A fresh install ain't to par with some auto-update? Well, if it auto-updates actually, as i can't remember clearly. I fire them up one after the other once in a while to check which ones grey out graciously and which ones fail early, including Win11 which proved being the worse of them all after stealing me 45 minutes when i thought 5 would do fine...
Expirion is alive again
- Thread starter GatorsFan
- Start date
OP
GatorsFan
Well-Known Member
Unattended upgrades is not installed by default you can run
to update /upgrade or can easily install it with
or get it through the Synaptic Package Manager this will allow for automatically get security update in case you cannot remember to run sudo apt update once a week
OP
GatorsFan
Well-Known Member
no not really indifference just tired of doing too many different stuff taking up too much time
That sounds familiar too!
My Expirion 5 setup is still working as expected, unlike Sparky which lost BlueTooth connectivity for some obscure reason. YMMV! Anyway, i'd just want to suggest the addition of ia32 GrUB2 (PC & EFI) resources for cases as evoked in a ChomeBook thread just recently.
OP
GatorsFan
Well-Known Member
I will consider it thanks for the suggestion
OP
GatorsFan
Well-Known Member
I added grub-efi-ia32-bin to Expirion-5.0.2-Xfce and LXQt just uploaded them to Sourceforge 04Nov2024
Yes, i got this one:
Verified twice using Thunar v4.18.4 + GtkHash v1.4, but i still don't believe it's able to complete booting on that user's machine which is likely to search for 'bootia32.efi' and drop to a CLI, as this critical component failed to show up in the .ISO unless it's hidden deeper elsewhere.
Refering to MX i observed these are conventional locations typical of Debian derivatives, in addition to '/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/' and their related resources:
With those also optionally present at times:
Yet i've seen exceptions as with RedCore having a less convential tree:
Too bad i can no longer perform any test with an UEFi BiOS that requires some hybrid 32/64 boot-loading scheme myself. Thanks giving it a try anyway!!
'Expirion-5.0.2-Xfce-241104.iso' (2G0)
Verified twice using Thunar v4.18.4 + GtkHash v1.4, but i still don't believe it's able to complete booting on that user's machine which is likely to search for 'bootia32.efi' and drop to a CLI, as this critical component failed to show up in the .ISO unless it's hidden deeper elsewhere.
Refering to MX i observed these are conventional locations typical of Debian derivatives, in addition to '/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/' and their related resources:
/boot/grub/i386-efi/
/boot/grub/i386-pc/
/EFI/BOOT/BOOTia32.efi
/EFI/BOOT/BOOTx64.efi
With those also optionally present at times:
/EFI/BOOT/grubx64.efi
/EFI/BOOT/mmx64.efi
Yet i've seen exceptions as with RedCore having a less convential tree:
/boot/efi/bootia32.efi
/boot/efi/bootx64.efi
/boot/grub/i386-efi/
/boot/grub/i386-pc/
/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/
Too bad i can no longer perform any test with an UEFi BiOS that requires some hybrid 32/64 boot-loading scheme myself. Thanks giving it a try anyway!!
OP
GatorsFan
Well-Known Member
I have just upgraded my Expirion Linux to 5.0.3 to reflect the upgrade to Debian 12.8 - I also upgraded my LMDE Respin to 6.8 and gave it a kernel upgrade to 6.10.11+bpo also my Debian 12.8 respin as well to kernel 6.1.0-27
If anyone is interested
If anyone is interested
I got it from the previous v5 install that went fine, so now my only interest is about ia32 support which was still absent after i reported it in my last post.
OP
GatorsFan
Well-Known Member
For ia32 support you can use this guide - https://github.com/lamadotcare/bootia32-efi
as I have no way to test it
Last edited:
Me neither, but i did notice it wasn't visible using the archiver utility. If i cared enough i'd try some emulator i guess, but i only mentioned this after a new member came around complaining about his own OS-selective BayTrail, which made me think perhaps that was some nice way to enlarge Expirion's audience. Similar to how i came to discover MX and adopt it when i still had to deal with an hybrid 32/64 bits bootloader on my previous tablet. No more patching for me...
OP
GatorsFan
Well-Known Member
I just uploaded a new one Expirion-5.0.3-Xfce-241117 I added these 3 extra files to /efi/boot - I does work on x64 but like I said I have no way to test the bootia32.efi
Last edited:
I can only imagine how that feels not having a setup ready to validate such tricky sample of work, but i keep thinking Expirion already survives this other test most nicely: to install (& successfully reboot...) from a 'YUMi-exFAT' USB drive, which spares us time & effort evaluating LIVE mode only to decide if it's possible to go further with more permanent adoption, since on a UEFi system exploiting that tool it turns out every new .ISO update no longer requires a slow/exclusive procedure as when dealing with Windows Rufus & co.
