Episode 49 Show Notes
Show Notes
Distrohoppers’ Digest
Episode 049
INTRODUCTION
Moss: Distrohopping: The idea that Linux is fun, and the myriad ways people put distros together should be reviewed often. My name is Moss. I live in eastern Tennessee.
Dale: I’m Dale, I live in northeast Ohio.
Eric: And I’m Eric, I live in southwestern Florida.
Moss: Welcome to Distrohoppers’ Digest. We love checking distros out — new distros, new versions of older distros, and even some we may have overlooked.
Dale: We each have our preferences, in complexity or desktop or package management. Perhaps we can help you find a new distro, or better understand one which has piqued your curiosity.
Eric: The idea of this podcast is that we will each install a new distro to our chosen hardware for 3-4 weeks and use it as much as possible, perhaps even as our daily driver. We record all our trials, tribulations, fixes, and what we like and what we don’t.
Dale: I tend to take on the more advanced distros and give them a go.
Moss: While I tend to prefer looking at distros that would be kind to a new user, especially one who is hoping to move over from another operating system, such as Windoze or MachOS.
Eric: We intend to give as much information as possible on each distro, and will also mention what hardware we are using and might comment how we think the hardware may have affected the rating.
Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 049 Introductions Hosts: Moss Bliss, Dale Miracle, Eric Adams Monthly Foibles Updates: Zorin OS, Linux Mint 21.3, Bodhi 7, Debian 12, Lubuntu 23.10, Pop!_OS Beautiful Failures: Budgie Desktop Reviews: none this month; review of the year New Releases Feedback Announcements Closing
Welcome to Distrohopper’s Digest, Episode 049, recorded on January 2, 2024. For this show, we will be reviewing our thoughts over 2023, rather than individual distros.
Chapters
00:01:50 – Introduction
00:02:08 – Monthly Foibles
00:18:28 – Updates
00:23:52 – Beautiful Failures
00:31:25 – Year in Review
00:56:37 – New Releases
01:00:43 – Feedback
01:12:36 – Announcements
01:13:49 – Acknowledgments
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MONTHLY FOIBLES
…wherein we discuss what we did this month…
Moss:
This month has been all about the holidays, by which I mean my wife’s knee surgery. I did get OpenMandriva Lx 5 ROCK installed on my test machine, so I can play with it and probably do a review next episode. I’ve been a bit down the past month or so, and have not been able to work as my wife has needed me to take care of her. My music and everything else is taking a back seat to the winter lows. We even had to cancel my annual trip to Atlanta, which hasn’t helped my spirits any.
Dale:
I finally finished my office for the most part. I have a few more pictures that need framing. I also want some pictures from the trip to Utah made into wall tapestries. Most likely small ones because of the resolution. Since I couldn’t find anything in my two closets in my office, I finally removed everything from them and organized them. This was an undertaking of many days. Surprisingly I ended up with a couple of empty storage bins.
In computer-related activities. Which there is quite a bit more than in previous months. My Lenovo Tiny M710 locked up while recording Episode 47 of Distrohoppers’ Digest. I can confirm Eric’s success with Audacity’s file recovery. Upon rebooting from the lockup, my audio file was still intact. I finished the recording on my Pangolin laptop. The next day I checked the fan settings in the EFI and saw it was set for Best Thermal Control. I tried the next setting where the fan was on full speed. That only lasted a few minutes since it sounded like a jet plane taking off. I removed the old paste from the CPU and applied the new paste. The old paste didn’t look too bad but it was dried along the edges of the heat sink and quite thick. I am hoping that resolves the lockup issue. Another puzzling issue is with the USB ports. When I plug in my Focusrite Scarlett Solo audio interface, I sound muffled and otherwise unintelligible. I plug it into another one and I sound normal. Until I rebooted while connected to the same USB port that sounded fine. Which then sounded muffled again. This was happening before the lockup and after. I know the Microphone and Focusrite are functioning correctly because this never happens on my Pangolin laptop.
