2016.01 RC2 ISO ready for testing

The Netrunner team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the second release candidate ISO for Netrunner Rolling 2016.01.

Changes since 2016.01 RC1:
Calamares 2.0 RC1
Plasma 5.5.4

For a full list of applications included on the ISO:
http://arch.netrunner.com/ISO/netrunner-rolling-2016.01-RC2-x86_64-pkgs.txt

Download:
ISO: http://arch.netrunner.com/ISO/netrunner-rolling-2016.01-RC2-x86_64.iso
MD5Sum: http://arch.netrunner.com/ISO/netrunner-rolling-2016.01-RC2-x86_64.iso.md5

NOTE: This ISO is provided for testing and feedback purposes only, please do not use this ISO to re-install an existing system or on new installations.

Thank you and Enjoy.

Started testing the ISO. Hashsum is OK. The timestamp of the ISO is:

netrunner-rolling-2016.01-RC2-x86_64.iso  2016-02-19 20:55  2.1G
  1. BIOS

Boot tested on two computers with Legacy BIOS and one computer with UEFI BIOS. The latter has UEFI mode and Secure Boot both permanently disabled, so de-facto boots in Legacy BIOS mode. No boot problems on all three.

Boot not tested in UEFI mode. I have neither Windowz no GPT-formatted disks, nowhere. No need to use UEFI.

  1. Grub 2

Grub 2 is never installed. I do not need and do not use it. The installation is always done in Do not install a boot loader mode.

  1. Calamares 2.0 RC1

All installations are done in Manual partitioning mode. It’s the only way to have 5 different partitions in the system, configured in non-traditional mode.

If none of the partitions is asked to be formatted during installation (they are pre-formatted), Calamares has no problem to terminate successfully. As the issue with unneeded grub.cfg generation (when Grub 2 is not installed) is fixed, the installation is lightning fast and finishes in 10 min.

Installing a new Linux I usually ask to format the / partition with Ext4. It’s the eternal Calamares’ problem. It fails to format it. That is why I avoid to use Calamares, whenever possible (Manjaro), or use pre-formatted partitions.

The situation is changed now

Previous Calamares versions returned the format error right before starting to unpack the ISO’s content. Nothing was written to the hard disk(s).

Calamares 2.0 RC1 returns the format error after successfully formatting the / partition and copying all data to it. In other words, the / partition is formatted with Ext4, the image is unpacked to the hard disk, occupies 7,33G of space, the usual value for this RC2. The main Netrunner installer window reports All done:

[see netrunner-20160219-success.png attachment below]

but above this window Calamares throws in the Installation Failed message:

[see netrunner-20160219-failure.png attachment below]

I’ve chosen to not use this installation, and reinstalled using pre-formatted partitions.

  1. Non-free drivers

Two computers have Nvidia Optimus cards. There’s no problem with proprietary Nvidia drivers installation. Both Bumblebee features - graphical acceleration with optirun and power saving with bbswitch - work perfectly.

Just a note, related to all tested ISOs.

Probably by design, but the EDITOR variable is not set. If a user needs to edit sudoers file, the simple command returns the error:

$ sudo visudo visudo: no editor found (editor path = /usr/bin/vi) $

As nano is installed by default, setting it as the editor works normally:

$ sudo EDITOR=nano visudo

Setting EDITOR variable to some value could probably be a bit more convenient for users.

Sudo is already set up for all users out of the box, this is probably why upstream Manjaro does not set the editor for this by default.

As far as the partition format issue in calamares. I’m not sure what causes this to happen on some systems and not on others. I did have one system that while testing Calamares 1.1.4, it couldn’t format the root partition when other existing partitions already existed. This only happened the one time, and turned out to be an issue with the existing partition table and the alignment of the partitions on that drive.

@AJSlye The same installation failure is happening with the RC3 from the blueshell iso folder.

Nikola,
So far I’ve not been able to reproduce these issues, could you please post a bug report of the issue to calamares:
https://calamares.io/bugs/secure/Dashboard.jspa

I found it.
If you have already formatted/created partitions, it won’t give you the error.
It will throw an error only if you just start creating the partitions.

I wonder if this could be some weird issue with your existing local partition table?
In any case, a bug report to the Calamares team would be helpful.

i am doing it in virtual machine, i can try it also for real :slight_smile: in an hour i’ll be ready. and will report you. Have to ./configure, make, make install the dinner :smiley:

Cool, it’s not even lunch time here yet.
Your not trying to use btrfs are you?
I don’t think the RC3 ISO had the fixed kpmcore on it until yesterday.
Anyway, there is another ISO on the way.
Get with me on Google hangouts later.

i’m done it had few errors during creating root partition, and when restarted the installer it was done.
second, it was impossible to boot if the bootloader is on /boot partition, or if it is with gpt table.
also if it has mbr table and install grub on /boot partition, again it is not possible to boot it. It is possible to boot only if grub is on the mbr of /dev/sdX
Strange. When i tried to instal manjaro-kde with grub on /boot partition it was fine. week ago.

We use the official tarball releases of Clalamars, Manjaro builds from git.
The Manjaro KDE ISO had Calamares 1.1.4 on it, our RC3 ISO now uses Calamares 2.0.