MX-23 Raspberry Pi comes out of the garage

[Jerry3904]

<This is both an announcement and a feedback thread>

A much improved alpha2 is now available at the same location.

After more than 2 months of development, we are making available the first alpha of our official Raspberry Pi OS MX respin for public testing and commentary. It is the flagship version of MX-23.1, based on Raspberry PI OS & Debian Bookworm, with Xfce 4.18.

Background
--designed for and tested on Pi 4, Pi 400 and Pi 5
--download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/mx-lin ... pi_respin/
--right-click the compressed (zip) file > open with Archive Manager
--to check integrity against the file in the download folder, open a terminal where you extracted it and enter

Code: Select all

md5sum mx23.1_alpha1_rpi.iso 

Installation
--easiest to use RPi’s Imager to install extracted image to an SD card or USB stick (16 GB recommended minimum size). Imager can be downloaded as a deb
https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/image ... _amd64.deb or flatpak (can use MX Package Installer)
NOTE 1) we recommend you do not use Imager’s “OS Customization” to preload information such as user name, wireless etc. In our testing of alpha1 doing so interferes with our boot process, making it longer and more difficult.
NOTE 2) a great guide to Imager—but ignore the directions after that first section that mostly do not apply to MX: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentati ... -pi-imager
--the boot process will show a couple of screens with lines of code, the screen will blank for a few seconds and then restart to bring up a stripped-down version of MX Installer.
--when you have finished entering information into the Installer, the system will reboot again and drop you on either the login page or the desktop, depending on whether you selected “autologin” in the Installer. From there on, anyone familiar with MX will feel at home.

Testing
--first of all: please tell us which device you were using when reporting results
--this is the first alpha, so it would be most helpful to address what is in it rather than what is not
--do not install from outside the repos unless you are prepared to break your installation. Because of the problems that arose earlier, we have taken great pains to not mix armhf packages with the base architecture arm64.
--there WILL be problems with many of the apps in MX Package Installer at this early stage.

And we're off ...

[Jerry3904]

I'll start with a couple of smaller things I noticed early this morning:

1. that notification on first boot about wifi being available etc. did not show up; it's pretty handy for first-timers
2. the conky also did not show up. I started it with Conky Manager, but after log out/in it again was not showing

[Jerry3904]

Since Raspberry Pi OS for Pi 5 comes with LibreOffice, I installed using synaptic

libreoffice-core
libreoffice-calc
libreoffice-gtk3
libreoffice-impress
libreoffice-writer

Glad to see that it all installs and, from a quick glance, runs correctly.

EDIT: From what I saw, all the major packages were arm64.

[chrispop99]

Since Raspberry Pi OS for Pi 5 comes with LibreOffice, I installed using synaptic

libreoffice-core
libreoffice-calc
libreoffice-gtk3
libreoffice-impress
libreoffice-writer

Glad to see that it all installs and, from a quick glance, runs correctly.

EDIT: From what I saw, all the major packages were arm64.

I installed LO metapackage from the Package Installer, but that missed the GTK3 theming. I've added libreoffice-gtk3, and it works fine.

Chris

[Jerry3904]

Glad to see you're testing this, need your careful eye. Are you using a Pi 400?

[chrispop99]

I wrote the image to an SD card using my preferred utility - gnome-disks. It booted fine. The initial setup screens were a little basic in appearance, but worked OK.
There was no option in the Locales section to change from US, but I was able to change to GB using the MX tool.
After installing LibreOffice, my test USB stick with many common file types on was used to see if files opened in appropriate apps. Some image files opened in ImageMagik, others didn't open, so I installed gThumb. Common images then opened OK, although not .psd or heif/heic. That was expected as not all Linux image viewers open them. (Nomacs does, but there is no ARM version as far as I can see.)
All video and document types opened as expected.

I know how much work as gone into this, primarily by @Jerry3904 and @dolphin_oracle , so very well done on getting so far with it. When it first booted to the MX-23 background and panel, I actually started to laugh as it seemed funny to see that on a Pi.

Chris

[chrispop99]

Glad to see you're texting this, need your careful eye. Are you using a Pi 400?

I'm on a Pi 4 at the moment, but have a 400 I can use if there would be a benefit. I don't have a Pi 5 as I don't have a use case to justify getting one. (I would rather they started production of the last version of the 3, because that is more useful for some projects.)

Chris

[Jerry3904]

I installed LO metapackage from the Package Installer, but that missed the GTK3 theming.

On the Pi 5 I had no LO metapackage. @dolphin_oracle That lireoffice-gtk3 package appears to be important to include, according to posts on the RPi Forum.

[dolphin_oracle]

we *could* put the entire default application set for the Xfce edition on the img if that's what folks want.

major item is figuring out what doesn't install from mxpi -> popular apps. there are a crap-ton of entries.

[Jerry3904]

The five I installed seem pretty functional so far, people could add themselves what else they wanted.

Could exclude Impress too.