Given the small form factor of the M710, I am hoping the thermal issues with the CPU were also affecting the USB controller. In between breaks while organizing my closets, I would turn on the M710 and open Audacity to see if it was recording my voice correctly. Each time, over a couple of days, it was fine. However, I didn’t use it long enough to see if the new thermal paste corrected the lockup issue. I will need to do a test run before recording Episode 49.
I wanted to replace my aging Xeon E3-1231 v3 from 2014 with a Ryzen 9 3900x in my Plex Media Server. The Xeon is still usable but the new video codecs are more challenging for it. I thought this was going to be a short 1-hour project. Unfortunately, it turned into quite an issue. In preparation for this, I bought a new MSI 750-watt PSU. I usually buy Corsair but the MSI was about $30 less with a similar warranty period depending on the model. The Micro Center employee said Channel Well is the ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) for MSI and other companies like Corsair. Along with making PSU’s under their name, ODMs can create a product using their customers’ names instead of their own.
The short version of the events is that the computer booted once and was later found powered off. The diagnostic lights on the motherboard report that the CPU is not recognized or has failed. Oddly it will only show those lights with the 24-pin and one 8-pin CPU cable plugged into the motherboard. This was my last evening at home, which meant I didn’t have time to remove a PSU from another computer to do some troubleshooting. I didn’t hear any loud noise as I was in my kitchen preparing dinner. Which is next to my office. I didn’t smell anything burning in the case. I am quite familiar with that burnt electronics smell. I looked over the motherboard with a flashlight and didn’t see any signs of damaged components. Considering the overvoltage protection in the motherboards and CPUs, I am leaning towards it being a DOA PSU.
MSI had only been selling PSUs for about 3 years. I am not impressed and will be replacing this with a Corsair PSU. If indeed that is the cause of the problem. Unfortunately, it will be past the return period by the time I arrive home. It was my fault for trusting a known brand with a new product line.
My suspicion is based on over 30 years of experience building and repairing computers. Says that companies not only sell products, they also sell quality control and component selection at a price. It could be that Corsair has a better contract/relationship with Channel Well than MSI does. Given how MSI has only been a customer for about 3 years. I have Corsair PSUs going on 10 years of near 24/7 service.
I finished trying out Fedora Sway and decided that I was not ready for Sway. It works fine and is reliable. I just don’t like the look of it. There is a limited amount of customizing you can do. This is due to the Sway developers not having any interest. Hyperland, on the other hand, is very customizable and looks promising from what I have seen. The Jake@Linux YouTube channel has a walk-through on compiling and installing Hyperland on Void Linux. I will be trying this the next time I am home.
I am still holding out hope that Xfce and Cinnamon will be just as customizable using Wayland. Although Budgie isn’t as customizable, it still looks good with a decent dark theme. I’m curious about its progress toward Wayland compatibility.
Speaking of Budgie. I am currently looking at Fedora 39 with Budgie, which is nicknamed Fudgie. Budgie looks great and I missed using it. It is like Gnome without the potential of extensions breaking during a release update. I am also getting used to the DNF package manager. It is slower than APT, though it is doing much more in a single command, which would require multiple commands with APT. I am not sure I will stick with Fedora. It is very similar to Debian with its interest in FOSS packages. I just don’t like the testing ground aspect of Fedora. As I get older, I am at the point where I just want things to work and be reliable.
I don’t know where I will land once Wayland becomes the default instead of Xorg. For now, my main desktop will be on LMDE or Linux Mint Cinnamon or Xfce. At least for my podcast recording, as I need that to be stable and reliable.
One last item I want to mention is Tony George’s website. He is the person behind Timeshift among many others. I noticed he had some pretty useful utilities available at reasonable prices. A home folder backup utility using Borg backup and an AMD mobile CPU power management utility using RyzenAdj. I have bought some of his utilities in the past and they have been great. I just wanted to bring attention to him because I haven’t heard him being mentioned much since he created Timeshift.
Now let’s move along to Eric. Hopefully, he has had better luck with things than I have.
