suspending on this computer. Monitor goes down and machine/fan powers off but power light blinks on/off for the duration. Fan keeps running in squeeze on this machine (turns off on my newer one). Next I'm going to add apci=off to the kernel line in addition to noapic (which didn't work by itself). This is just as an exercise for bragging rights because it's unlikely I'd be doing any media editing on this machine.

> fsmithred wrote:Uh, the wheezy stable you tried was debian-live? Refracta doesn't have vlc, but it's one of the first things I add to my own installations. I can play dvds fine here, the dvd menu works. Extra packages needed for that are libdvdnav, libdvdread4, and libdvdcss2 (last one from deb-multimedia).

Yes, I booted to a wheezy stable debian-live xfce DVD. Neither MPlayer nor VLC work right on my refracta install. I suspect some dependency for other media apps may have borked things. And remember all the experimenting with DVDStyler that went on months ago? I may try from scratch with the latest refracta though it wasn't really clear which iso I should be downloading for i686 32 bit.
FYI, the snapshot and installer were older versions from several months ago.
fsmithred

- fsmithred
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- Joined: Wed Mar 09, 2011 9:13 pm

## Re: Snapshotinstaller worked!

Sun Aug 11, 2013 3:35 pm

If you want to compare package lists between the different installations, I'll post the script I use for that below. Maybe you can figure out if something important is missing.
Note to self: Add "i686" to the name of the updated 32-bit iso when I make it. Currently, the one with "amd64" in the name is for 64-bit, and the other one is for 32-bit. Thanks for the suggestion.
This will tell you if any packages in list1 are missing from list2:

Code:
  `#!/usr/bin/env bash
  # compare-package-lists
  # Do this to create the lists:
  # dpkg -l | grep "ii" | awk '{ print $2 }' > list
  # Usage:
  # compare-package-lists list1 list2
  list1="$1"
  list2="$2"
  while read -r line; do
  if ! $(grep -q "$line" "$list2"); then
  echo "$line" is missing >> list_comparison
  fi
  done < "$list1"
  exit 0
  `

golinux

- golinux
- Posts: 663
- Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2012 1:23 am

## Re: Snapshotinstaller worked!

Tue Aug 13, 2013 4:27 pm

Just getting back to this. I have downloaded the latest refracta iso. Will install refracta and debian wheezy to compare if not today, soon. First thing I will do is add VLC to refracta. If it works, I'll start adding apps from multimedia - avidemux and bombono (dvdstyler is still a bust but heard it will work in wine). FWIW, I noticed that neither mplayer nor totem are will play video in squeeze anymore either. Has to do with multimedia dependencies, I think.
Still trying to fix the suspend glitch in my squeeze snapshot install. Log shows that suspend is successful but immediately awakes. Tried the noapic and acpi=off but no joy. Might have to do with the nvidia cruft that's lingering from the original install or perhaps there's some vestigial system setting that needs to be nuked but I have no idea what/where. Any thoughts?
fsmithred

- fsmithred
- Posts: 2101
- Joined: Wed Mar 09, 2011 9:13 pm

## Re: Snapshotinstaller worked!

Tue Aug 13, 2013 5:35 pm

I really know nothing about suspend, so I have no good ideas.
You don't have to install or even run refracta to get the package list. It's right here (32-bit) -
http://distro.ibiblio.org/refracta/file ... st_7.0.txt
and you can create one from your running system with

Code:
  `dpkg -l | grep "ii" | awk '{ print $2 }' > list`

Also, I'm working on finishing that other thread, for the website. Got some firm changes to give you and also have some things that need a little discussion or feedback, regarding where to put stuff.
golinux

- golinux
- Posts: 663
- Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2012 1:23 am

## Re: Snapshotinstaller worked!

Tue Aug 13, 2013 6:18 pm

Good news that you're thinking about the final tweaks to the site.
I know I can get the package lists and will probably do so when I'm in the mood (still doing final tweaks on the videos which is pretty intense). I just want to start from scratch and rebuild to see where it's breaking.
I'll post over at duf about the suspend thing.
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