Unofficial LMDE KDE Live DVD: UP4 / 201208

[Schoelje]

It's been a while but I've been working hard for the past week.
I've been working on a Plymouth Manager for Debian and because it's my first Python/Glade experience (and my coding days have past a long time ago) it took some time until I was satisfied enough to post it here.

I created a front end for Plymouth. There already was one for Ubuntu but I couldn't use that so I started this one from scratch...without the burden of having the coding skills or talent.

I hope you can test what I've conjured here but please, don't try this on your system yet (or have an image when things go wrong).
You can download it here:
http://www.schoelje.nl/lmdekde/packages ... .0_all.deb

Screenshot:

[BostonPeng]

Shiny, Schoelje! I can't wait to give it a try. I was hoping to putt the trigger on the nuke and pave last week but I ended up falling behind on a lot of things so if I'm lucky I'll install your respin later this week. Once I do I'll see about snagging the new .deb and see how it behaves on my system. It definitely looks nicer than EZSwitch, which is what I use now for changing Plymouth themes.

[zerozero]

Schoelje,
that link doesn't go to the .deb d/l but to a page with a bunch of code, this >>

[GeneC]

zz

The .deb downloaded ok for me....

[zerozero]

hey Gene you know what it d/l perfectly for me also with chromium

but still get the same code soup with FF (and just tried a clean FF profile- get the same: so might be a FF thingy but it's not my setup messing it up)

[GeneC]

Mint 11....

Time you clean out your downloads folder, my friend.....

[zerozero]

forum tasks

Code: Select all

Accessed: Thu 21 Jun 2012 22:49:36 BST
Modified: Thu 21 Jun 2012 22:31:48 BST

[Schoelje]

I see you're all having fun downloading the deb

Before I forget it: thanks to BostonPeng's tutorial (http://nancib.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/ ... -rebooting) I included a bash that you can run if you want to preview your Plymouth settings.
If you open a terminal, login as root and run "plymouth-preview" you'll see what your settings look like before you reboot.
And if you want to see the debug information, just run "debian-plymouth-manager" from terminal.

Because you need to run this as root, I could not include this in the program...something to do about security...highly overrated...

[BostonPeng]

Actually that tutorial should have a new home. I recently spun off my Linux posts form that blog to a new blog, Linux + Me, that will be specifically for my Linux-related writing. It turned out that somehow that post missed getting included in the move (woops!), but once I get it moved I'll edit this reply with the new addy.Thanks for pointing out that I missed it. I had a feeling some posts would get missed.

ETA: IT's now on my Linux blog at http://bostonpeng.wordpress.com/2011/11 ... rebooting/

[zerozero]

tested the Plymouth manager in my lmde-kde-test partition and it works without problems, tho i'm not much of a plymouth person as you probably already guessed.

[Schoelje]

I placed the code for debian-plymouth-manager on github:
https://github.com/Schoelje/debian-plymouth-manager

So, if anyone would like to contribute...

[TeaSwigger]

I see you're all having fun downloading the deb

Tested this Plymouth manager (in Virtualbox) and it worked perfectly.

[bradsha22]

Working on my 64 bit system nicely on a duel boot set up got the ati drivers and fglrx to fully work with going to the package manger and installing the drivers from synaptic although the boot screen that reboot and shut down goes wonky but works!. . Thanks for the os and good work i hope we can get 4.9 soon !

[Schoelje]

Testers needed!

As you might know, I've been coding away for the past few weeks.
It looks like that the Debian Plymouth Manager functions well.

Now, I've finished a new welcome screen: it incorporates hardware driver detection for which additional drivers can be installed.
For now, only Nvidia, ATI and Broadcom are supported and it will detect multi-core 32-bit systems for which the pae kernel could be installed.

The welcome screen is accompanied by a driver manager which can be used separately.
This application is responsible for the actual installation of the selected drivers and will start installing the drivers as soon as you hit the "Install drivers" button in the welcome screen.

For this I need some volunteers:

• Test the installation of drivers on an ATI system.
• Test with Broadcom chip set.
• Test with legacy Nvidia chip set.
• Just click away and see what happens

Any suggestions are very welcome (and needed)!

You can download the debs here:
http://www.schoelje.nl/lmdekde/packages ... .0_all.deb
http://www.schoelje.nl/lmdekde/packages ... .0_all.deb

Screenshots

[zerozero]

ok i can test one of the required fields (broadcom)
how do i go about that exactly?
- grab that liveUSB, boot in the laptop, install the debs and "click away" ?

[Schoelje]

Yes, that's about it.
If you log off and log in again, the welcome screen should pop up...

[zerozero]

i'm assuming that for nvidia current things are more or less tested?

[Schoelje]

Your assumption is correct
I've been installing and reinstalling the Nvidia drivers for the past few days now.
Except of course, an Nvidia legacy card...I haven't got that one.

[zerozero]

it didn't work in the live session installed ok (didn't even gave the dep problem that i got in the installed system: install first debian-driver-manager and only after debian-welcome) but it didn't show up (and yes i logged out several times) no biggie i guess; while i was waiting for the system to install in the laptop i tried in the desktop and it worked just perfect


now i'm gonna try the promised broadcom
nahh it doesn't detect my card


apart from this, 2 questions:
1- debian-driver-manager logs its activity where? might be useful for troubleshooting;
2- it could be a clearer indication that the driver is installed/uninstalled (like in my nvidia example above: even with the driver previously installed, ddm's dialogue is "install drivers")

[Schoelje]

...forgot to mention that: just like mintwelcome, debian-welcome doesn't run in a live environment (or does it, I'm confused).

What do you get when you run:

Code: Select all

lspci | grep Wireless

Looking at the code, it should detect your Broadcom network card (even more confused now).

Logging is not yet implemented (working on that) but if you run debian-driver-manager or debian-welcome from terminal, you will see all the output.

I haven't decided yet how to show whether or not a driver is already installed. Some drivers that are listed could already be installed and others might not. The user should always have the freedom to decide whether or not to install the driver, even when it's already installed. Maybe indicating with a colored first cell: green for a clean install and orange for a reinstall.