VortexBox 2.5 BETA

[vbbob]

FWIW, I'm running 2.5 and just ripped an Audio CD and it appeared to rip fine. DVD's also still rip but are stored to "unknown"

Have you tried another CD or DVD?
Is there a way to test or replace the drive?

03/31/2019 20:53:05 - Optical disk detected - type : Audio CD
03/31/2019 20:53:06 - Ripping from /dev/sr0.
03/31/2019 20:53:11 - MusicBrainz does not know this discid! Using freedb instead.
03/31/2019 20:53:12 - The following CD will be ripped ...

[chabelo]

I don't understand why a new VB release would be based on a platform (Fedora 25) which reached end-of-life on December 2017. Why not build a new release on the latest Fedora 29?
I reached a point about a year ago when I could no longer tolerate the various issues - security being foremost - associated with an increasingly obsolete platform. I managed to cobble together my own compromise solution with a combination of Fedora 29 Server, LMS, and various packages. I don't have every last feature replicated but it serves my purposes. Most importantly it's secure and stable, and I'm not beholden to any single developer or development team for updates going forward.

[dyohn]

I don't understand why a new VB release would be based on a platform (Fedora 25) which reached end-of-life on December 2017. Why not build a new release on the latest Fedora 29?
I reached a point about a year ago when I could no longer tolerate the various issues - security being foremost - associated with an increasingly obsolete platform. I managed to cobble together my own compromise solution with a combination of Fedora 29 Server, LMS, and various packages. I don't have every last feature replicated but it serves my purposes. Most importantly it's secure and stable, and I'm not beholden to any single developer or development team for updates going forward.

Andrew explained that he likes to build his OS on top of an older Fedora release to ensure stability.

[chabelo]

Andrew explained that he likes to build his OS on top of an older Fedora release to ensure stability.

Fedora official releases are pretty darn stable. Each release goes through a fairly elaborate release cycle - Alpha, many months of Beta, etc. I've been keeping current on Fedora releases on my laptop since Fedora 22. I usually wait about a week after an official release for the dust to settle but to be honest I haven't seen any chatter about problems with official new releases since Fedora 24 or before. And even then, none of these minor - usually convenience - issues would have fallen into the "stability" category. If Andrew knows of any instability anecdotes with official Fedora releases he should share them both with the VB and the Fedora communities as they are news to me.

The lack of updates and support with End-of-Life platforms is a huge issue and only becoming more important. Regular (supported) updates cover a multitude of sins.

[chabelo]

Also - for the past several Fedora releases the upgrade process has been extremely slick. A few simple commands result in seamless upgrades in about 30 minutes or so. If would be nice if Andrew could migrate VB packages and repo's to the new Fedora releases while they were in Beta. I'm sure most of the code of the packages in the VB repo would be relatively unaffected through most releases He would have time to tweak and test so that when the new Fedora release became available VB users could migrate. That's the typical open source protocol under the Fedora framework.

[bart]

chabelo,
Since the post where you mention Fedora 29 Server, I wonder if this Fedora version could be the architecture to future-proof Vortexbox.
Especially what I understand about the Modularity structure, up-to-date core, different modules, different life-cycles, etc., it also should be possible to mix new and old rpm's based on individual specs (sw & hw).

But let me be clear I'm no expert at all, although tempted I'll try to skip this Beta period (this time) and stick to a working (!) system, to enjoy the music ...

cheers,
/bart
(a relatively long time, very happy, and thankful Vortexbox user)

[Doris1997]

I absolutely Agree!

[Wirrunna]

I have tried 3 times now to prepare the USB boot drive. I followed the instructions precisely and executed the 64 bit batch file. All went as per the instructions. However, when I then install the thumb drive in my motherboard and boot it boots into Clonezilla, not the Vortexbox installation script. As I said I have prepared the thumb drive 3 times now and its always the same; boots into Clonezilla. Anybody have any hints or ideas ?

