• 0 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 22nd, 2024
  • Gyroplast@pawb.socialtolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•Personally I'm grateful to not need 3rd party packagesEnglish
    5·
    4 months ago

    TL;DR: Don’t think of the AUR as a package source, but as of an only mildly moderated, but ultimately free and open, sharing platform for PKGBUILDs, primarily useful for (self-)packagers, not necessarily non-technical end users.

    Before the AUR, you had people individually hosting their PKGBUILDs anywhere, sometimes on GitHub or the BBS (yeah, it’s been a while), sometimes along with a repository URL you could add to your pacman.conf to install packages right away, and it was glorious. I didn’t have to write a working PKGBUILD myself from scratch, and I could decide if I trusted that particular packager to not screw me sideways with a pre-built package. An officialized “Trusted User” (TU) role emerged from this idea, which has recently been renamed to Package Maintainer (PM). This is fundamentally still how the AUR works, it just became much bigger, and easier to search for particular software. Packagers gift to you their idea of how software should be packaged, for you to expand upon, take inspiration from, or learn, or use as-is if you determine it to be good for your purpose.

    The AUR is ultimately a great resource for packagers, and still useful for users, but “true end users” get the extra repository, and community, kind of, before that, and should try to avoid the AUR if they can, or at least be prepared to put in effort to establish trust, or get help.

    A handful of Package Maintainers are manually adopting and subsequently vetting for sufficiently popular packages to move them from the AUR to the official extra repository, which is deemed safe to use as-is, on a best-effort basis. Obviously, this is a bottleneck, as it is not feasible for the few volunteering PMs to adopt and maintain 10k+ AUR packages and be held to any quality standard. That’s why “you are on your own” with the AUR.

    On the positive side, there’s a voting system to determine package popularity. AUR packagers have a public list of maintained packages, and a comprehensive git commit history. Establishing trust is still crucial, and I feel hard pressed to name a reasonably popular/useful package that isn’t already in extra or has been maintained in the AUR for a long time.

    The biggest risk, IMHO, for malware getting slipped into a package is orphaning a popular package, and having it adopted by a malevolent user. This is something I personally look out for. If the maintainer changed, I make sure to check the commit history to see what they did. Most of the time it’s genuine fixes, but if anything is changed without a damn good and obvious reason, hit up the AUR mods and ask for help. This is how malware is spotted. Also, typically only the version is bumped in a PKGBUILD on an update, which is a change I feel safe waving through, too. If the download URI changes, or patches are added, I do look at them to determine the reason, and if that isn’t explained well enough to understand, that’s a red flag. Better ask someone before running this.

    source: personal involvement in Arch since 2002

  • Gyroplast@pawb.socialtoArch Linux@lemmy.ml•New Motherboard with pre-existing Linux Install can't be found?English
    5·
    5 months ago

    You can fix this, and this certainly isn’t “basic”.

    I figure you didn’t see your Linux option, because your EFI boot variables (boot order and boot loader locations) are stored “on the mainboard”, and you didn’t manage to reset those on the new board according to your current layout. Windows still boots, as it installs its bootloader in a generic location intended for removable devices, instead of properly registering itself with EFI boot variables. Because of course they do.

    To fix this, I’d recommend a deep breath first, and then set BIOS to UEFI boot only, no CSM/legacy at all for now, no even as fallback. If you’re lucky, you can boot into your Linux system from the BIOS boot menu right now, and skip the archiso boot and chroot shenanigans. Have a look. Otherwise boot into the archiso as you did before.

    Identify your EFI system partition(s) (ESP) Run sfdisk -l /dev/nvme0n1 and sfdisk -l /dev/nvme1n1, note the “EFI System” type partitions. Ideally, there’s only one at nvme1n1p3. Multiple ESPs would be trickier, but let’s assume your singular ESP is nvme1n1p3. Have a look at the ESP, to understand its layout and confirm this is really what you’re looking for: mkdir /esp, mount /dev/nvme1n1p3 /esp, find /esp. You should find the Windows bootloader at EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi and EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi.

