Cosmetic issues with disk drive icons

[pterid]

When I load Porteus 5.01 Xfce with additional modules, I find the disk drive icons in the desktop, and the left nav pane of Thunar, are changed somewhat. They no longer have volume names (only generic identifiers sda3, sdb1 etc) nor custom icons (like the USB stick icon for my Porteus drive itself. Strangely it doesn't seem to matter which module I boot with, and it's fine when I boot with base-only in my config file, or if I move all modules to the optional directory.

Has anyone else seen this? Is it a known issue? It doesn't seem to break anything functionally, but it's highly visible so it just bothers me.

Base-only:



With a single module loaded (xlockmore in this case):

[ncmprhnsbl]

a quick test failed to reproduce
just to confirm: this happens when: a module(s) is located in <installation>/porteus/modules at boot?
and doesn't when the module is activated during live session? (and maybe then logout and back in to double check for module issues)
what about if placed in /optional (or some other place) and loaded at boot with load=some_module or extramod=/path/to/a/folder/with/modules ?
is your porteus up to date? (see menu>system>porteus settings centre>update)

[pterid]

Hello, thank you for your reply, and sorry to hear this one is difficult to reproduce!

is your porteus up to date? (see menu>system>porteus settings centre>update)

Sorry - I thought I was up to date, but then I checked and found a new update for 001-core.xzm. With that update the behaviour seems to improve, but it still bugs if I load more than one large module.

just to confirm: this happens when: a module(s) is located in <installation>/porteus/modules at boot?

Yes, that's right. To be precise, before the latest 001-core update:

• it never happened if I had zero modules
• it was intermittent with one small module (xlockmore)
• it always happened with one or more big modules (firefox) or several small ones (xlockmore, figlet, boxes, bsd-games, svkbd)

and after the update

• it doesn't happen with a couple of small modules
• it is intermittent with one big module (firefox) and a couple of small ones
• it does happen if I load firefox and libreoffice and a few small ones

In both cases it seems like there is a threshold of extra modules to load above which the drive appearance goes weird, with some random chance. But at least the threshold seems higher now.

and doesn't when the module is activated during live session? (and maybe then logout and back in to double check for module issues)

Correct, live sessions boot fine and then adding modules is still fine. It's also fine during a persistent boot if I put the modules as optional and then activate them manually. The problem appears only when the modules are loaded as part of the boot process. (I have tried activating firefox then logging out & in, everything is still OK.)

what about if placed in /optional (or some other place) and loaded at boot with load=some_module or extramod=/path/to/a/folder/with/modules ?

Please can you prescribe exactly where I should place such a folder, and exactlywhat I should write in porteus.cfg? I have tried twice to do this test for you over the last hour, but unfortunately both tries failed, and one caused some file system corruption that I had to fix with fsck.ext4 in Mint. Apologies for my incompetence!

[Ed_P]

Apologies for my incompetence!

No apology necessary, we all were at some point.

Please can you prescribe exactly where I should place such a folder,

Next to your /modules folder. If your mods is /porteus/modules then opts would be /porteus/optional.

and exactlywhat I should write in porteus.cfg?

Nothing. No changes needed. Optional modules are loaded after you have booted. Mods in the /modules folder are loaded and activated automatically when you boot. So basically mods for drivers and settings and accessing the Internet are loaded when booting, mods you would like to use at some point you load when needed, from the /optional folder.

While you can use the file manager to find and activate /optional modules you can also use /home/guest/ scripts for activating a mod in the /optional folder, something like this one for activating the 05-devel.xzm module:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh

XZM=05-devel

if [ ! -e /mnt/live/memory/images/$XZM.xzm ]; then
   if [ "${BOOTDEV:5:3}" == "iso" ]; then 
      echo toor | sudo -S activate /mnt/$DRV/porteus5.0/Optional/$XZM.xzm  > /dev/null 2>&1 &
   else
      echo toor | sudo -S activate $BOOTDEV/Optional/$XZM.xzm  > /dev/null 2>&1 &
   fi
   sleep 2
else 
   echo Pesent
fi
exit

# The 05-devel module needs to be Activated to download applets.
# And for slpkg and for kernelBuilder.

hth

[pterid]

Thank you for your message Ed! I appreciate the tip on the activation script in particular.

To provide the best debug info to ncmprhnsbl, I would like to do exactly as they prescribe w.r.t. this request in their post:

...and loaded at boot with load=some_module or extramod=/path/to/a/folder/with/modules ?

It sounds like the above quote is a cheat code, that does require a change to porteus.cfg, which I would like to execute precisely for them.

