Myth busted: Can you run sway/wayland’s i3 without systemd or elogind?

For those who want to skip the discussion and get right to it follow the steps at this README

For a while, we have heard this justification, among distributions that have refused systemd as init, that elogind was adopted as a necessity for running wayland which is the future of graphical desktops.  Some future this is, but anyway.  For Artix it was a day one decision, for Void and Adelie it has been a year or more, for Slackware a few months.  But it is only a handful of distros at this point that have totally refused the use of elogind and stick to consolekit2 (which was recently upgraded upstream unlike common myth that has it abandoned).  Consolekit2 can handle logind functionality but can’t provide seat management.  So there is seatd, a daemon that just does this.  So count the different functions, unrelated to each other, that systemd provides all in one huge blob.

Arch-linux building from source – and Obarun to the rescue

What if, there was a benefit in building from source, a system that is commonly used by pre-fabricated binary packages, like Arch or any of its forks and desktop flavors?  What Arch considers a “clean-chroot” is primarily of need to developers ensuring their package can be both satisfied for all dependencies AND are reproducible, as long as this can be achieved within a constantly rolling distribution.  That is open and nearly free condition for you.

Why

Building in a clean chroot prevents missing dependencies in packages, whether due to unwanted linking or packages missing in the depends array in the PKGBUILD. It also allows users to build a package for the stable repositories (core, extra, community) while having packages from [testing] installed.

Scratch most of this for several reasons.  We are not developers, we are building our own system like Gentoo-ers, k1ss-ers, Crux-ers, and others do.  We want to make sure that each of our packages fits well within the parameters of our specific machine, and it wasn’t built on another machine that may not be 100% compatible to ours.

Glaucus Linux α = musl-c-library toybox-utilities init=finit

https://glaucuslinux.org

This is a very alpha project with very promising prospects.  Not much software other than the core basics, a tiny kernel that boots in QEMU and other virtual realities, it can possibly boot on some plain-jane hardware, we didn’t try.  It is tiny in size and tiny in resource use.  In our tries we were booted and loged-in as root with about 14MB of Ram use.

If you don’t like Qemu you can use its utility to convert the image to a vdi (VirtualBox)

qemu-img convert -O vdi glaucus-bennettae-finit-x86_64-30092020.img glaucus-bennettae-finit-x86_64-30092020.vdi

 

FSF Richard M. Stallman and the gangsters of the globe

There is much talk these days about RMS, the founder of FSF returning to the board of FSF and IBM refusing to have him, popular demand, vote, or otherwise.

I could list countless articles here as a detailed research on the matter, but the plethora of them TOTALLY MISS THE ISSUE.

Who decides and how is a decision made?  Is it influence by rational arguments or is it a choke-hold maneuver that even his (RMS’s) dearest of friends can’t escape?

The rational argument by IBM, and their fellow mutually interested global giant corporations, is “YOU DO AS WE SAY, OR NO MONEY COMING TO YOU“.

Roy Marples’ family and friends sharing dhcpcd

CALL FOR ACTION

Roy, get well soon.  Get some quantity of fungi.com mushrooms or even go to the real forest and eat them off of tree branches.  It is how nature intended healing for its forest children.

Roy Marples is the man behind dhcpcd for many years.  Despite my disliking of this package, and its systemd automation approach to a paternalistic networking setup, particularly writing and rewriting over your DNS setup providing dns characteristics of your router (which may not be yours) and not the system itself, I have to admit its superior reliability.

If you are new and lost, you boot up and your ethernet is not connecting, the quickest, easiest, most reliable solution to it all is dhcpcd.  If dhcpcd can’t connect you, chances are the cable is broken or the router has gone belly up!

Long live roy.marples.name and family

Openbox tweaks and tricks – no {dbus,ck2,elogind,dm} no user services needed

Although this was created with Obarun/Arch based distros in mind it works pretty universally for nearly all distro that have openbox available (nearly all except for Adelie that is).  About building and installing obmenu-generator there is an older article here.

Originally published in the Obarun Forum, so here is a copy:

Openbox tweaks and tricks – no dbus – no ck2 – no user services

Minimalist tricks and treats

To start you need xorg-xinit and openbox installed:

From AUR download, build, and install obmenu-generator

You can use pacopts or cower if you don’t have something else as an AUR helper, ask for help if you want details, especially if you want to install yaourt, the best AUR helper ever created which was taken off AUR for a second time in less than a year.  I wish they would make their minds up!

