[LetuxOS] LetuxOS: some recent updates

[H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Hi all,
to make this list a little more active again, I think it is good
to report about some small progress of LetuxOS every now and then.

Different flavours of LetuxOS run on several other devices:
Pyra, RasPi 3B+, Udoo neo, Kobo Clara/Tolino Shine, CI20, PinePhone,
Letux 400, BeagleBoard, BeagleBone, PocketBeagle, PandaBoard, OpenPandora
and perhaps more. No longer supported are Acer n30 and Sharp Zaurus.

GUI flavours are: LXDE, XFCE, Mate, QuantumSTEP, QtMoko, Replicant, ...

Overall the LetuxOS target is to be GUI and hardware agnostic for
small devices - like you can install macOS or desktop Linux on almost
any machine... This is not the case for ARM/MIPS based small devices.

LetuxOS Kernel news will continue to be posted as usual on
https://lists.goldelico.com/mailman/listinfo.cgi/letux-kernel

At some point it is planned to move the list-host to letux.org
and rename this list to make it more clear that LetuxOS is more
than for the GTA04. 

Now, here are some news:

a) letux-usbmount.deb

has been updated to be compatible with Stretch, Buster, Bullseye
but still with Jessie.

Its function is to auto-mount an USB stick plugged into some USB
port automatically in /media/letux/$label and independently of
any desktop setup.

The mount point uses the disk label or the UUID if there is none.

This version also better cleans up mount points in /media/letux.

For source code see: https://git.goldelico.com/?p=letux-rootfs.git;a=commit;h=42ee2864f76e07f2b80aaf400d415209a110ba81

b) letux-sources-list.deb

has been updated to use https download where possible.

See: https://git.goldelico.com/?p=letux-rootfs.git;a=blobdiff;f=packages/letux-sources-list/letux-sources-list.preinst;h=a53550c402f8da52d6ce968b2316de7caae6193e;hp=158d5969f77cf1398c9eac74da62c74fa8cd800a;hb=82f6273a17aed191c1dfd228c830bd5e47fc89a8;hpb=42ee2864f76e07f2b80aaf400d415209a110ba81

c) makesd

There was an incompatibility of makesd with some host systems,
e.g. Ubuntu 16.4. It turned out that the version detection for
sfdisk was broken and makesd did supply command options that
are not available and therefore failed.

And to make it worse, the output of sfdisk --version depends
on the locale and can't be uniquely parsed if we do not use
a standardized locale.

Other recent improvements are that there are new options of
makesd to fine-control which versions are installed:

-v		overall version (e.g. stable or latest)
-vk		version for kernel, device tree and modules
-vb		version for u-boot
-vr		version for rootfs

This allows to mix e.g. stable versions of kernel and u-boot
with latest user-space or vice versa. Default is always "stable".

Example:

DEV=/dev/sdb makesd -vk latest -vr 20210616-stretch-9.13 udoo-neo -r minimal

meaning to install stable u-boot, latest kernel (currently 5.13-rc7)
and a specified rootfs. Rootfs flavour is "minimal", i.e. headless
without GUI.

You can update your makesd simply by running "makesd -u".

See: https://git.goldelico.com/?p=letux-makesd.git;a=summary

d) kernel

The "latest" Kernel has been upgraded to letux-5.13. The "stable"
i.e. recommended kernel (note: does not yet support all devices)
is 5.4.128.

Also note that there are some kernel-variants working with the old
Replicant 4.2 rootfs image :)

See: https://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-kernel/

e) Debian rootfs

Recently the rootfs images have been updated for ARM. Latest
available versions are:

wheezy       7.11
jessie       8.11
stretch      9.13
buster      10.9
bullseye    11.0

The mips versions are a little older. Anyways, we recommend
to run an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade after first boot
and every now and then.

See: https://download.goldelico.com/letux-debian-rootfs/?C=M;O=D

BR,
Nikolaus