Eric:
Not surprisingly, I’ve spent more time tinkering with my Dell Latitude tablet and, after having tried several other distros, including Ubuntu 23.10, as well as ChromeOS Flex on a whim, am back on Fedora 39. Even though Fedora isn’t my favorite, it provides up-to-date packages which includes the latest version of the GNOME desktop. There are some additional steps I need to take like adding certain GNOME extensions and the RPM Fusion repos but that isn’t particularly difficult. I had considered using Arch but am not interested in spending the extra time configuring the base system. I appreciate that something like Fedora provides that for me.
I have been wanting to give Homebrew a try as an alternative means of installing certain software. According to their website, Homebrew installs the stuff you need that Apple (or your Linux system) didn’t. It provides a package management system similar to snap and flatpak. I have also been wanting to give Hugo a try. Hugo is one of the most popular open-source static site generators. It is available as a precompiled binary via snap or homebrew so I chose the latter. That required setting up Homebrew first. This requires running one of the infamous bash curl commands, although this one is easy to read through and also provides feedback on what it is doing when you run it.
/bin/bash -c “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)”
Once it has been installed, you use the brew command to manage software. Using the simple command brew install hugo sets up Hugo. I was able to then follow along with their tutorial to get started. Easy!
Homebrew provides an easy way to update itself and any packages you have installed via the simple command brew update && brew upgrade && brew cask upgrade. There is some humor involved as well with related brewing terms such as pouring, casks, and kegs. I have only just begun trying this out but it is always nice to have access to more software so I’m happy to have discovered and tried Homebrew.
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UPDATES (Where we discuss what we have learned about distros we’ve already reviewed)
Moss:
Zorin 17 is out. I look forward to reviewing it, if I can connive a copy (as I did for v. 15 and 16). Mint 21.3 has gone to public Beta, with a version update for Cinnamon if you use it. Bodhi is preparing its 32-bit version of Bodhi 7.0.0.
Dale:
I previously mentioned in Episode 48 that the QRedshift on LMDE6 wasn’t working after it was installed. I noticed there was an update for it that was installed. So I removed Redshift GTK and then installed QRedshift. After it was installed I had no issues configuring it and is working fine now.
The Lubuntu team has announced their plans for 24.04 codename Noble Numbat. They also explain why they are using the Calamares installer instead of the new Flutter-based installer from Ubuntu.
With the planned new boot screen, you will have the option to connect to WiFi and try or install Lubuntu. The installer will have customization options like minimal, normal, and full install.
There are many more updates listed.
Debian has released version 12.4 which superseded 12.3 due to an Ext4 corruption bug found in Kernel 6.1.0-14. The release of 12.4 includes Kernel 6.1.0.15 which resolves that issue. Unfortunately, the release of 12.4 introduced a regression in some WiFi adapters. Instructions for updating those packages are available in the show notes. They entail adding stable-updates to your /etc/apt/sources.list file.
Spiral Linux was updated to Debian 12.
Eric:
In Episode 44, I reviewed Pop!_OS. The existing release of Pop has a lot to offer, providing a number of substantial changes and improvements to the GNOME desktop. Pop’s developer, the open source focused hardware company System76, has been working on the successor to Pop named Cosmic. While it still has a way to go, it shows great promise as a desktop environment which could rival the top options like GNOME and KDE Plasma. I have been following their progress via their blog at blog.system76.com.
Also on the blog is The System76 Guide to Gaming on Pop!_OS. While this is an article about gaming on Pop!_OS specifically, most of the information would certainly apply to any distro based on Ubuntu and likely most others as well, although the specific packages and command will probably be different. It discusses Proton, what it is and how to use it. It also covers installing Steam and other tools. Gaming isn’t really a focus for me so I haven’t used the information contained in the post but thought it might be helpful to others looking for tips on getting started.
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BEAUTIFUL FAILURES – What we tried, and failed, to install or run this month
Moss:
I did not have any failures this month. I do remember installing something on my machine prior to OpenMandriva and didn’t like it, but don’t remember what it was.
Dale:
I had a quick experiment to see if I could install the Budgie Desktop on LMDE 6. I was able to select it from the Display Manager and log in. Everything worked except for the Gnome System Settings. Every time I selected it, it crashed the Budgie session returning me to the Display Manager. I suspect it was due to some dependencies from Gnome that Cinnamon wasn’t using. I didn’t go any further than that. I have experimented with LMDE in the past trying to modify the installation. It is most likely due to the changes Clem and his team made to the Debian base.