Popular mythology spread by IBM parrots elogind vs consolekit2 1.2.2

Thanks to the great work by Eric Koegel and Antoine Jacoutot we were not wrong again!

Parrots never think of what it is they say, they hear things (generally things are heard through highly paid and supported media that serve corporate and state interests) and reproduce the sound of them.  Not that they are dumb, but they can’t process rational language based communication. 

QUESTION: Why are you dumping consolekit2 and use elogind, that you know is just a significant piece of systemd, which further makes upstream reliance to systemd more acceptable and wide spread?

EXCUSE:  Consolekit is deprecated, it is unmaintained, it will never work with Wayland, and we must support wayland because that is the future.

QUESTION: Could consolekit2 be able to work with wayland?

EXCUSE: No, it never will!

QUESTION: Elogind, being a piece of the most convoluted piece of opensource software ever encountered is very big.  Shouldn’t this be a performance concern?

EXCUSE: No, because consolekit was also huge!

---

ANSWER:  Consolekit2 1.2.2 was released Dec.20 2020 and among its changes is a memory leak fix, NetBSD/OpenBSD fixes/compliance and more.  If you notice in the list of issues and discussion there has been a workaround to get ck2 to work with wayland in Gentoo since 2018. 

Consolekit2 is between a 1/5 to 1/6 of the size of elogind!

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Zenwalk Slackel Salix – Slackware without systemd?

Run, don’t just add it on the TDO list, and download images from those two (Salix is dormant and part of Slackel) and if you do an installation, DO NOT do a network install, do copy from live image, or from CD.  We will explain later, while you are downloading those historic pieces of Slackware forks.

Cut them some slack?  New Years day and all happy hunky dory crap….  Not here folks, go to Phoronix or Fedora-Magazine for such festive atmosphere.

Slackel and Zenwalk (2021), report by Oneirosopher

A Short MEMO on Slackies to serve for all purposes…

Slackel has been designed so that:

• it comes for 64-bit and 32-bit CPUs as well;
• be %100 compatible with Slackware (Current) –beware: as such, it comes with elogind;
• it may be capable of using Salix’s source packages;
• it provides an OpenBox flavour (OB is not in the Slackware repos);
• the KDE-desktop is KDE 4;- MATE is more recent: 1.22;
• it comes with house-built Slackel tools: slapt-get & slapt-src to CLI-manage packages, Gslapt as a GUI frontend for the both of them;
• it provides, quote: “a ‘rolling release’ for lazy slackers” (Dimitris’ words);
• its ISOs both enable to install the system and to run (fast) live-sessions;
• it enables to create a liveUSB with persistance features directly from within a live-session;
• since last version, it be possible to perform a real installation on a USB media, which differs from liveUSB with persistance (it doesn’t get slow when more packages are installed).

2021 hardcore list of linux without elogind and other systemd tracking devices

        Edited: Dec 30th 2020

This list is going to be short and there may be a sublist of distros with a medium strict standard.  We shall explain what the object is, below the short list (which we hope the community will assist in making longer as we have not been able to currently review the work of every distro and fork.

2021 list of “healthy” hardcore distros in alphabetical order

1.    Kiss Linux –> k1ss.org
2.    Kwort Linux –> kwort.org
3.    Obarun Linux –> obarun.org
4.    Sabotage Linux  –> sabotage-linux

Hardcore because they seem honest and dedicated to the war against totalitarianism by IBM and other mega corporations to dominate the Open and Free software world.

mr Edward Snowden, facebook and open/free code directed to linux users

This is going to be short, it is me not providing information but asking for it from the community.

Snowden has come out and spoken loudly on facebook, google, and other social media, of being up to no good against people using their free services.  I can’t find any reference on how exactly those mega corporations deal and cooperate with state agencies, or even whether state agencies relate to the foundation of such corporations.  If, and whether, some were founded specifically for the purpose of what they are accused of doing, by Snowden and many others who are less well known.

Why was Nutyx dropped from our lists

NO PUBLICITY IS BAD PUBLICITY

In our initial review of Nutyx, more than a year ago, we did not see a distro struggling for identity, we applauded their effort to make a linux system work without components of the pest (systemd, pulseaudio, gnome, wayland, etc.) but independently using the “stable” consolekit2, sysvinit as tried and refined for decades, and their very own tool for package management, cards.  Revisiting it now, after comments on our list of linux distributions without systemd, we were both disappointed and curious on why and how they did such a thing.  We have seen others go, but they were more like forks of a system than an independent distribution.  Like ArchBang, the fleadog of flea dogs.