Too bad the owner of a ChomeBook Lenovo N23 didn't keep us posted with his progress ~2 weeks ago, while i'd gladly check on my Atom CherryTrail based transformer LapTop if i could. Yet i may happen to have some potentially comforting news for you: Linuxium for Atom "respins" being now gone this leaves such a select niche relatively unoccupied for Expirion and so i'm pleased to point a finger at this script:
Perhaps an emulator would correctly behave as a 32-bits machine but i vaguely recall these either proved having limited hardware port(s) support and/or only allowed short-term "trial" licensing. What i know better is that in some rare cases it was OKay to only copy these few /efi/boot/ supplemental files, but in others GrUB would drop to its CLI and leave me there for a lack of access to the rest of it. Searching for the « ia32 » string through that old script i find it refers to at least one directly-related debian 'grub-efi-ia32*.deb' package and sure enough if i dig inside then there's directory '/usr/lib/grub/i386-efi/' full of module files indeed. In addition the script refers to 'grub-efi-ia32-bin' and a command with this syntax:
So this does confirm my advice of November 4.
In any case it would be great to read that Expirion has been made compatible with these budget ChromeBooks and more!
Too bad the owner of a ChomeBook Lenovo N23 didn't keep us posted with his progress ~2 weeks ago, while i'd gladly check on my Atom CherryTrail based transformer LapTop if i could. Yet i may happen to have some potentially comforting news for you: Linuxium for Atom "respins" being now gone this leaves such a select niche relatively unoccupied for Expirion and so i'm pleased to point a finger at this script:
Perhaps an emulator would correctly behave as a 32-bits machine but i vaguely recall these either proved having limited hardware port(s) support and/or only allowed short-term "trial" licensing. What i know better is that in some rare cases it was OKay to only copy these few /efi/boot/ supplemental files, but in others GrUB would drop to its CLI and leave me there for a lack of access to the rest of it. Searching for the « ia32 » string through that old script i find it refers to at least one directly-related debian 'grub-efi-ia32*.deb' package and sure enough if i dig inside then there's directory '/usr/lib/grub/i386-efi/' full of module files indeed. In addition the script refers to 'grub-efi-ia32-bin' and a command with this syntax:
« grub-install --force --target=i386-efi ...»
So this does confirm my advice of November 4.
In any case it would be great to read that Expirion has been made compatible with these budget ChromeBooks and more!
OP
GatorsFan
Well-Known Member
I have seen this script you mention it does not support Devuan or Debian from line 34 of the scriptI can only imagine how that feels not having a setup ready to validate such tricky sample of work, but i keep thinking Expirion already survives this other test most nicely: to install (& successfully reboot...) from a 'YUMi-exFAT' USB drive, which spares us time & effort evaluating LIVE mode only to decide if it's possible to go further with more permanent adoption, since on a UEFi system exploiting that tool it turns out every new .ISO update no longer requires a slow/exclusive procedure as when dealing with Windows Rufus & co.
Too bad the owner of a ChomeBook Lenovo N23 didn't keep us posted with his progress ~2 weeks ago, while i'd gladly check on my Atom CherryTrail based transformer LapTop if i could. Yet i may happen to have some potentially comforting news for you: Linuxium for Atom "respins" being now gone this leaves such a select niche relatively unoccupied for Expirion and so i'm pleased to point a finger at this script:
Perhaps an emulator would correctly behave as a 32-bits machine but i vaguely recall these either proved having limited hardware port(s) support and/or only allowed short-term "trial" licensing. What i know better is that in some rare cases it was OKay to only copy these few /efi/boot/ supplemental files, but in others GrUB would drop to its CLI and leave me there for a lack of access to the rest of it. Searching for the « ia32 » string through that old script i find it refers to at least one directly-related debian 'grub-efi-ia32*.deb' package and sure enough if i dig inside then there's directory '/usr/lib/grub/i386-efi/' full of module files indeed. In addition the script refers to 'grub-efi-ia32-bin' and a command with this syntax:
« grub-install --force --target=i386-efi ...»
So this does confirm my advice of November 4.
In any case it would be great to read that Expirion has been made compatible with these budget ChromeBooks and more!
SUPPORTED_OS=("Ubuntu" "Kubuntu" "Lubuntu" "Lubuntu-Next" "Ubuntu-Budgie" "Ubuntu-GNOME" "Ubuntu-MATE" "Xubuntu" "Mint" "neon" "elementary" "BackBox" "Peppermint" "Ubuntu-Studio")
This old script wasn't expected to work out of the box for Expirion, especially after noticing this mention:
« ...option is only compatible with an ISO that uses 'systemd'... »
Which made me vaguely remember some previous post(s) about not using it here. Moreover i'd rather keep Devuan's situation separate from Debian-related scenarios finding there's actually a variable named 'DEBIAN_FILE' and even a comment focussing on the notion of a "Debian binary package" too, so that's a lot of Debian stuff and yet that ain't my point.
The usefulness of 'isorespin.sh' should be limited to being a reminder of what's to be provided to GrUB at boot time, e.g. before the OS can kick in. For example the RAMDisk 'initrd*' apparently gets rebuilt besides 'vmlinuz*' and 'efi.img', i also seen keywords like eltorito, iso9660, joliet, mbr and gpt, etc. So these hints tell me it all maters while still searching for an alternative ia32 bootloader.
In addition i've already described what was involved when i used to "patch" .ISOs for use on my Atom CherryTrail, and i did depend on the 32-bits version of Debian for such graft indeed. Then MX Linux spared me the hasle, after that a few others seemed to follow a similar path but i can no longer qualify their level of compatibility with certainty. At the time i was copying my .ISOs on a Ventoy drive, perhaps this is where ia32 support really came from, go figure...
By the way, that script also refers to 'rEFInd'.
Similar threads