Eric:
I suppose it’s fair to consider trying other distros and OSes on my tablet as failures as I didn’t ultimately stick with them but I’ll say it was actually more of an experiment to find the best option so it shouldn’t depict the options I didn’t stay on as being lesser, just that they weren’t the right option for my use case.
The only legitimate failure I can think of is having gone away on vacation and not being able to connect to the computers at home. I have been successfully accessing my desktop as well as my wife’s laptop remotely, either from my LAN or while out at doctor’s offices, for quite a while. Recently, I switched to Tailscale rather than other solutions like AnyDesk or Chrome Remote Desktop. Tailscale essentially provides a virtual LAN using wireguard. I have been using it for almost a year now and it has been rock solid. This made it all the more surprising when I tried to connect to my desktop from the rental house and wasn’t able to. I tried to connect to my wife’s laptop and also wasn’t able to. Then I tried AnyDesk but didn’t have the right number. Luckily, I still had Chrome Remote Desktop configured on her laptop so I was able to finally get in that way. That let me get the correct AnyDesk number for her machine and also to verify that my desktop was at least on and responding to pings. I used ssh to access my desktop and reboot. I still couldn’t access it via Tailscale so I kept trying to determine what the problem was. I finally noticed that I had inadvertently configured a VPN client to auto connect, which blocks Tailscale’s connection. I disabled the VPN client and then was finally able to use tailscale to connect. So really, the failure was that I wasted several hours trying to figure out what was happening after which I was able to finally connect. Live and learn as they say.
So let’s move on.
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2023 IN REVIEW
Eric:
After having been a listener for several years, I decided to reach out in March of last year to let the guys know that I enjoyed the podcast and it led to me becoming a co-host which was unexpected but welcomed. I had previously been an active YouTube creator as well as co-host of a different Linux podcast and part of other tech-focused groups as well. I had pulled back from doing these when my health worsened several years ago so this was my path back, so to speak. I had also been a serial distrohopper, rarely using anything for more than a few months at a time before moving on to something else. In many cases, that timeframe was days or weeks. It was usually fun but also very time consuming and sometimes frustrating. This led to me sticking with Ubuntu for several years, updating to the various point releases as they were made available.
Now, almost a year later, I am not only co-hosting this podcast but a couple others and participating in a couple LUG-type groups as well and am thinking of getting back to making YouTube content. More importantly to the context of this podcast, I have a renewed interest in distros and what’s new in the desktop Linux world. I have reviewed seven distros for the podcast but have looked at many, many more. I have some new hardware to test with and am looking forward to many more episodes in the future.
I reviewed Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.1 on episode 44 last July and, somewhat ironically, have not distrohopped and have been using it as my main distro ever since. Sure, I have reviewed several others for this podcast but I can’t seem to shake Cinnamon and, by extension, Mint. Everything I have said so far applies to my main system, which is the Dell XPS 15 9570. I already discussed my situation with the Dell Latitude 5290 2-in-1 during my Updates which has provided a further outlet for testing distros.
The seven distros I reviewed last year were Fedora 37 KDE Spin, Kubuntu 23.04, Linux Mint 21.1 Cinnamon, Pop!_OS 22.04, Rhino Linux 2023.1, Manjaro 23 “Uranos” Cinnamon Edition, and LMDE 6. That is one XFCE, one GNOME, two KDE Plasma, and three Cinnamon desktops which is a good mix. I don’t tend to use tiling window managers often but might sneak one in at some point. None of these took hold like Linux Mint has however they all had their strong points.
2024 looks to be full of interesting new things so far, chief among them the release of KDE’s Plasma 6 desktop. I was a Plasma user for many years but was eventually won over by the GTK side of things, mainly GNOME and Cinnamon. Sure, it’s nice to have the flexibility that Plasma offers but I found myself spending more time tinkering than doing more useful things. I also seemed to have more issues than most with Plasma and was generally using more GTK-based software anyway but that was then and I think Plasma 6 has a chance of swinging the pendulum back in their direction. I expect the first few releases to be mainly based on the Qt 6 transition but I can see them potentially breaking new ground after that, which is an exciting prospect.
