Re: aptitude is blowing up again.
On Sunday 04 February 2018 05:23:56 Wookey wrote:
> On 2018-02-03 11:46 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > greetings all;
> >
> > I very carefully selected docs, x11, kde and xfce to be installed
> > on this rock64. That was something over 2000 packages when I hit the
> > g.
>
> Seems a lot, but X and two desktops is a lot of stuff. Using
> --no-install-recommends is one way to install way less stuff. (In the
> GUI untick "Install recommended packages automatically " under
> 'Options'). I always do this for build-dependencies. Possibly not such
> a good idea for a desktop but it should work. Why are you installing
> two desktops if you don't want 'too much' stuff?
>
> I just tried using a bare, current unstable chroot. Installing x11,
> kde, and xfce (sudo aptitude install xserver-xorg xfce4
> task-kde-desktop) is 1792 packages 3907 MB unpacked). Without
> recommends (sudo aptitude --without-recommends install xserver-xorg
> xfce4 task-kde-desktop) it's 1005 packages, 1993 MB unpacked
>
> Doing it in the curses interface gets the same results, showing me
> that xserver-xorg is +67MB,
> xfc4 +1682MB,
> task-kde-desktop +3810MB,
>
> so X is much lighter wieght than a desktop. xfce4 desktop is half the
> weight of a kde desktop.
>
> Now I did just check that on this x86 machine, but it really shouldn't
> be materially different on arm64.
>
> > So how _do_ you control this application?
>
> Aptitude is marvellous. I'm not sure why you are having trouble with
> it.
>
Because the man page sucks dead toads thru soda straws? Most of us are
too used to a decent gui. The man page spends quite close to zero
characters describing what pressing key x does. Its extremely easy to
get lost if you don't have a decent docs from the website visible on
another workspace screen, IF you have x and some sort of a desktop that
allows multiple work spaces. So I am walking back and forth from where
this is peeking out from under one corner of an old dell, and typing on
a keyboard thats resting on a tablesaw, to one of my wheezy machines
where those docs are displayed. All that putzing around is quite
distracting to an old fart having enough troubles with his short term
memory.
Oh and top that off with the fact that at that stage of the install, not
even the man utility is available. That of course is not debian's fault,
sorry if thats what it sounds like, it isn't. But it is what it is.
Have apt install task.xfce brought in the man pages and man so that is
NOW available, but was not yesterday.
At this point, I have 3 major projects to complete before I can test
this.
1. build a realtime kernel, and get it installed on a u-boot system.
Buil;ding the kernel, on the rock64 is a piece of cake, getting it
installed on a u-boot system is not.
2. build the latest git clone of linuxcnc-master.
No problem doing that mid october last year.
3. build the interface hardware to connect a mesa 7i90HD interface card
to the rock64's spi, hopefully using the same gpio connector adapter
thats used on the pi's for this. As cables go, its source terminated and
about 1" long because its a 50 megahertz circuit. Connector orientations
make me mount the pi upside down on standoffs, with a video card fan
under it. NBD.
Looking at the kernels driver src for the rock64, I see that it claims up
to 50 megabaud so there's a chance it might work, but this spi driver is
missing the ability to write at one speed, while reading the responses
at a different, slower speed. And this is a case where every nanoscond
counts.
So there are a lot of "if's" between now and moving machinery in real
time with it, which the pi is doing very well.
The pi's problem is hardware architecture, and results in keyboard/mouse
events being thrown away, something I don't believe the rock64 will do.
> It has a nice interface that make exploring dependencies very easy -
> you can add and remove stuff easily, and it's good at doing tricky
> resolving. It certainly used to be a lot better than apt in this
> regard, although I think they are nearly equivalent again these days.
>
> And you can choose whether to use cli or curses.
>
> > I'm at this point, ready to re-write that image to a 64GB sdcard,
> > and spend days using apt to pull stuff I need in one package at a
> > time. I know you cannot remove a package with it, because its
> > interpretation of dependencies will leave you with an unbootable,
> > destroyed system. Its done that to me several times already.
>
> Nonsense. If you want to report bugs you are going to need to be
> specific, about 'before' status, and 'after' status. If aptitude is
> really messing up arm64 systems just because you asked to remove
> packages then that's not good. But without enough info to reproduce
> nothing much can be done.
After watching it fill up a 32gig pny card, killing it with htop when
there was about 30k of the card left, it did not respond to several
ctl-c's, it kept very good records and wanted to finish the job when I
restarted it. But I wanted to remove a few gig's of stuff I'll never use
first. That was when I powered it down and put a minimal stretch image
on a 64gig card, a samsung, except I've wasted a day getting it to
assign a gateway to the network. Something just had to be changed.
Reason? I dunno.
> > So when do we get a default, just works, does _only_ what you ask it
> > to, text/ncurses based package manager with a bare bones arm64
> > install? Something you can actually build a working system with?
>
> I use aptitude all the time, for many years, on arm and x86. It has
> _very_ rarely screwed up. It's actually quite good at _unscrewing_ a
> machine with a messed-up mixed set of packages.
>
> Are you mixing repositories (like stable and unstable?).
No. /etc/apt/sources is virgin. It may grow an entry to the
buildbot.linuxcnc.org eventually, but it can build the git pull too.
> Be very
> careful if doing that. An incredibly useful tip is to change the
> default aptitude display to include the suite name: change (in
> 'preferences') 'display format' from:
> %c%a%M%S %p %Z %v %V
> to
> %c%a%M%S %p %Z %t %v %V
>
I'm not even sure how to access that. As stated, the man page sucks. So
I've no clue how to access that. And as root, or the user?
msg marked FFR.
> (IMHO this should be the default for everyone).
>
> Wookey
Thank you Wookey.
--
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
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