Crux diary

[hazel]

My second week and I have some sort of workable system now. I haven't booted Debian for several days.

What I most like about Crux:
1) It's very easy to understand the internals. For example the startup is simplicity itself compared with System 5. Just one script to do basic initialisation and one to start the services.

2) It really is fast. I can boot to a GUI prompt in 40 sec (that's on a Celeron P3 with only 128MB core). Firefox loads in 8 sec! On Debian I used Kazehakase wherever possible because Iceweasel was so slow. No such problems here.

What I don't like:

1) The Crux version of hwclock only recognises hardware clocks that run in local time. Mine runs in UTC but hwclock doesn't correct for that!

2) the shortage of software. Even with the contrib port activated, there's not a lot of stuff available. Where do Crux users get their applications from?

The shortage has led me to improvise creatively. For example, I can't get anacron and without it cron doesn't work reliably for me. I don't run my machine regular hours. So I've put my daily tasks in rc.local instead like so:

#!/bin/bash
#
# /etc/rc.local: local multi-user startup script
#
# Check if /usr/man/whatis and /var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db have already been 
# modified today - we may be rebooting:
#
whatisfile=`find /usr/man -name whatis -daystart -mtime 0`
mlocatefile=`find /var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db -daystart -mtime 0`

[ -z $mlocatefile ] && /usr/bin/updatedb 2>>/var/log/notcron &
[ -z $whatisfile ] && /usr/sbin/makewhatis -w 2>>/var/log/notcron &
/usr/sbin/pwck 
/usr/sbin/grpck

exit

I still need to know more about managing Crux in practice. For example how often does one update? With Gentoo I religiously synced and updated every day. With Debian Stable, I do it once a month. But most important is to learn where to get software.

[hazel]

Grr!! Just as I thought I was settling in, this happens:

I decided to sync ports and do a system update. There were new versions of glib and gtk, which updated successfully, and then xulrunner and firefox. I knew xulrunner would take hours but I gritted my teeth and accepted it. To my surprise, it refused to compile as I didn't have alsa installed. I never bothered to install it as I don't use sound on my computer at all, and the previous version of xulrunner didn't require it. On Gentoo, I could have set a USE flag to exclude alsa support. But OK, this is Crux, so I installed alsa-libs and tried again.

This time it compiled for hours and then failed because of a "footprint" mismatch. Several files were missing - headers concerned with wifi. I don't have wifi! And why doesn't it check the footprint (which I take to be a form of manifest) before it does all that compilation, not afterwards?

The prt-get man page is no use; it says you can ignore the footprint or give an instruction to update it but it doesn't tell you when it is safe to do either. There's a question in the Crux FAQ on footprint mismatches, which says that extra files are no problem but missing ones suggest an unmet dependency. That is not the case here; I've checked for missing dependencies and there are none. So what do I do now? Re-update with "ignore footprint"?

There's also a firefox update pending and I'm not looking forward to it. I think it will "upgrade" firefox to behave like the version I had on Gentoo, which used sqlite to handle its internal files and was grindingly slow. Of course I know I could lock it against updating, but I feel the browser is to a computer what your skin is to you - the main interface with the outside world - so it ought to be kept up to date for security reasons.

And then there is the problem with my hardware clock. Since I've installed Crux, the clock doesn't work properly even in Debian! But I'm going to put that in another thread.

[reed9]

Hazel, I marvel at your tenacity. Reading over your crux posts again, should you get tired of source-based distros, I really really think you would like Arch Linux.

The startup script has the same simplicity as Crux. It may not be quite as fast, I'm not sure, but it is pretty darn quick. My Dell Mini 9 netbook boots in around 18 seconds from the bootloader into a pekwm session. And you can of course compile yourself a leaner, meaner kernel if the stock has too much cruft in it for your tastes.

There's a tremendous amount of software available, if not through the official repos, then the Arch User Repo through PKGBUILD scripts (similar to ebuilds in Gentoo).

It's easy to customize packages and build them yourself if you need to add or remove configurations. Not quite as simple as in Gentoo with USE flags, but nearly so.

I hate to evangalize, but again, looking at your posts from Gentoo and Crux, I can't help but think Arch might just fill your needs better than the others.

[Dapper Dan]

Hi Hazel...

On the footprint deal. You're right in that it would be more convenient for it to let you know about the mismatch beforehand and it is a pain. Routinely when compiling I just set the option for it to ignore the footprint mismatch...

prt-get depinst -if package

There is also the problem from time to time with md5sum mismatch that can be solved similarly...

prt-get depinst -im package

So far, I've not run into any problems with ignoring either in the years I've been doing it.

