Month: July 2015

Tasty calamares in Gentoo

First of all it’s nothing to eat. So what is it then? This is the introduction by upstream:

Calamares is an installer framework. By design it is very customizable, in order to satisfy a wide variety of needs and use cases. Calamares aims to be easy, usable, beautiful, pragmatic, inclusive and distribution-agnostic. Calamares includes an advanced partitioning feature, with support for both manual and automated partitioning operations. It is the first installer with an automated “Replace Partition” option, which makes it easy to reuse a partition over and over for distribution testing. Got a Linux distribution but no system installer? Grab Calamares, mix and match any number of Calamares modules (or write your own in Python or C++), throw together some branding, package it up and you are ready to ship!

I have just added newest release version (1.1.2) to the tree and in my dev overlay a live version (9999). The underlaying technology stack is mainly Qt5, KDE Frameworks, Python3, YAML and systemd. It’s picked up and of course in evaluation process by several Linux distributions.

You may asking why i have added it to Gentoo then where we have OpenRC as default init system?! You are right at the moment it is not very useful for Gentoo. But for example Sabayon as a downstream of us will (maybe) use it for the next releases, so in the first place it is just a service for our downstreams.

The second reason, there is a discussion on gentoo-dev mailing list at the moment to reboot the Gentoo installer. Instead of creating yet another installer implementation, we have two potential ways to pick it up, which are not mutual exclusive:

1. Write modules to make it work with sysvinit aka OpenRC
2. Solve Bug #482702 – Provide alternative stage3 tarballs using sys-apps/systemd

Have fun!

[1] https://calamares.io/about/
[2] johu dev overlay
[3] gentoo-dev ml – Rebooting the Installer Project
[4] Bug #482702 – Provide alternative stage3 tarballs using sys-apps/systemd

Plasma 5 and kdbus testing

Thanks to Mike Pagano who enabled kdbus support in Gentoo kernel sources almost 2 weeks ago. Which gives us the choice to test it. As described in Mikes blog post you will need to enable the use flags kdbus and experimental on sys-kernel/gentoo-sources and kdbus on sys-apps/systemd.

root # echo "sys-kernel/gentoo-sources kdbus experimental" >> /etc/portage/package.use/kdbus

If you are running >=sys-apps/systemd-221 kdbus is already enabled by default otherwise you have to enable it.

root # echo "sys-apps/systemd kdbus" >> /etc/portage/package.use/kdbus

Any packages affected by the change need to be rebuilt.

root # emerge -avuND @world

Enable kdbus option in kernel.

General setup --->
<*> kdbus interprocess communication

Build the kernel, install it and reboot. Now we can check if kdbus is enabled properly. systemd should automatically mask dbus.service and start systemd-bus-proxyd.service instead (Thanks to eliasp for the info).

root # systemctl status dbus
● dbus.service
Loaded: masked (/dev/null)
Active: inactive (dead)


root # systemctl status systemd-bus-proxyd
● systemd-bus-proxyd.service - Legacy D-Bus Protocol Compatibility Daemon
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib64/systemd/system/systemd-bus-proxyd.service; static; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Fr 2015-07-10 22:42:16 CEST; 16min ago
Main PID: 317 (systemd-bus-pro)
CGroup: /system.slice/systemd-bus-proxyd.service
└─317 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-bus-proxyd --address=kernel:path=/sys/fs/kdbus/0-system/bus

Plasma 5 starts fine here using sddm as login manager. On Plasma 4 you may be interested in Bug #553460.

Looking forward when Plasma 5 will get user session support.

Have fun!