Penguins-eggs: help needed for Manjaro compatibility

Manjaro Development
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Hi Guys, some weeks ago Philip point me to this Italian project; honestly I already know this project but since was Ubuntu/Debian centric I did not take an eye on it for the most time. Well, seem the main developer of this project want to make this tool useful also for all Arch derivates and of course for Manjaro. I have started to help him and seem we are on the right way…

Any help is appreciated … a package for eggs is present in AUR but I can make one based on git … the tools can also be installed via npm and are very easy to make changes after cooking the iso and re-cook the iso…
I also invite the developer to join here in our forum…

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Well, today it’a a great day to be invited to Manjaro Linux forum!

I am the author of penguin’s eggs, a remake of the various refracta, remastersys etc. Since I started the project, actually a few years ago, I always wondered if it was possible to make it universal with respect to the various Linux distributions, the answer I’m finding it five years later - it could be done better - and it seems positive.

At the moment I’m working on manjaro Linux and, thanks also to Stefano’s advices, we are quite close to bring eggs on manjaro.

What’s missing, where do I look for help?

  • I need to overcome the hurdle of creating a working initramfs to mount squashfs with overlay in rw;
  • creating a configuration for calamares;
  • creating a package for manjaro or more generally for arch,

I take this opportunity to wish the manjaro community a Happy New Year!

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https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/eggs/
already in the Arch universe but we can import here and use a git package for the last modifications

Easy with Calamres and its modules :wink:

This is the hard part …

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After a long adventure. finally we have a working version eggs for manjaro Linux!

Well, even if immature, even if to be perfected, the Epiphany brings us a nice goodie, not just to have a new customized iso made with manjaro, but because it was born a new work tool: penguin’s eggs adaptable to a multitude of different distributions.

You can find the manjaro xfce remastered iso, in penguins-eggs page on sourceforge. It is just an example, but it is reproductive: You can install it, customize it and get back a new live cd with calamares installation ready.

NOTE
The present manjaro iso, come with this defect: we don’t find - at the moment - a way to find the iso mounted, probably becouse I used a not so standard way to have a rw squashfs loaded during the boot.

Anyway, that you need, before to run calamares is:

  • open your installation cd, it’s volid is xfce
  • sudo mkdir /run/live
  • sudo ln -s /run/media/live/xfce /run/live/medium

After that start calamares and enjoy!

If you like our efforts to create a nice and suitable way to customize Linux, evolving with the time, it is good time now to add your star to our repo.

Thanx

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The next step is to fix this defect

Personally I’m not an expert neither of Arch Linux nor of manjaro, as eggs I come from Debian and, as penguin I’m omnivorous, so there is hope!

Despite the invaluable help of Stefano, I can’t say that all the problems of adapting eggs to manjaro have been solved, in particular I’m sorry for the need to mount the CD and to create the link.

I think this problem - better described above - comes from the fact that I used an old library to have squashfs, library that I adapted to have a rw configuration with overlay. I think all this can be done with miso, but at the moment I don’t know how to use it.

For example in the original manjaro installation iso, it is possible to find cd in /run/miso/ at this point I can just edit the unpackfs module of calamares and set:

source: /run/miso/live/filesystem.squashfs

Someone experienced in the subject would be of great help, even if only with a suggestion, directions, etc.

Thanks

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I just released a new version of eggs-9.0.1, I solve the problem described before and now the behaviour ot the resulting iso is anologue to the original one, no need to mount iso, no need link and so on.

I used the hook miso from manjaro-tools and now calamares find the filesystem.squshfs under the path /run/miso/bootmnt/live/x86_64/livefs.sfs as in the original manjaro live image.

There are still a few problems to fix:

  • I did not copy the man page of the manual (on the iso I fixed it);
  • the autocomplete, from bash, is missing: give the command eggs autocomplete and follow the instructions.

What to say, i’m very satisfied and i wish you a good fun

egg-of-manjarolinux-qonos-xfce-amd64_2022-01-07_1707.iso

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XFCE cannot feel alone… so

kde
kde1920×982 136 KB

You can donwload KDE version from sourceforge page of Penguin’s eggs

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Well, guys, since penguins-eggs is now ready for re-mastering, with changes, also Manjaro finally penguins-eggs package is in all of our repo: simply install it and enjoy.
Note: a good point for reading how to use can be there…
If you are impatient try

sudo eggs config
sudo eggs produce

or type
eggs mom for ask directly at eggs what you want

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Testing eggs from manjaro repositories, I created two short videos, illustrating installation, configuration and producing an iso image from our system and installation on the new iso created.

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After two days of cursing behind GRUB and UEFI, the Lucio Dalla song mentioned in the title came back to my mind.

Contribute

If anyone would like to take a look at it, these are currently the configuration files:

while the code that composes the kernel_parameters is found in ovary.ts, in the function makeEfi() line 1335

Thanks

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Now you can easy duplicate your customized manjaro and install it on UEFI or BIOS.

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I just finished to rewrite eggs manual. The original is italian, but of course it’s possbile translate.

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This post should never been closed, is now reopen.

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You are right codesardine… thanx! :smiley:

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After long time, I’m back in the forum I was sollecitated by same mails from moderated - do not make personal info public - forum rule , asking me about eggs on manjaro.

Specking with @Ste74, I found and solved a problem on the installation and just released as iso an my development system, image is called egg-of-manjarolinux-qonos-colibri-amd64_2022-06-04_1945.iso.

This live consist on an updated xfce manjaro minimum plus node, vscode, pnpm.

To start to hack, once installed, you can:

git clone https://github.com/pieroproietti/penguins-eggs
cd penguins-eggs
pnpm i

at this point from the same dir, you can just enter ./eggs to run it.

For example, if you want to create an iso image ot your system:

sudo ./eggs dad -d
sudo ./eggs calamares --install
sudo ./eggs produce --fast

and you will get an iso image installable with calamares.

Working from sources let you to try immidiatly your modification and debug them.

I have a blog inside there is an a bit outdated manual where you can find more information too.

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What’s the point of the penguins-eggs Manjaro community package then? :thinking:

Dumping the entire repo into /usr/lib/ does not look optimal at all. If files are meant to be modified, then they should not be installed to the system. @Ste74 This should not be in the repos like that.

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Hi @Yochanan

perhaps I expressed not clear: eggs - used in this way - absolutely dont put nothing in /usr/lib.

Here I want to say:

You can use eggs from sources to debug, in that case - whitout install it - you can… etc, etc.

This ./eggs is just a script to run eggs from the current directory using directly your sources typesript with node-ts.

When you build the package and an user install it, the question it’s completely different: just your “javascript” code go in /usr/lib/penguins-eggs not the repository.

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Indeed. I’m dropping the penguins-eggs package from the repos, however I will add pnpm to the repos for ease of use. Also, pnpm is pretty neat.

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