It looks like http://repo.puri.sm/purism/ appears to contain a snapshot of debian stretch, including all packages from “main”. But it does not seem to contain linux-image-4.2.3purism-rc2 or purebrowser. So the purism signing pubkey is not of much use at the moment ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It’s disappointing that the Purism github group doesn’t seem to get any updates, and the link to the repo on https://puri.sm/pureos/download/ is broken, and the instructions for “Make a bootable USB Drive” are kinda wrong (no format or sync steps are needed, it works like sudo cp purism.iso /dev/sdb or sudo dd if=purism.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=8192) etc. I was never really excited for another distro (with all sorts of grandiose and unnecessary claims), but purism is managing to do worse than I expected with this.
They really don’t have a working (update-able) distro together, and at least some laptops shipped without any apt sources (so even standard packages like gcc can’t be installed with apt-get). For me that’s fine. But they really should point people to another distro, as well as have links to their touchpad driver sources, and instructions for building a module or building a whole kernel as required. Yeah “newbies” are just screwed either way.
also the caching situation of this whole website is ridiculous. forum posts don’t appear for hours, and now I see a logged-in wordpress header on http://repo.puri.sm/
Yeah, I was quite disappointed when I booted up Purism OS. I had problems with both keyboard and touchpad, had to plug in usb input devices to click and type, and yeah, there were no repos set up except debian security updates.
Better to start with a fresh install of Debian stretch. With that, I get a working touchpad that can tap to click, but not push to click, and there’s no multitouch.
Seems like Purism should just scrap the custom OS and focus on delivering a touchpad driver kernel module as a deb package.
so I will give some insights here. We are still small team (I am for example just recently added to Purism) and we are still working on our infrastructure to make it easier for us to scale in future.
The new PureOS ISO should now work fine and inew sources.list should give you out-of-box working updates. We had some problems with our archive but not it should work. We are based on Debian Stretch so it is natural to see it (we are still working on proper sync with Debian testing while maintaining our own repo). Our keyring is currently not in use but it is already on TODO list.
For the touchpad - we are actually trying to mainline our patches.
The download page shouldn’t contain anymore any link to repo (as it gets changed now all the time while we test things). Formatting USB before installing OS on it should be done (not mandatory) as your USB can contain bad sectors or software that could “interact” with installation (maybe even remove the bootable flag). The cp should work as the images are hybrid but better to avoid broken hybrid iso with dd command.
The logged in wordpress header is an issue we are working on it so please be patient.
Thanks for using Librem and helping us in making our products everyday better!
Zlatan, getting a response from you is really helpful. So, thank you!
Just my two cents:
Getting patches upstream is obviously the best bet. However, since that’s a always non-trivial effort in any community, I think it’s important to share building/source information here, with your users. If it was a matter of spending X minutes writing instructions for users and X/10 minutes getting it upstream, then yeah: ignore the write-up task and get that patch upstreamed. However, I’m guessing that a decent write-up of current Get-Involved steps would take much less time and would be appreciated (at least by me).
FYI: I’m now unable to use my trackpad altogether (nothing happens, just
lots of /var/log/syslog output, and no xinput -l output for the trackpad).
I tried the latest ISO (tried rewriting it to USB two times now), but I
just keep getting stuck at the graphical installer’s step, “cannot load from CD
ROM, Retry?”
Constructive Resolution:
I think I’d be a lot less frustrated if there were a wiki[1] that looked like a
Purism engineer at least reviewed it. Here I’d expect:
a) how/where i might build stuff myself[2]
b) what i might want to build
c) how you’d like contributions to be returned
Does any of this sound reasonable? Please correct me if I’m missing something
that’s already out there.
Thanks for your efforts so far!
Jon
[1]: Currently the only info I find is the unhelpful “PureOS” splash-page and a
list of Github repos without any guide as to where your TODOs are, what is
currently being worked on, what others might help debug/fix/patch.
[2]: This is really important. This means I don’t have to bug Purism in forums,
emails, etc.; instead, I can just toil away and try to make the Librem
experience better for myself (and share), and Purism doesn’t have to worry about
having staff just to answer support/tech questions.
Thanks for the update. I understand it’s a work in progress. I was just surprised that the device shipped with a version that was so broken (and with no update mechanism set up). But I’ve got standard Debian repos set up now and things are working pretty well. Glad to hear the touchpad driver is making progress.
@Jon hi, do you have Librem 15 or Librem 13 (asking regarding touchpad issues)?
Regarding wiki, yes that is on TODO list. We are waiting for pureos.org domain to expire so we can take it and open there community pages regarding PureOS - and we will call (probably via blog post) all you in community to help us there. Regarding building - if you can build on Debian and understand Debian packaging, you already know everything you need for PureOS. The TODOs are currently internal (as we are are lazy and don’t have a lot of time so we just don’t push it to Github) - but I will go right now and mail us all to put TODOs so community can play with it. We do really want to have full community engagement (hey, most of us emerge from Debian community) and we will have our entire work public and transparent.
In general for now - if you build a debian package (with source included) you could just open an issue at github or send it to support@puri.sm (or just ping us on freenode (#purism)). If you do build I would just make one suggestion - git buildpackage workflow would be preferred.
On the other hand, I want entire community to send any kind of feedback - what they would like to see by default in PureOS, what they want to be improved/used/removed etc etc. We listen closely and things will be better if we all work together.
Can you clarify what the correct instructions are for adding purism’s debian repo?
I currently have the following /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://repo.puri.sm/pureosrepo/ stable main
deb http://security.debian.org/ stretch/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ stretch/updates main
deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian stretch main
deb-src http://httpredir.debian.org/debian stretch main
deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian stretch-updates main
deb-src http://httpredir.debian.org/debian stretch-updates main
... snipped
Ign:4 http://repo.puri.sm/pureosrepo stable/main all Packages
Ign:5 http://repo.puri.sm/pureosrepo stable/main Translation-en_US
Ign:7 http://repo.puri.sm/pureosrepo stable/main Translation-en
Err:3 http://repo.puri.sm/pureosrepo stable/main amd64 Packages
404 Not Found
Ign:4 http://repo.puri.sm/pureosrepo stable/main all Packages
Ign:5 http://repo.puri.sm/pureosrepo stable/main Translation-en_US
Ign:7 http://repo.puri.sm/pureosrepo stable/main Translation-en
Get:11 http://mirror.us.leaseweb.net/debian stretch InRelease [215 kB]
Get:12 http://debian.mirror.constant.com/debian stretch-updates InRelease [113 kB]
Fetched 328 kB in 1s (256 kB/s)
Reading package lists...
W: The repository 'http://repo.puri.sm/pureosrepo stable Release' does not have a Release file.
W: Failed to fetch http://repo.puri.sm/pureosrepo/dists/stable/main/binary-amd64/Packages 404 Not Found
E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.
these lines should be the only one needed atm (put # in front of other lines and put these ones in)
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade (or even dist-upgrade but read what it does). Report if touchpad started working after update (also check touchpad settings)
yep, it was down for a bit (Dreamhost has some weird issues sometimes which they said it will be solved in a month). So if it is down sometimes, just try back later.
I’ve tried downloading it at all different times over the last few days but it seems to be perpetually down. On a couple of occasions it has started to download but only got to, at most, 11MB and then stopped.