    You might also find your grub bootloader in a subdirectory like EFI/arch/grubx64.efi. Find all of your instances with find /esp -iname grubx64.efi, and note the paths. If you find multiple grubx64.efi, I’d recommend to pick only the newest file, unless you know for a fact which one is supposed to be the one you want to use. A ls -l <file> gives you the date of the file to check. If you don’t have any grub bootloader installed, yet, that’s fine, too.

    Create a boot entry with grub in a chrooted system If you can arch-chroot into your Linux system, make sure your ESP is mounted in your chroot as well, let’s say at /esp again, and your /boot directory must be mounted, too, otherwise grub-install will fail. Then grub-install --efi-directory=/esp should do its magic just fine. Use efibootmgr to display/edit the EFI boot variables, and check if the entries in there look correct. The ESP will be referenced by UUID, and the list will look pretty busy, but you should recognize the EFI paths, and your arch entry should be the BootCurrent value. Make sure you’ve got a /boot/grub/grub.cfg in place, otherwise grub won’t do you much good! Create one with grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg from within your chroot, after editing /etc/default/grub if you need to add any kernel arguments for your system. Usually you do not, so fire away.

    If chrooting doesn’t work for you, btrfs can be a little tricky, you should be able to install grub with the ESP and boot partition mounted alone in the archiso. nvme0n1p1 looks like your boot partition, so it’d go down like this:

    mkdir /esp /linuxboot
mount /dev/nvme1n1p3 /esp
mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /linuxboot
grub-install --efi-directory=/esp --boot-directory=/linuxboot

    You can pacman -S grub if grub-install isn’t available on archiso, yet. Make sure you’ve got a /linuxboot/grub/grub.cfg in place here as well. Unfortunately you cannot use grub-mkconfig effectively without the chroot, but if you are at this point, and you’re dropped into the grub rescue shell, you can try a minimal, lovingly handcrafted grub.cfg: You need to obtain the UUIDs of your ESP, boot and root partition for the menuentries, and replace the placeholders with your values. You can get those values with lsblk -oNAME,UUID /dev/nvme1n1p3 /dev/nvme0n1p1 /dev/nvme0n1p2, in this order (ESP, BOOTPART, ROOTPART UUID). I assume your root subvolume is named root, and your kernel is named vmlinuz-linux on the boot partition, with a vmlinuz-linux.img initfs. You should adapt these filenames in the grub.cfg if they are different, of course, but I think this is a pretty good guess. :)

    insmod part_gpt
insmod part_msdos
set default="0"
if [ x"${feature_menuentry_id}" = xy ]; then
  menuentry_id_option="--id"
else
  menuentry_id_option=""
fi
export menuentry_id_option
function load_video {
  if [ x$feature_all_video_module = xy ]; then
    insmod all_video
  else
    insmod efi_gop
    insmod efi_uga
    insmod ieee1275_fb
    insmod vbe
    insmod vga
    insmod video_bochs
    insmod video_cirrus
  fi
}
terminal_input console
terminal_output console
set timeout=5
menuentry 'Arch Linux' --class arch --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-simple' {
        load_video
        set gfxpayload=keep
        insmod gzio
        insmod part_gpt
        insmod ext2
        search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root <BOOTPART UUID>
        echo    'Loading Linux linux ...'
        linux   /vmlinuz-linux root=UUID=<ROOTPART UUID> rw  rootflags=subvol=root
        echo    'Loading initial ramdisk ...'
        initrd  /initramfs-linux.img
}
if [ "$grub_platform" = "efi" ]; then
  insmod bli
fi
if [ "$grub_platform" = "efi" ]; then
menuentry 'Windows Boot Manager --class windows --class os $menuentry_id_option 'osprober-efi' {
        insmod part_gpt
        insmod fat
        search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root <ESP UUID>
        chainloader /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
}
fi

    Let’s see how this goes.

