Experimental frugal install

[trawglodyte]

does it add an entry to UEFI?

I want to say the way I did it did not write anything to the EFI partition. But I'm not entirely sure because I don't remember if this "boot" folder was there before or not. (The MX folder is from a different, traditional filesystem install). I didn't even think about it because I found that menuentry and put it in my Debian grub. I can do another frugal install and find out if you want me to.

Screenshot from 2024-02-14 19-00-19.png

Screenshot from 2024-02-14 19-10-44.png

[Adrian]

No worries... I was thinking maybe fehlix knew that offhand...

[fehlix]

Haven't tried frugal installation in a loooong time, does it add an entry to UEFI?

No. Frugal install just creates the /antiX-xxx directory
with content and generates /antiX-xyz*/grub.entry
It does not provide any further means to get it booted.

Available Boot options are:
* the grub.entry copied as custom.cfg to /boot/grub of an existing grub-install
or
* from LiveBoot ( with the same kernel and use the live-system to find and boot the Frugall install)
by using any frugal boot options
or
* from LiveSystem GRUB menu -> Boot Rescue -> search for "frugal installs", which search for the grub.entry files

[Adrian]

Would it be nice/possible to provide a way to install a UEFI entry?

[BitJam]

Haven't tried frugal installation in a loooong time, does it add an entry to UEFI?

fehlix covered how a frugal install modifies the system, namely it adds a directory to an existing partition and copies files into it. That's it. No partitioning, no creating file systems, no modifications of any bootloaders. The philosophy behind this was to first do no harm. IOW, we try to play well with others and be a well behaved guest so we make it difficult for the user to use a frugal install to harm the current system or prevent it from booting.

Would it be nice/possible to provide a way to install a UEFI entry?

IMO the frugal install process is not the best time to do this. The basic idea of the frugal install is to piggy-back on the existing system using an existing bootloader, either the live-usb bootloader that was used to do the install or an existing Grub bootloader already installed on the system.

For example, we provide the text of a Grub entry for booting directly into the frugal install but we rely on the user to manually add this entry to their grub.conf. This avoids us having to select/guess which grub.conf to modify and avoids us possibly screwing up the existing bootloader.

In the bad old days frugal installs would often bork existing systems and do other weird things. We tried to steer clear of this bad behaviour as much as possible.

[trawglodyte]

EDIT - I was way off about update-initramfs, it works fine on frugal install.

Maybe I should try it again. I thought what had happened was when I installed the nvidia driver, update-initramfs tried to find / on the partition (well, it's not there in a frugal install) so error. I tried tiny-initramfs and dracut. dracut did it's thing without error, but I'm not sure if it worked right. I wound up with a system that said it had the nvidia-driver installed but was giving me VGA display on one monitor with my other monitor dead....

Maybe I misunderstood the information I was getting from the terminal, or maybe I made some mistake. But I just concluded update-initramfs won't work on a frugal install. And, if that's the case, I am probably going to run into other problems with current debian packages not playing nice with a frugal install. I base this partly on recent experience with BookwormPup64, a frugal install Puppy Linux that has apt and uses debian bookworm repository. But it's issues go a little deeper because it's really more radically different from Debian than MX Linux, and frankly, not as well developed as MX Linux.

I'll do that, I'll try it again, try to make sure it's not some error on my part and find out for sure if update-initramfs can run on a frugal install or not.

p.s.- the "do no harm" policy worked out in reality. I put the frugal install on a partition with several other frugal installs. When I did it, I really didn't know if it would wipe the partition or not. I wanted to find out, so I tried it. It just made itself a folder and left everything else alone.

[fehlix]

Would it be nice/possible to provide a way to install a UEFI entry?

Nice definetly. Possible, yes, we "only" need to generate a "frugal" grub.efi, in order to keep the frugal-dir concept and avoid any use of /boot/grub
to not conflict with any normal grub install, so we clearly separate frugal from normal grub-installs.

[fehlix]

Maybe I should try it again. I thought what had happened was when I installed the nvidia driver ...

Nvidia diver installation on MX best to be performt with:

Code: Select all

sudo ddm-mx -i nvidia

or with the menu entry "Nvidia installer"
On Live-booted system like Frugal one would best doing a remaster in order to get the nvidia driver also into the squashfs linuxfs, otherwise you may get conflicts with drive state files saved across live-reboot.

Next is to adjust live boot parameter, by adding

Code: Select all

xorg=nvidia nouveau.modeset=0

b/c we have not injected the nvidia driver into the live-initrd
and we need to tell kms not to load nouveau driver either.
E.g add those boot parameter into the grub.entry (custom.cfg)

[trawglodyte]

@fehlix You are the man!!
exactly what you said, I used MX nvidia-installer, did a remaster (I LOVE RemasterCC btw, it's so awesome on a frugal install that I can do that as well as the other options it gives me) , added xorg=nvidia nouveau.modeset=0 to menuentry.
Reboot and all is good again.
I was way off about update-initramfs, and I apologize for posting that here before doing more trial-and-error.

I don't know if it's worth mentioning all I did prior to these steps, because it probably was unnecessary. Installing nvidia drivers on freshly installed operating systems is something I consider myself pretty knowledgable about, but I was totally lost on this one. lol.

[thomasl]

But I just concluded update-initramfs won't work on a frugal install. And, if that's the case, I am probably going to run into other problems with current debian packages not playing nice with a frugal install.

I do realise that you've solved that specific problem but I just want to my $0.02 re general compatibility (or lack thereof) of a frugal install. I started with a frugal MX17, but just for testing, more than six years ago. Then I created an MX18 frugal install maybe five or so years ago, updated that to a frugal MX19 and last year updated this to frugal MX23. (In other words, I am using MX since 2018 without it ever being "installed" in the traditional sense. Also, the same install -- literally the same five files (vmlinuz, initrd.gz, linuxfs, rootfs and homefs) -- is re-used in three PCs here and also boots into PCs of friends and relatives w/o problems.)

In all those years I haven't had a single problem which I could trace back to me using a frugal install. The one thing that very occasionally creates trouble is software that requires systemd (frugal apparently doesn't support booting into systemd... have never tried it). So far, I've always found workarounds and made it work anyway -- but that certainly could be a weak point.