I got my R-01 module the other day, and I gotta say it’s a weird mix of nostalgia and novelty. I frankly love the default twm + gkrellm look. It’s been a long time since I last used a real retro desktop. As I’ve been poking around at the OS, I’ve learned some things I want to share.
First, the sources.list is configured for devel instead of jammy. Fix that up with a quick sed command.
sudo sed -i 's/devel/jammy/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
Next, there’s something wrong with update-notifier. If you try to apt dist-upgrade and you watch what’s taking so long in htop you’ll notice that one of the problem is that some update-notifier scripts run lsb_release thousands of times. I have a suspicion that this is actually due to something not being enabled in the kernel. More on that later. But we don’t need it, so gonzo.
sudo apt remove update-notifier-common
I like to keep my systems minimal, so the next thing I did was install debfoster to trim it down. There’s a lot of stuff on the OS image you don’t need, like XFCE, GIMP, Inkscape and Chocolate DOOM, along with really a ton of others. It’s kind of astounding how much junk you don’t need is on here. You have to be careful because the devterm-* packages don’t necessarily require all the packages they need, but there’s a lot of fat you can trim if you want to. I like to do this before updating to reduce the number of updates.
Bootloader Configuration
There’s a “bug” mentioned on the wiki that an upgrade will overwrite your boot configuration in /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf but there’s a backup file for you to use. It’s not really a bug, rather the system is configured to update the boot configuration when kernels are installed or uninstalled. You can stop that from happening by removing all the Ubuntu kernels:
sudo apt remove linux-*5.*
Then to make sure the right parameters are set in extlinux.conf if u-boot-update ever gets run for some reason, you can configure it properly in /etc/default/u-boot:
## /etc/default/u-boot - configuration file for u-boot-update(8)
#U_BOOT_UPDATE="true"
U_BOOT_ALTERNATIVES="default"
#U_BOOT_DEFAULT="l0"
#U_BOOT_ENTRIES="all"
U_BOOT_MENU_LABEL="DevTerm R01 OS"
U_BOOT_PARAMETERS="earlyprintk=sunxi-uart,0x02500000 clk_ignore_unused initcall_debug=0 console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0 cma=8M LANG=en_US.UTF-8 fbcon=rotate:1"
#U_BOOT_ROOT=""
U_BOOT_TIMEOUT="0"
U_BOOT_FDT="board.dtb"
U_BOOT_FDT_DIR="/usr/lib/linux-image-"
And re-run u-boot-update to undo any mess made when removing the Ubuntu kernels.
Kernel CONFIG Deficiencies
There are other things that seem to be broken. For example you’ll see something like:
systemd-journald[103]: Failed to set ACL on /var/log/journal/a4f7484327ea45d0adefc49de6774111/user-1001.journal, ignoring: Operation not supported
That’s probably because:
# CONFIG_EXT4_FS_POSIX_ACL is not set
It turns out there are a lot of kernel configs, required by systemd, that are not set but should be:
# CONFIG_FHANDLE is not set
# CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER_API_HASH is not set
# CONFIG_NET_NS is not set
# CONFIG_USER_NS is not set
# CONFIG_EXT4_FS_POSIX_ACL is not set
# CONFIG_SECCOMP is not set
# CONFIG_SECCOMP_FILTER is not set
# CONFIG_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE is not set
# CONFIG_BPF_SYSCALL is not set
# CONFIG_BPF_JIT is not set
# CONFIG_CGROUP_BPF is not set
# CONFIG_EFIVAR_FS is not set
It’s possible some of these just aren’t available yet for riscv64, but several of them seem to be resulting in systemd having issues.
systemd Woes
In general systemd seems to be ailing on this kernel. When I’ve tried to apply updates, systemd eventually gets broken so that you can’t talk to it at all. That makes your updates extremely slow as there are half a dozen calls to systemd for any package that runs a service.
I tried updating just systemd, udev, and related things first, then rebooting. It didn’t help systemd not fall over eventually anyway, so I suspect the kernel configuration is at fault. It still seems like a good idea to update those core services first though.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install udev
sudo reboot
Updating
Hold on to your butts!
This works, but it starts to not work if systemd falls over:
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade
The best way I’ve found to kick it along is to run sudo htop in another window and be prepared to kill things that get hung. Running it in Tree mode helps you see what’s below the apt process.
