(OLD) (ARCHIVED) Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

3guesses · Joined: 30 Sep 2014 Posts: 172

Just FYI, I used Frugal Pup v13 in an attempt to be able to boot a frugal install of Bionic Puppy 8.0 x64 in a dedicated partition on the internal eMMC of an Asus T100TA - and it completely trashed the machine. You can see further details on this thread: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php. It has taken a day for me to repair the damage.

Given my experience and the damage this package can do, my personal opinion is that Frugal Pup is too dangerous to be publicly available without considerable re-coding to incorporate extensive error-checking, warnings, logging of actions performed, etc, etc.

Yes, I am not best pleased,

gyro · Posted: Sat 25 Jan 2020, 03:07 Post subject: Warning Warning Warning

Warning Warning Warning

"3guesses" has discovered, the hard way, an important issue with FrugalPup.
It completely clobbers any pre-existing bootloader stuff on the fat32 partition that it installs 'grub2' to.
This is a problem in a dual boot situation, if you choose to install 'grub2' to the fat32 parition that contains the uefi Windows boot.
This is not a problem if you choose a boot device, other than the Windows boot device.

A fixed version of FrugalPup will be available soon.

gyro

foxpup · Joined: 29 Jul 2016 Posts: 1141

gyro · Posted: Sat 25 Jan 2020, 08:33 Post subject:

@foxpup,
I think for now, I'll stick with using an alternate boot medium, and leave the Windows one to Windows.
I'll just make sure it's a lot more obvious in FrugalPup, if folk are choosing to clobber a Windows uefi boot.

gyro

gyro · Posted: Sat 25 Jan 2020, 08:43 Post subject:

Thers is another issue with FrugalPup v17 (and earlier), it does not contain support for 32bit efi, i.e. there is no '/EFI/BOOT/bootia32.efi'.

I have discovered that this is the reason that my "Lenovo ideapad 100S-11IBY" has failed to recognise any of my "uefi" usb sticks until now, even though I had "SecureBoot" disabled.

This will be fixed in the next release.

gyro

foxpup · Joined: 29 Jul 2016 Posts: 1141

gyro · Posted: Sat 25 Jan 2020, 22:17 Post subject:

I'm changing FrugalPup to "tar xf --overwrite" the boot stuff,
and adding red warning messages in FrugalPup and DiskPup about boot files being overwritten.

My Windows grub2 entry looks like:

gyro

test FrugalPup uefi compatibility with ".zip"

I have uploaded 'test-efi-no-sec-17.zip' (1.1MiB) and 'test-efi-no-sec-18.zip' (2.1MiB) to http://www.mediafire.com/folder/rdyc5lgzpeij1/frugalpup.

Each is meant to be unzipped to the root of an empty usb stick. They expand to less than 10MiB.
Then attempt to uefi boot the usb stick using the bios boot menu.
If it boots to a yellow on blue grub2 menu, then FrugalPup should be able to install Puppies that will uefi boot on your machine.
If it is available, but booting it fails authentication, then "SecureBoot" is still enabled. But FrugalPup installs should uefi boot on your machine, if you disable "SecureBoot".
If the usb stick does not appear in the bios boot menu, then there is no chance that FrugalPup installs will uefi boot on your machine.

'test-efi-no-sec-17.zip' does not contain 32bit uefi support, and so represents the capability of current FrugalPup's.

'test-efi-no-sec-18.zip' contains the 32bit uefi support, that will be included in the next release of FrugalPup.

My "Lenovo ideapad 100S", with "SecureBoot" disabled, boots a 'test-efi-no-sec-18.zip' stick, but fails to recognise a 'test-efi-no-sec-17.zip' stick.
But my desktop machine will boot both.

gyro

gyro

FrugalPup 18, DiskPup 18, StickPup 18 and f2StickPup 18 - Puppy frugal installers.

Download extra sfs 'frugalpup_18.sfs' from http://www.mediafire.com/folder/rdyc5lgzpeij1/frugalpup (2.6 MiB).

This is another bugfix release.

Bug:
FrugalPup and DiskPup delete all files in '/boot' and '/EFI' on fat32 boot partition.