I’m expecting less change with the traditional distros in 2024. Sure, new versions will be released and things will evolve as they always do but I am not aware of anything truly different happening. I am hopeful that Wayland gains ground and am interested to see if atomic and immutable distros gain ground and become more mainstream. But it’s alright if things don’t radically change. There are so many distros out there based on the number that Moss seems to find for his updates and I have only tried a small number of the total.
So I am absolutely looking forward to Distrohoppers’ Digest in 2024 and beyond and hope that you’ll join us for the journey!
Dale:
The Linux distro that I have been looking forward to the most this year was the 12th version of Debian. From Episode 44 07/23. I was using version 12 when it was the current Testing branch. This was also my longest experience with Wayland using Gnome to date. Aside from the early compatibility issues with Electron-based apps. Everything worked as it should. Granted I don’t do any streaming or video production using OBS, at least not yet. So the compatibility issues with Wayland didn’t affect me. Once Electron was updated to support Wayland, I didn’t have any issues, except for when I tried to do a dist-upgrade and it broke something in the Wayland support. That was a self-inflicted problem since APT’s upgrade command prevents dependency issues. It defaults to holding back updates that require removing packages.
I know people will still complain that Debian’s packages are old. I think these people are fixated on the new and shiny instead of what is different between versions. If there is a need for an updated version, using Flatpak, Snap, or compiling from source are valid options.
Debian’s move to officially support Non-Free Firmware and software was a definite win. Now we just need for them to redesign their website making it easier to find the ISOs.
Lubuntu, from Episode 46 09/23, has left a good impression on me. It is almost half the memory usage compared to Plasma. I know this is not an issue with newer computers having 8 and 16 GB of memory. However, it is impressive having similar functionality compared to Plasma. I was also happy to see the progress that Snapd has made over the years. However, I am still not a user of Snaps. I think they have better integration on a Ubuntu distro. If I was using one of the Ubuntu distros, I wouldn’t have many issues with using them. Except, I don’t like auto updating of software. This is a personal preference because I do keep my packages up to date and don’t need a service to do that for me. When it comes to the typical user, I can see how automatic updates are a benefit.
ArchCraft from Episode 43 06/23 left an impression on how they customized the Openbox Window Manager. It took quite a bit of effort to find the applications and to theme Openbox. Using it was a bit of nostalgia. I used Openbox, Blackbox, FVwm, and others in the mid-90s. Funny how your interests can change as you get older.
PC Linux OS from Episode 41 03/23 was another walk down memory lane. It is a modern distro that still has the 90s Linux vibe to it. SysVinit is alive and well. All Root level access is done via SU instead of the common use of Sudo today.
The last distro I will mention is LMDE6 from Episode 48 11/23. It has been nice seeing the improvements with every release. I was excited to see how the release of Debian 12 has helped the advancement. I always considered it the configured/themed option of Debian, since it does take some time and effort to get Debian configured and themed. In previous versions, as with Debian, required diving into the terminal to get some things working. That is not as required if at all with version 6.
In 2024, I am looking forward to the advancements of Wayland. I am hoping that other projects like Xfce will have something to try out, even if it is early in development. Similar to what Linux Mint is doing with Cinnamon 6.
Moss:
This has been a pivotal year for me. It was almost the year to ditch regular Mint for LMDE. For that matter, this has been the year either I broke through with Debian or it broke through with me, as I reviewed more than a couple Debian 12-based distros and liked them quite well.
Our download numbers have remained stable this year, averaging just north of 900 per episode. Adding Eric to the team made a big difference, as did changing our primary distribution to Red Circle, thanks to Dale. We have two episodes north of 1,100, which was unthinkable prior to 2023. I’ve said this in a few places, but our little podcast has had more downloads than LeBron James has scored points in his NBA career.
