VectorLinux 7.0 CORE ALPHA 1

[vector]

The development crew is happy to bring  you the first core release of vector7. This is alpha 1 so expect your computer to catch fire and crash and burn.................. . This is all the latest and greatest from linux from the X.org server on down. There is nothing fancy here just a console login and doing startx gives you a basic xfce4 desktop. There is firefox, opera,  and gftp to keep you connected and the other basics. There is no gslapt or slapt-get as no real repo yet for vl7. We would like you brave testers to check for bugs try building your favorite apps etc etc. We have included a new set of plugins to do things like qt movie trailers (trailers.apple.com) and the standard realplayer and ms stuff. We want to make sure the core is is up to snuff before we spend a lot of time building on top of it........so your feedback is very important. Some notes........you will prolly have to do one reboot after install to get network working ..........and you have to create your own cdrom/dvd symlinks in /dev if you want to use those devices...........milage may vary.
good luck and happy testing!!! One other note this is above and beyond slack 13.1 and starting with vec7 we intend to keep parity with slack-current or surpass.


Cheers,
Vec
http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/veclinux-7.0/iso-test/VL7.0-CORE-ALPHA-1.iso
http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/veclinux-7.0/iso-test/ALPHA-1.md5sum

[nightflier]

Not much luck on first test subject. 

GUI installer crashes during or after gparted.
Text installer can not find hard drive (regular ATA).
Direct ISO install with image on hard drive: can not find install media.

[M0E-lnx]

Might I suggest you roll out a 64b edition parallel to the 32b... that way they can both grow simultaneously

[stretchedthin]

Not much luck on first test subject. 

GUI installer crashes during or after gparted.
Text installer can not find hard drive (regular ATA).
Direct ISO install with image on hard drive: can not find install media.

I had better luck here. Installed and running inside of Virtualbox.
Kind of wish it had a current sbbuilder included.
Startx does not fire up graphical environment but does start with startxfce4 (perhaps that's because no display manager yet.)

Might I suggest you roll out a 64b edition parallel to the 32b... that way they can both grow simultaneously

I agree, if I'm building packages for one, might as well do it for the other.

[kidd]

Can't promise anything, but I'll try to have an updated sbbuilder for v7 during the next week.

If anyone want to try to update it, you can fetch it from http://code.google.com/p/vlgetpatches/

cya.

[Andy Price]

I've tried to install on a couple of machines (P3, P4) but in both cases it says it can't find the install media, which is an IDE CDROM. Any workarounnd? I haven't tried the GUI installer yet.

[kc1di]

install went well here , would not configure x in 24 bit though. 16 bit works ok.

no nvidia yet.

But all that i've tried so far is working.

[stretchedthin]

Thought this was odd.  I've been building some packages against this alpha one of which was fltk2.  I used the slackbuild uelsk8 made for vl6.0 (version 2.0.6403). I just added the new source file (version 2.0.x-r7513) and changed the apropriate lines in the slackbuild.  Checked all the dependencies...all there.

When I ran the build, however, I get this error...

Code:

=== making images ===
Makefile:97: makedepend: No such file or directory
Compiling FileIcon2.cxx...
Compiling Fl_Guess_Image.cxx...
Compiling fl_jpeg.cxx...
Compiling fl_png.cxx...
fl_png.cxx: In static member function 'static bool fltk::pngImage::test(const uchar*, unsigned int)':
fl_png.cxx:65: error: 'png_check_sig' was not declared in this scope
fl_png.cxx: In member function 'virtual bool fltk::pngImage::fetch()':
fl_png.cxx:114: warning: 'png_struct_def::jmpbuf' is deprecated (declared at /usr/include/png.h:1090)
fl_png.cxx:114: warning: 'png_struct_def::jmpbuf' is deprecated (declared at /usr/include/png.h:1090)
make[1]: *** [fl_png.o] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

I then transfered the build onto my vl6.0 machine where it built just fine.

I'll keep playing with it but I'm thinking that maybe libpng needs looking at. (Could be wrong though, often am.)

PS. aslo built fltk(1) on the alpha.  That built and installed no problem.

[vector]

I'll keep playing with it but I'm thinking that maybe libpng needs looking at.

This has libpng14 and jpeg-8a so you may run into a few problems. As far as I know I rebuilt everything to use png14 but again I may have missed something.........so keep testing. I do know the qt4 needs a rebuild
 against libpng14.

Thanks,
Vec

[rbistolfi]

From libpng Changelog:

Code:

i. We removed the obsolete png_check_sig(), png_memcpy_check(), and
      png_memset_check() functions.  Instead use !png_sig_cmp(),
      png_memcpy(), and png_memset(), respectively, i.e.,

      replace
        png_check_sig(buf, 8)
      with
        png_sig_cmp(buf, 0, 8) == 0

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/src/libpng-1.2.x-to-1.4.x-summary.txt

[uelsk8s]

looks like you need this for now
http://repos.archlinux.org/wsvn/community/fltk2/trunk/libpng14.patch

From libpng Changelog:

Code:

i. We removed the obsolete png_check_sig(), png_memcpy_check(), and
      png_memset_check() functions.  Instead use !png_sig_cmp(),
      png_memcpy(), and png_memset(), respectively, i.e.,

      replace
        png_check_sig(buf, 8)
      with
        png_sig_cmp(buf, 0, 8) == 0