Fix:
All installers in the FrugalPup group, now only overwrite individual files.
So, any files with non-matching names will be retained.
e.g. any files in '/EFI/Microsoft' will be retained.
Also, both FrugalPup and DiskPup contain warning messages about the overwriting.

Bug:
FrugalPup did not contain any support for 'bootia32.efi' (32bit).
FrugalPup installs did not work on uefi computers that looked for '/EFI/boot/bootia32.efi'.

Fix:
Support for 'bootia32.efi' is now included in all FrugalPup installers.

gyro

gyro · Posted: Mon 03 Feb 2020, 01:18 Post subject:

Thanks to "jamesbond", I now have an efi boot solution that should work in most situations.
It supports both 32bit and 64bit efi.
It supports "SecureBoot" enabled, provided the "Puppy_key.cer" is enrolled as a MOK.
Of course it also works with "SecureBoot" disabled.

Now I have to fix FrugalPup to do installs that include this new efi stuff.

The next version will also, in a non-uefi boot, chainload grub2 from grub4dos. (The grub4dos mbr installer is much much easier to use than the grub2 one.).
Thanks to "foxpup" for this suggestion.

There are a couple of features I'm considering, that probably won't make it into the next version, but maybe the one after that.

1. Add a new facility to FrugalPup called "Grub2" that installs Grub2 to a selected fat32 partition.
And change the "Boot" facility so that it no longer installs Grub2, just creates/updates the 'grub.cfg' file.

2. Provide a facility to update the 'grub.cfg' file with an appropriate "Windows" boot entry.

gyro

jamesbond · Joined: 26 Feb 2007 Posts: 3475 Location: The Blue Marble

gyro · Posted: Wed 05 Feb 2020, 07:46 Post subject:

FrugalPup 18sb, DiskPup 18sb, StickPup 18sb and f2StickPup 18sb - Puppy frugal installer.

Download extra sfs 'frugalpup_18sb.sfs' from http://www.mediafire.com/folder/rdyc5lgzpeij1/frugalpup (2.9 MiB).

This is a test release.
It includes the latest "jamesbond" support for uefi with SecureBoot,
this includes support for computers that require 32bit uefi,
and a Puppy MOK in the file 'puppy_key.cer'.

When doing a uefi boot of an install by this FrugalPup,
for the first time on a particular computer with "SecureBoot" enabled,
MOK processing will be entered, simply "enroll" the key stored in the file '/puppy_key.cer'.
Subsequent boots on the same computer, should proceed directly to the Grub2 menu.

Of course you can avoid the MOK processing, by disabling "SecureBoot".

This FrugalPup still supports non-uefi booting with Grub2, so the same 'grub.cfg' is used for all booting.
Only it now chainloads Grub2 from grub4dos, hence the presence of '/grldr' and '/menu.lst'.

Note on MOK processing:
It seems that the partition selection screen is a little more user friently if the fat32 boot partition has a label.

MOK: Machine Owner Key

gyro

bigpup · Joined: 11 Oct 2009 Posts: 13981 Location: S.C. USA

FrugalPup 18sb

did an install of Bionicpup64 8.0 to a USB flash drive.
Drive partitioned with two partitions.
small fat32 first partition
ext3 2nd partition.

Installed Bionicpup to 2nd partition and boot stuff to first partition.
Installed uefi boot.

First boot on a computer with secure boot enabled.
Did as you say

gyro · Posted: Fri 07 Feb 2020, 06:33 Post subject:

@bigpup,
Thanks for testing.

Yes, the MOK screens need documentation. but since we are not the only folk who use MOK manager, I'm hoping to find some on the web before the release of FrugalPup v19.

Error message:
It means exactly what it says, the script '/usr/local/frugalpup /frugalpup-dobootpart' failed because it could not find the named directory.
The named directory looks quite odd, as though the script got a little confused. The question is, why did it try to use that name?
Unfortunately I would need to know the full set of imputs used to get to that result, in order to have any chance reproducing it.

gyro

jamesbond · Joined: 26 Feb 2007 Posts: 3475 Location: The Blue Marble