In the meantime, I got a brand new version of Bodhi Linux to play with, which is what I’ve done since the alpha came out. You don’t have to guess what my favorite distro is, even though I do almost all my work in Mint. I hope my review helped push Bodhi up the Distrowatch rankings, and which those rankings actually meant something. I would state that any distro claiming to have a “light” desktop which does not feature a variant of Enlightenment is missing the point. I use a rather heavy form of Bodhi, and my initial RAM usage is only 320 Mb; I have friends who get it down to 100 Mb. Only a minimalist window manager can do better.
I managed to successfully review two immutable distros, Endless OS and blend OS, which were quite good indeed. This also gave me more reason to feel good about promoting blend OS and its creator, Rudra Saraswat. I reviewed three Arch-based distros – blend OS, BigLinux and Endeavour OS. And I stayed in my wheelhouse with Feren OS and Linux Lite. The show notes state I reviewed Elementary OS but I don’t have any memory of having done that. Nonetheless, the continued forward development of usable Linux distros is enheartening, and I look forward to more next year.
It appears that 2024 will be the Year of Wayland. Fedora is all in, Ubuntu has made the move, and even Mint has a roadmap toward full implementation. We just need to see how smaller distros such as MX Linux and Bodhi come along.
Anything else you guys want to throw in?
Let’s move on to New Releases.
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NEW RELEASES THIS MONTH:
from 11/23 – 01/02
ExTiX 23.11
rlxos 2023.11
Proxmox 8.1 “VE”
IPFire 2.27-core181
Slackel 7.7.2 “Live”
Ultramarine 39
Absolute 20231124
OpenMandriva 5.0
SysLinuxOS 12.2
Archman 2023.11.26
NomadBSD 140r
Oracle 8.9
SpiralLinux 12.231120
Nitrux fefc905b
Q4OS 5.4
Armbian 23.11
4MLinux 44.0
Linuxfx 11.4.3
NixOS 23.11
Proxmox 3.1 “Backup Server”
Alpine 3.18.5
ArcoLinux 23.12.03
OpenMediaVault 7.0.11
Mabox 23.12
SolydXK 12
XeroLinux 2023.12
Kali 2023.4
EasyOS 5.6.5
Raspberry Pi OS 2023-12-05
Alpine 3.19.0
SparkyLinux 7.2
Freespire 10
Puppy 10.0.3
CachyOS 231210
Regata 23.0.38
openmamba 20231210
OSMC 2023.12-1
Univention 5.0-6
TrueNAS 13.0-U6.1
pfSense 2.7.2
TUXEDO OS 2-20231218
OpenMediaVault 7.0-16
Qubes 4.2.0
Rhino 2023.4
Zorin 17
KDE neon 20231221
NuTyX 23.12.2
Tails 5.21
Whonix 17.1.0.2
Manjaro 23.1.1
LibreELEC 11.0.4
openmamba 20231226
Nobara 39
Exe 20231220
Gnoppix 23.12.15
OpenMediaVault 7.0-20
SmartOS 20231228
MidnightBSD 3.1.3
ArcoLinux 24.01.04
wattOS R13
Peppermint 2023-12-30
Bluestar 6.6.8
Manjaro 23.1.2
Emmabuntüs DE5-1.01
Arch 2024.01.01
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FEEDBACK
We noticed this month that there had been a backlog of comments to be approved on Blogger so we’d like to remedy that.
Peppe commented on “Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 31” (Mar 26, 2022)
Every month a great cast, with a great crew! Thank you guys so much, it is one of the few I always look forward to. KR, Mark
Mike commented on “Show Notes for Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 33” (Jun 25, 2022)
Hi all,
I keep hearing about GRUB install/update issues. Just wondering:
- has anyone tried ReFind?
