[Inx] inx-lucid-alpha-2

[Peter Garrett]

Hello all,

I've uploaded a new iso, inx-lucid-alpha-2. It is not very different
from inx-lucid-alpha, but I have made a couple of changes that need
testing. Links at the bottom of this message, in the forlorn hope that
people will actually read and act on it ;-)

First:

I have 'blacklisted' the nouveau driver and the radeon driver, and two
intel drivers. The reason for this is as follows:

* Ubuntu Lucid preferentially loads these drivers even on a non-X
  system. This would be fine, but unfortunately directfb cannot handle
  the frame buffer that these drivers appear to create. Mplayer can't
  handle this either. The result without the 'blacklisting' is that
  mplayer plays video in black and white in a small format, and that
  links2 -g (a.k.a. xlinks2) runs without directfb, which takes away
  mouse scrolling, and is slower.

* I recognise that this is an ugly hack, since the 'native resolution'
  frame buffer is of course superior to the vesafb frame buffer, but as
  long as INX is run without X the drivers concerned just cause problems
  as noted above. Directfb and mplayer don't seem to be able to handle
  the 'full colour' RGB framebuffer, sadly.

Second:
* Fixed the bug in cdmp that made it unable to recognise the CD
  (added /dev/sr* to the checks). Cdmp should now play audio CDs.

Third:
* Fixed a couple of issues in the 'inxusb' script that creates a
  bootable USB of INX. 
  These are: 
  - because Lucid is bloated, the INX partition has been upped from 
    250MB to 300 MB for installing to USB.
  - 'vol_id' no longer exists, so I re-coded the volume UUID line to use
    'blkid'

  With these fixes I was able to create a 'persistent' USB of
  inx-lucid-alpha-2. The only fly in the ointment here was that
  for some reason on boot the USB install went into an endless loop
  checking the floppy drive (/dev/fd0). I told the BIOS that the floppy
  didn't exist, and then it booted... This is not very satisfactory
  since the floppy *does* exist, but I thought I'd mention it in case it
  happens to you. This did not happen with hardy-inxen, so I suspect a
  bug in 'upstart', or something of the kind.

Known Issues:
* Tried to use 'lsb_release' to ID the iso, but got it wrong in the
  script :/
* Missing 'patience' game
* Various places where 'Ubuntu 8.04' is mentioned instead of '10.04'

Unknown issues:
* Probably lots ;-)

******** What I *really, really* need you to test: ********

* People with nvidia, ati or intel video cards/onboards - please see if
  mplayer plays in colour (easy way is to go to "Fun & Games" to play
  "A New Computer"), and check to see if the mouse scroll works with
  xlinks2. Please include your particular video card in reports (ati,
  nvidia, intel)

  ****N.B.***
  You need to test this from boot on actual hardware, not in
  a virtual machine like Virtual Box or VMware. Sorry if that's obvious
  - just covering the bases ;-)

* Test the 'inxusb' script as above. You can run it from the 'tools'
   menu - it is under " i: Install Information and Options " - or just
   run 'sudo inxusb' from the command prompt.

* If you have the time and patience, try to run as many INX menu entries
  as you can, to see if they do what they are supposed to do...

Regarding the blacklisting of drivers - at the moment I don't think
installing to a hard drive is going to work all that well, if at all,
but if you used to do a hard drive install and then install
"ubuntu-desktop" or just "xorg" and so on, X will probably break.

Of course, doing that is heresy since (*cough*) INX's not X 
*grin*

Do please grab the newer iso and test as above. I have an nvidia card,
and this blacklisting hack Works For Me (tm), but obviously I need
people to see if it Works For Them (tm) ;-) Ditto the other tests...

Links for the new .iso :
http://inx.maincontent.net/devel/unstable/lucid-inx/

Direct links:

http://inx.maincontent.net/devel/unstable/lucid-inx/inx-lucid-alpha-2.iso
http://inx.maincontent.net/devel/unstable/lucid-inx/inx-lucid-alpha-2.md5sum

For those new to the list: please report to the list, so that we can
discuss and/or be aware of issues, whether my ugly hacks do what is 
expected, and so forth.

An INX based on Lucid depends on you, since I have only my hardware on
which to test, and of course we know Linus' Law about "Many eyes"
making all bugs shallow!

Peter
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