Sean, I finally got it to work.
My problem is cheap uefi motherboards that don't allow you to turn off the uefi.
On the https://clonezilla.org/downloads.php page under Hints it tells you that "If your machine comes with uEFI secure boot enabled, you have to use AMD64 version of alternative (Ubuntu-based) Clonezilla live."

I downloaded and set up a USB key with the AMD64 version. Then I unzipped the vortexbox-25-20190306.zip image and from C:\Downloads\Vortex Box\VortexBox Images\vortexbox-25-20190306\home\partimag I copied the vortexbox-25-20190306 folder to another USB key.
Then after booting up the Clonezilla live, go through the keyboard etc defaults, then select Device-Image, local_dev, restoredisk, pick the vortexbox-25.. folder from your USB, nominate the target and use the beginner settings.
All worked to a SSD.

[Wirrunna]

All the usual repos are disabled -

[[email protected] ~]# dnf repolist all
Last metadata expiration check: 1 day, 4:55:24 ago on Sun Apr  7 08:35:50 2019.
repo id                                          repo name                                                          status
fedora                                           Fedora 25 - x86_64                                                 disabled
fedora-cisco-openh264                            Fedora 25 openh264 (From Cisco) - x86_64                           disabled
fedora-cisco-openh264-debuginfo                  Fedora 25 openh264 (From Cisco) - x86_64 - Debug                   disabled
fedora-debuginfo                                 Fedora 25 - x86_64 - Debug                                         disabled
fedora-source                                    Fedora 25 - Source                                                 disabled
updates                                          Fedora 25 - x86_64 - Updates                                       disabled
updates-debuginfo                                Fedora 25 - x86_64 - Updates - Debug                               disabled
updates-source                                   Fedora 25 - Updates Source                                         disabled
updates-testing                                  Fedora 25 - x86_64 - Test Updates                                  disabled
updates-testing-debuginfo                        Fedora 25 - x86_64 - Test Updates Debug                            disabled
updates-testing-source                           Fedora 25 - Test Updates Source                                    disabled
vortexbox                                        Packages for VortexBox                                             enabled: 44
vortexboxbeta                                    Packages for VortexBox                                             disabled

Will they be enabled in the next version ? It makes for a quick update though !

[SeanMiddleton]

Sean, I finally got it to work.
My problem is cheap uefi motherboards that don't allow you to turn off the uefi.
On the https://clonezilla.org/downloads.php page under Hints it tells you that "If your machine comes with uEFI secure boot enabled, you have to use AMD64 version of alternative (Ubuntu-based) Clonezilla live."

I downloaded and set up a USB key with the AMD64 version. Then I unzipped the vortexbox-25-20190306.zip image and from C:\Downloads\Vortex Box\VortexBox Images\vortexbox-25-20190306\home\partimag I copied the vortexbox-25-20190306 folder to another USB key.
Then after booting up the Clonezilla live, go through the keyboard etc defaults, then select Device-Image, local_dev, restoredisk, pick the vortexbox-25.. folder from your USB, nominate the target and use the beginner settings.
All worked to a SSD.

Hi Wirrunna

Sounds like you may have a solution, I too use UEFI only motherboard (Asrock J5005) so likely we have identical problem.. I'll give it a go this evening.

When you copied the unzipped vortexbox folder over to your thumb drive did you perform the Windows procedure to make it bootable (as specified in the VB 2.5 installation instructions) ?

Cheers
Sean

[Wirrunna]

Hi Wirrunna

Sounds like you may have a solution, I too use UEFI only motherboard (Asrock J5005) so likely we have identical problem.. I'll give it a go this evening.

When you copied the unzipped vortexbox folder over to your thumb drive did you perform the Windows procedure to make it bootable (as specified in the VB 2.5 installation instructions) ?

Cheers
Sean

Sean, No, just copied the folder.
The bootable image was the "I downloaded and set up a USB key with the AMD64 version" from here - https://clonezilla.org/downloads.php - and booted from that.

