dCore Import Debian Packages to Mountable SCE extensions > dCore X86

Debian Jessie dCore

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Jason W:
With a recompile of the current TC 3.8.13 kernel to include CONFIG_DEVTMPFS=y and a disabling of the zram swap routine in tc-config, I am testing an early working Jessie dCore.  There are some quirks with Udev and Xorg, as well as Gnome does not just fire up and run, but other than that things like icewm, XFCE, iceweasel, and my other commonly used apps are working as is.  Of course, there are always challenges with any major system-wide upgrade and I am confident that Jessie will make a solid dCore just like Wheezy has become.  Jessie will freeze in November, so package versions are still in flux right now but when I get things polished a little more I will post an alpha cut for wider testing.

The main dCore features are pretty much in place and working well it seems.  My plans for the coming few months will be to focus on the coming Jessie upgrade as well finding less widely used packages that may need startup scripts or dependencies added.

netnomad:
hi jason w,

great news!
actually i wanted to ask you for a dCore-version based on jessie.

usually i use stable and extremely audited software especially based on lean, vanilla, stable debian,
but for some weeks i was fallen almost in love with my jessie-installation on a netbook...
it's stable, modern and there is some fun with fresh packages :)

what do you think about a more recent kernel? ... with the actual i didn't succeed with suspend to ram :(
i'm looking forward to your jessie-cut and will contribute with heavy testing ;)

keep on hacking.

Jason W:
Hi netnomad,

When standard Core updates it's kernel is when I adopt it rather than using a different one.  That way there is a larger pool of folks using and testing the same kernel rather version than us each having our own separate kernels for x86.  Actually, I plan to use the same source, config, and patches and compile it on dCore so that folks can use dCore to compile their own kernel modules if they want to use something outside the standard kernel tree.  I have been meaning to do that with wheezy dCore but just did not get around to it and there has not been a request for it yet.   

Basically right now the zram swap issue is the holdup, I hope to figure that out soon as I am also eager to get a Jessie dCore up for testing. 

Jason W:
CONFIG_DEVTMPFS=y
CONFIG_LEGACY_PTYS=y

The above kernel changes fixes the xterm issue and allows most everything to work, but not Gnome, though the Gnome apps work through Icewm.  I will figure out Gnome, and as I don't think many use it on Core anyway, it is not a show stopper for an alpha release of the next major version.. 

These kind of changes are documented out there and are common to whether one is taking on a major update to a source based system or one like dCore.  I will continue to polish and hopefully in the coming weeks I will feel it is ready for a public alpha.

Jason W:
Actually things have come together more quickly than I anticipated, just an xterm issue to resolve and otherwise all that I use on my normal desktop is just working.  I have made some more kernel config adjustments using Gentoo's list of required and recommended config options to support systemd.  The good thing is that like Knoppix, we use our own booting and init that is independent of systemd, upstart, etc.  So systemd is there but the /etc/init.d scripts work as before and to the user there is no real difference. 

So far the startup scripts, dependency lists, prebuilt packages, and data tarballs on the server work across Wheezy, Ubuntu, and Jessie dCore x86 versions.  So Jessie dCore will still be under the 5.x major release.  Since I plan to stay with one directory to support both existing and new dCore's, at least as long as possible, the next major version can be when enough changes require that we start a new directory of files on the server to cleanly support newer Debian/Ubuntu releases. 

Oh, and the packages in Jessie are changing daily, so when testing my advice would be to use the list file feature of importsce and make one large SCE.  If you want to add more packages, re-import that SCE with the additions.  Otherwise breakage can occur due to conflicting files among SCE's.   The xterm issue is all that is left before I feel confident to post a dCore.gz, I aim to fix that tonight.

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