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/src/libpng-1.2.x-to-1.4.x-summary.txt

[stretchedthin]

looks like you need this for now
http://repos.archlinux.org/wsvn/community/fltk2/trunk/libpng14.patch

From libpng Changelog:

Code:

i. We removed the obsolete png_check_sig(), png_memcpy_check(), and
      png_memset_check() functions.  Instead use !png_sig_cmp(),
      png_memcpy(), and png_memset(), respectively, i.e.,

      replace
        png_check_sig(buf, 8)
      with
        png_sig_cmp(buf, 0, 8) == 0

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/src/libpng-1.2.x-to-1.4.x-summary.txt

Nice find.  It worked.  I cheated though and just went in and deleted the line in the file that was deprecated and replaced with the correct line. Then compressed myself a new tar.gz out of the corrected source.  It worked though.

As far as testing some of the apps on board this alpha, I've been using mousepad, thunar, mc, wicd, firefox and opera.  So far the only trouble I've had is that opera will not play flash, but firefox will and that I when I made a custom action in thunar to use vinstallpkg it fails because zenity is not yet installed. (hmm, maybe I'll build it, but not tonight...little sleepy.)

Also, really like how up to date this is. Most recent GTK+, Pango, Glib, etc. I was wondering about Perl.  It has Perl 5.10.x which is over 9 months old. There is now a Perl 5.13.x. That being said, I don't think anybody is going to run into anything they can not build because we don't have the new Perl (it's only been out 9 days) but if it is like Glib2 and GTK+ where they are very hard to upgrade after the distribution is finalized, maybe we should.

[retired1af]

I've been unable to really play with this over the past few days due to a complete forum software change / conversion on our server. Hopefully, I'll have time to start playing and building after the weekend.

[GrannyGeek]

I installed it on my 1.3 GHz Celeron from a CD I burned. GUI install worked flawlessly. It seemed slower than usual but I didn't time it, so I could be totally wrong. I skipped the bootloader section of the installation because I like to install LILO on a floppy disk and that's not an option. All my hardware was identified without problems. VASM set up the xorg radeon driver, which is correct for the Radeon 9200, and I got 1280x1024 without any intervention except for selecting that resolution when presented with choices. startx did not work but startxfce4 does.

My biggest annoyance is that VASM does not keep its window size after I do an operation but before I close VASM. Default fonts on all VectorLinuxes (and Windows) are much too small for my aging eyes and I make them larger, which often causes various dialogs and windows not to work as designed. So I'm constantly resizing the VASM window after I do anything.

I tried to run LILO through VASM and got a "Cannot find kernel (vmlinuz). Aborting LILO install." So I have to use the CD to boot to VL7.

All programs I've tried are doing well so far. I've had an audio stream running in XMMS for several hours. Flash is working in Firefox but in Opera it tells me I need to install the Flash plugin. I've installed Tuxcards, SoftMaker Office, Adobe Reader, RealPlayer, Picasa, and CheckBook Tracker. A needed library was missing for Tuxcards--it was in the /usr/lib/qt3.something directory on my VL6 SOHO partition and is a qt3 library. I simply copied it into /usr/lib on VL7, did ldconfig, and tuxcards is now running. I cannot do without Tuxcards! CBTracker needed the same library it always does. I just copy it from my previous VL installation. No problems or complaints from SoftMaker Office, Adobe Reader, and RealPlayer. I installed the latest Picasa for Linux (they say they aren't going to continue developing Picasa for Linux). However, the Linux version is lacking important features of the Windows version, such as the excellent face recognition, so I always install the Windows version BUT KEEPING THE LINUX VERSION OF WINE INSTALLED BY PICASA FOR LINUX. It's a little too involved to go into a description of how I do it here. The trouble with simply installing Wine and then installing picasa36-setup.exe through Wine is that Picasa is badly behaved and grabs 100% of the CPU and doesn't clean up after itself, so when you exit Picasa many associated processes are still running and taking up too many resources. This does not happen with Picasa for Linux. So you really need to keep Picasa for Linux's wine and setup (in /opt) BUT replace the actual Picasa files with those from the Windows version running under straight Wine. Too complicated to go into here, but if anyone is interested, I can describe the procedure in another topic. Google tweaked Wine for Picasa for Linux and it apparently needs it.

I set up my local nfs network but haven't tested it, as I don't have another computer running right now. I haven't installed any printers yet.

This computer has always been very Linux friendly and it's getting along fine with Alpha 1. I think VL7 is doing remarkably well for an alpha 1 version. I probably won't do a lot more with VL7 except install my printers and make sure the basics I run are working, as I have very little time right now.
--GrannyGeek

[nightflier]

Much better results on test machine #2   

GUI installer completed without problems. X runs without xorg.conf and comes up with "startx". Firefox and plugins work.

Now on to more in-depth testing:
- The regular "Down arrow" and "End" keys do nothing. Using the ones on the keypad (Numlock off) it works as I'm used to.
- Mplayer plugin: it exhibits some strange habits depending on what media I'm playing. Need to test several more.
- Desktop has two "Home" icons. One opens home, the other one opens the .desktop file in Mousepad. The ones for Vector-Docs and Help forum also open with Mousepad.