On the packages... Aside from core, opt, contrib and xorg, have you added any of the others? I'll usually go to the repositories page, do a ports search for the package(s) I want and add the corresponding repositories to my /etc/prt-get.conf and /etc/ports. A few I've found useful over the years are yhafri, ecarux, romster and sepen. yhafri has over 2000 packages so is a must for me.

On updates, I never have a set time to do it and will occasionally do a prt-get sysup at night before going to bed. If everything is working satisfactorily, I might go months without updating. I've been a long time advocate of the adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" but that's just me...

Hope this helps...

[hazel]

On updates, I never have a set time to do it and will occasionally do a prt-get sysup at night before going to bed. If everything is working satisfactorily, I might go months without updating. I've been a long time advocate of the adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" but that's just me...

Hope this helps...

So once a month would be good enough? That's what I do on Debian. I'm a great fan of "If it ain't broke don't fix it, but I'm not sure that's adequate for browsers on account of the security issues.

So far, I haven't activated any other repositories. Perhaps I'll try that.

Reed9: I'm inclined to agree with you but I don't want to chicken out too soon. You don't really get a feel for a distro in just one week. But if after a few weeks more, I'm still fed up with all that compiling, Arch is definitely the next one on the list.

[Dapper Dan]

So once a month would be good enough? That's what I do on Debian. I'm a great fan of "If it ain't broke don't fix it, but I'm not sure that's adequate for browsers on account of the security issues.

It's never seemed to be a problem for me to take this approach. On browsers and other security sensitive software, you can always just update it instead of the entire system:

prt-get update firefox

Another resource I've found useful is the #crux IRC channel on Freenode. Many of the ports maintainers are usually on.

[hazel]

Now that I've got the clock to work in Crux, I decided to take advantage of the famed Crux speed by installing OpenOffice, a package that I'd never bothered to install in Debian because I'd used it in Ubuntu and it absolutely crawled. I mean half a minute to load...

This is a binary package. I suppose if it was source it would take a week to compile. At first I couldn't install it - footprint problems again, and when I told it to ignore them, some libraries didn't get installed and the program wouldn't run at all. I traced the problem back to a puzzling cpio message "no space left on device" (which meant that one archive file couldn't be unpacked), but it took me a bit of detective work using watch df to find out that it was actually the ramdisk on /tmp that was getting overfilled. Today I unmounted this and used the literal /tmp directory on my root partition, which is about ten times as big. Installation succeeded.

So I decided to do a benchmark trial. I couldn't believe my eyes! OpenOffice loaded in 7 seconds!. That is the same time as abiword takes to load in Debian - and abiword is a much smaller program. I think I am going to enjoy Crux!.

[acrux]

What I don't like:

1) The Crux version of hwclock only recognises hardware clocks that run in local time. Mine runs in UTC but hwclock doesn't correct for that!

that's incorrect, UTC is the right choice in your /etc/rc.conf

TIMEZONE=UTC

but remember to sync your hw clock with your system clock (man hwclock)

2) the shortage of software. Even with the contrib port activated, there's not a lot of stuff available. Where do Crux users get their applications from?

cruxers usually already know what they needs from their own machines then they very often have their own private ports repository.

I still need to know more about managing Crux in practice. For example how often does one update? With Gentoo I religiously synced and updated every day. With Debian Stable, I do it once a month. But most important is to learn where to get software.

security updates are reported on CRUX official ml


have fun with your CRUX!

greets,
Acrux

[acrux]

I decided to sync ports and do a system update. There were new versions of glib and gtk, which updated successfully, and then xulrunner and firefox. I knew xulrunner would take hours but I gritted my teeth and accepted it. To my surprise, it refused to compile as I didn't have alsa installed. I never bothered to install it as I don't use sound on my computer at all, and the previous version of xulrunner didn't require it. On Gentoo, I could have set a USE flag to exclude alsa support. But OK, this is Crux, so I installed alsa-libs and tried again.

this "funny" dependency is a xulrunner-1.9.1 issue

And then there is the problem with my hardware clock. Since I've installed Crux, the clock doesn't work properly even in Debian! But I'm going to put that in another thread.

see my previous reply

[hazel]

that's incorrect, UTC is the right choice in your /etc/rc.conf

TIMEZONE=UTC

but remember to sync your hw clock with your system clock (man hwclock)

The clock thing has been sorted - see the thread I started in the hardware forum. Some more experienced cruxers made the same mistake here as I did.

cruxers usually already know what they need from their own machines then they very often have their own private ports repository.

That sounds great. How does one do it? Is it anything like a portage overlay in Gentoo?

security updates are reported on CRUX official ml

I'm not on that yet. I've always found mailing lists rather intimidating compared with forums. Dapper Dan says once a month overnight is OK for the standard sysup on Crux, so I suppose if I keep abreast of security updates and do them ASAP and then once a month for everything else, I should be alright.