  • Gyroplast@pawb.socialtolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•RealisticEnglish
    771·
    6 months ago

    In some retirement homes, we hear feeble cries for justice, lamenting “source tarballs are even cross-platform, just build yourself already as intended”, but nobody received that suggestion from their AI assistant, just a list of packaging services you should subscribe to instead.

  • Gyroplast@pawb.socialtoArch Linux@lemmy.ml•[SOLVED] System freezes at boot and I'm not sure if it's a software or hardware problemEnglish
    4·
    7 months ago

    You could increase verbosity, and try working up your way from booting a bare minimum, to see when the system hangs, and if it persistently hangs at the same time, in the same way.

    My usual go-to is to add debug apic=debug init=/bin/sh vga=0 nomodeset acpi=off to kernel boot arguments and see if I consistently drop into the bare initramfs shell that way, without switching to any framebuffer graphics mode, while also avoiding potential ACPI breakage that may manifest as early boot freezes. Yes, vga=0 is legacy BIOS only, feel free to skip that one if you’re booting UEFI. This is not likely to avoid your problem, anyway.

    If that works, remove the arguments, from the right, one after another, to re-enable ACPI, then KMS, then automatic framebuffer console setting. If you’re still going, change init=/bin/sh to emergency, then to rescue, then remove to boot normally, always with excessive debug output. At that point, boot should freeze again, as you’ve only increased verbosity. The messages leading up to the freeze should always give a hint as to what subsystem might be worth looking into further - be it a specific module that freezes, which can subsequently be blacklisted by kernel parameter, for example. Let the system tell you its woes before stabbing at its parts randomly.

    This does not assume you having a software fault. This procedure uses the kernel init and following boot process as diagnostics, in a way. Unfortunately, it is pretty easy to miss output that is “out of the ordinary” if you’re not used to how a correct boot is supposed to look like, but the info you need is typically there. I typically try this before unplugging all optional hardware, but both approaches go hand in hand, really. I’ve found in modern, highly integrated systems, there’s just not that much available to unplug anymore that would make a difference at boot time, but the idea is still sound.

    If this becomes involved, you might want to look into using netconsole to send the kernel messages somewhere else to grab with netcat, and store them in a plain text file to post here for further assistance. You might just get a good hint when reading the debug kernel messages yourself already, though!

    EDIT: If those two colorful, pixely dotted lines in the lower half of your literal screen shot happen to flicker into view during boot somewhat consistently right before freezing, my gut feeling says it’s likely a graphics-related issue. You might want to short-circuit your tests by trying only debug nomodeset, a more brutal debug nomodeset module_blacklist=amdgpu,radeon, or replacing your GPU with a known good model, as suggested.

  • Gyroplast@pawb.socialtoArch Linux@lemmy.ml•Unexplained reboots and kernel panicEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    Do I need to run the machine for longer or should it have crashed right away according to your hypothesis?

    Sorry for mudding the waters with my verbosity. It should not crash anymore. I believe your kernel panic was caused when an idle CPU 6 was sent to sleep. Disabling C-states, or limiting them to C0 or C1, prevents your CPUs from going into (deep) sleep. Thusly, by disabling or limiting c-states, a kernel panic should not happen anymore.

    I haven’t found a way to explicitly put a core into a specific c-state of your choosing, so best I can recommend now is to keep your c-states disabled or limited to C1, and just normally use your computer. If this kernel panic shows up again, and you’re sure your c-state setting was effective, then I would consider my c-state hypothesis as falsified.

    If, however, your system runs normally for a few days, or “long enough for you to feel good about it” with disabled c-states, that would be a strong indication for having some kind of issue when entering deeper sleep modes. You may then try increasing the c-state limit again until your system becomes unstable. Then you know at least a workaround at the cost of some loss of power savings, and you can try to find specific issues with your CPU or mainboard concerning the faulty sleep mode on Linux.

    Best of luck!