[Ed_P]

To the porteus.cfg file's APPEND line you can add extramod=/path/to/your/optionals folder if you want but I believe it just loads all the modules in the folder. noload= to stop /modules from loading works also. And noload= names do not have to match 100% the name(s) of the modules you don't want to load. noload=kde;jinn;lxqt;xfce;lxde;mate allows me to boot my 003-cinnamon.xzm system.

[pterid]

FAO devs: I had another try at the extramod cheatcode.

I moved all modules into optional, so they will not be loaded.

I moved firefox, libreoffice and xlockmore to a new sister folder: /mnt/sdb1/porteus/extra/

then I changed line 43 of /mnt/sdb1/boot/syslinux/porteus.cfg from

Code: Select all

APPEND changes=/porteus

to

Code: Select all

APPEND changes=/porteus extramod=/mnt/sdb1/porteus/extra/

and rebooted.

In short: the bug still happens.

Detailed results:

• No bug initially with firefox, libreoffice and xlockmore
• Bug when I added five more modules to /.../extra (figlet, boxes, netsurf, svkbd, bsd-games)
• Bug when I went back to only firefox, libreoffice and xlockmore
• No bug when I removed libreoffice, leaving only firefox and xlockmore

It has a strange hysteresis: to get it to stop, I seem to have to have to go down to fewer modules than the number that initially set it off.

Other observations:

• In Thunar as root, in the left nav pane, the icons are always OK. Only the desktop, and Thunar as guest, are affected.
• I boot Porteus from an ext4 partition, so tmp doesn't get cleaned up, and my changes folder is quite large overall (5076 items, 129 MB)

Later, I'll try to see if I can reproduce the behaviour in a VM (Porteus in Virtualbox on Mint on hard drive on same machine).

[pterid]

Update: I managed to get the bug to happen in my Virtualbox VM too, but with Porteus 5.01 base release (not updated).

I had no modules activated, but I had previously activated and used firefox and libreoffice, so the changes folder is a bit bloated with their local config files, it is 1500 files total. This VM has only 1 GB RAM compared to my bare metal 4 GB, and the install is on an ext4-formatted virtual SATA HDD cf. my real life USB stick.



I've since installed updates on my VM, and no sign of the bug so far (though it has an intermittent issue with the virtual BIOS that causes a series of errors and eventually prevents booting, which I won't go into here...)

[ncmprhnsbl]

In short: the bug still happens.

I had no modules activated, but I had previously activated and used firefox and libreoffice, so the changes folder is a bit bloated with their local config files

starts to narrow this down a bit toward something funky going on with changes ...maybe
just looking at the symptom for a moment, seems like one or more of elogind, dbus or gvfs shenanigans..
if you can get root thunar(and other pkexec actions) then it's not elogind
when it's happening, see what these say(in terminal):

Code: Select all

logind list

and whether notifications are working:

Code: Select all

notify-send "yes i'm working"

[pterid]

Hello ncmprhnsbl, thank you for the reply! Here are some terminal sessions from when the bug is happening.

As guest:

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guest@porteus:~$ logind list
bash: logind: command not found
guest@porteus:~$ elogind list
bash: elogind: command not found
guest@porteus:~$ /lib64/elogind/elogind list
guest@porteus:~$ notify-send "I am working"
guest@porteus:~$ 

(the notification comes up fine)

As root:

Code: Select all

root@porteus:/# logind list
bash: logind: command not found
root@porteus:/# elogind list
bash: elogind: command not found
root@porteus:/# /lib64/elogind/elogind list
root@porteus:/# notify-send "I am working"
GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.Notifications was not provided by any .service files
root@porteus:/# 

(no notification)

It seems there is no logind executable anywhere on my Porteus, but I found an elogind and ran it. Hope it was the right one! If not please direct me, I'll do as you say.

[ncmprhnsbl]

It seems there is no logind executable anywhere on my Porteus, but I found an elogind and ran it. Hope it was the right one! If not please direct me, I'll do as you say.

ah sorry, my bad : should've been:

Code: Select all

loginctl list

looks like dbus is fine, and most likely it's not elogind session seating either.. leaving some gvfs quirk that i don't quite remember atm ..
i've made a vbox install to try and reproduce..

[pterid]

Oh, OK! In that case it is:

Code: Select all

guest@porteus:~$ loginctl list
SESSION  UID USER  SEAT  TTY 
     c1 1000 guest seat0 tty7

1 sessions listed.
guest@porteus:~$ 

for both guest and root, with the bug.

Thanks again for taking the time to investigate! For reproduction, I'm using an ext4 partition on bare metal and VM if that makes any difference. Happy to provide any other details.