The VB2.5 zip file was unzipped on the computer hard disk and using Windows Explorer "vortexbox-25-20190306\home\partimag - I copied the vortexbox-25-20190306 folder to another USB key..

Then after booting up the Clonezilla live, go through the keyboard etc defaults, then select Device-Image, local_dev, restoredisk, pick the vortexbox-25.. folder from your USB, nominate the target and use the beginner settings.

[Alex_M]

Also - for the past several Fedora releases the upgrade process has been extremely slick. A few simple commands result in seamless upgrades in about 30 minutes or so. If would be nice if Andrew could migrate VB packages and repo's to the new Fedora releases while they were in Beta. I'm sure most of the code of the packages in the VB repo would be relatively unaffected through most releases He would have time to tweak and test so that when the new Fedora release became available VB users could migrate. That's the typical open source protocol under the Fedora framework.

I'm pretty sure that Andrew has reasons not to use latest Fedora distro.
I have tested latest ( nightly ) built of LMS on Fedora 29 with minimal amount of packages ( core system ) and it uses 1.5GB of system memory. This is very big since performance setting are on defautl values.

[[email protected] ~]# systemctl status squeezeboxserver
● squeezeboxserver.service - LSB: Startup script for the Logitech Media Server
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/squeezeboxserver; generated)
   Active: active (running) since Sun 2019-04-14 17:34:28 EEST; 14h ago
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
    Tasks: 1 (limit: 2358)
   Memory: 1.5G
   CGroup: /system.slice/squeezeboxserver.service
           └─636 /usr/bin/perl /usr/libexec/squeezeboxserver --daemon --prefsdir=/var/lib/squeezeboxserver/prefs --logdir=/var/log/squeezeboxserver --cachedir=/var/lib/>

Apr 14 17:34:28 vortexbox2.localdomain systemd[1]: Started LSB: Startup script for the Logitech Media Server.

[[email protected] ~]# cat /etc/os-release
NAME=Fedora
VERSION="29 (Twenty Nine)"
ID=fedora
VERSION_ID=29
VERSION_CODENAME=""
PLATFORM_ID="platform:f29"
PRETTY_NAME="Fedora 29 (Twenty Nine)"
ANSI_COLOR="0;34"
LOGO=fedora-logo-icon
CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:fedoraproject:fedora:29"
HOME_URL="https://fedoraproject.org/"
DOCUMENTATION_URL="https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f29/system-administrators-guide/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicating_and_getting_help"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/"
REDHAT_BUGZILLA_PRODUCT="Fedora"
REDHAT_BUGZILLA_PRODUCT_VERSION=29
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT="Fedora"
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT_VERSION=29
PRIVACY_POLICY_URL="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:PrivacyPolicy"
[[email protected] ~]#

IMHO - this is not normal behavior and I will start migration of LMS on different distro like Debian or SuSE to see if there will be difference.

[Pmendes]

2.5 is giving me a pain in the... there is no unzip installed!?!? I installed over may 2.3 VB 2tb drive and it didn't del the old install now I just have de free space left by 2.3. I will have to reformar and reinstall.

Change VB version is a pain. And 3 years to release a Fedora 25 based version is very disappointing.

[Arcticpollen]

It’s easy enough to enable the standard Fedora repos temporarily if you need to install something like unzip etc like I needed to so I could install PHPsysinfo.

[chabelo]

I'm pretty sure that Andrew has reasons not to use latest Fedora distro.
I have tested latest ( nightly ) built of LMS on Fedora 29 with minimal amount of packages ( core system ) and it uses 1.5GB of system memory. This is very big since performance setting are on defautl values.




IMHO - this is not normal behavior and I will start migration of LMS on different distro like Debian or SuSE to see if there will be difference.

Not sure why this is a huge problem. How little memory are you using in your builds? My first VB Appliance had 1GB of memory ten years ago but I've never built a machine with less than 4GB since. If you need a small machine / minimalist build you may be better off running Max2Play on a Raspberry Pi.

Just rolled my Fedora 29 build to Fedora 30 without incident.