I’ve had no issues with it finding all boot partitions (Linux or Windoze) but of course Ubuntu will make GRUB the primary boot manager whether you want it or not :(. Just use efibootmgr or maybe refind-mkdefault to set it back…. - how about using supergrubdisk2 ?
it has been pretty reliable for me. just boot up with it, select your primary ‘grub’ OS and after boot run grub-install to get grub bootmgr back
TIA, Mike
sb56637 commented on “Show Notes Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 35” (Aug 20, 2022)
Hi there! SpiralLinux creator here. Thanks a lot for the nice and thorough review! A few responses to your comments:
Regarding Firefox ESR, that’s actually the only version that Debian Stable offers. It kind of makes sense, since Debian’s policy is to not include any feature updates during the Stable lifecycle, so if there were any security fixes they would have to backport them if they were using the normal stable release. I didn’t want to include the Flatpak version because I prefer native DEB packages wherever possible.
I’m glad the Gnome Software system update process worked. But I still don’t really trust it for updates, and in the SpiralLinux wiki I recommend using Synaptic for system updates.
Regarding adding the default wallpaper to Linux Mint’s wallpaper selection, ironically that wallpaper is originally from a Linux Mint release that came out about 15 years ago. 😉 It’s my all-time favorite.
Regarding disk usage, it should use around 6GB by default. Did you maybe check it after initializing Gnome Software or after the system updates?
Thanks again for the coverage and for the recommendation! Really glad it worked well for you.
Londoner via Telegram commented on “Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 48”
Earlier today I created another dual-boot VM, this time with LMDE6 formatted as ext4, but with Mint 21.2 using btrfs, both in EFI mode. As before both distros can read and create files in the home folder of the other. Once again GRUB in 21.2 (btrfs) could see the LMDE install, but LMDE didn’t see 21.2.
This time instead of using rEFInd, I copied the menu entry from the grub.cfg file in 21.2 to the /etc/grub.d/40_custom file in LMDE. Then after re-installing GRUB so that LMDE controlled it again, I could boot 21.2 from the LMDE GRUB menu. This menu entry loads a GRUB module for btrfs, but it appears that this provides read-only support. You need to remove the line “recordfail” as elsewhere in the grub.cfg file it states “GRUB lacks write support for btrfs”, so recordfail support should be disabled.
Dale’s response:
Very cool testing @londoner366. I still don’t see why two GPL-compliant applications don’t work together. So is there any other way of invoking the BTRFS support other than as you described?
Londoner’s response:
Not that I can think of.
Bhikhu via Email commented on Episode 48
Hi there guys,
This is gonna be a short and succinct feedback due to some personal constraint,
Slax is offered in Slackware and Debian variants,
https://www.slax.org/#getslax
Grub2 not detecting an OS on a Btrfs partition is an old and known issue. An easy work around is to create a custom entry manually,
https://serverfault.com/questions/778183/add-menu-entry-in-grub2-for-os-on-btrfs-partition
Keep up the great work!
Bhikhu
We absolutely appreciate your feedback, either on the Blogger website, by email, Telegram, Discord, or by contacting any or all of us directly.
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ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Moss: For chatting with us further, you may choose to join our Telegram group or our Discord channel.
Dale, where can we find you?
Dale: I’m @Dale_CDL on Telegram and Discord. My email is [email protected]. Eric?
Eric: You can hear more of me on mintCast, Linux OTC, Linux Saloon, and LinuxLUGCast. I also have a YouTube channel @ericadamsyt. You can reach me by email at [email protected].
Moss: And you can hear me every week on Full Circle Weekly News. My email is [email protected], and I’m on Mastodon as @[email protected], plus you can find me, Dale and Dylan, at Its MOSS dot com for a limited time only.
BEFORE WE GO:
Moss: We would like to thank all those who make this project possible,
Dale: Archive.org for storing and helping to distribute this program;
Eric: Audacity, which we use for recording and editing the show
Moss: Tony Hughes, for managing the website and Eric Adams for audio editing services;
Dale: Joshua Lowe for work on our logo;
Eric: All those who work on the teams which are creating, adapting, and maintaining the Linux distros we have reviewed this episode;
Moss: Mid-Air Machine, creators of the song, “Streets of Sant’ivo”, used as our music under Creative Commons license;
Dale: Thanks to Linus Torvalds for the Kernel, Richard Stallman for the GNU Toolkits, and all those who have worked behind the scenes on Free and Open Source/Libre Software;
Eric: We will be back next month. Thank all of you for listening.
