We have just finished the release of eggs for manjaro linux, it has been a nice undertaking and a nice discovery, a system how to say: fast, updated and performing.

What opportunities for the future and growth of eggs?​

eggs as backup system​

A dear friend of mine suggested me to propose it as a backup tool, in fact - server side - it is already possible to create a complete backup of an installation and reinstall it.

What's more, it is also possible to transfer a server for example from a node in India to one in Germany, without having to expose the data.

In fact the backup is done by eggs copying the ENTIRE system except the /home folder, then a LUKS volume is created with our pass phrase that will be required during the installation.

Without the knowledge of the pass phrase, you will be able to restore the system but not our data.

This security might not be necessary for a home backup, and you could add a flag to save a user's home for personal use as well: carry the complete system on a flash drive and so on.

eggs as a tool for creating vertical deployments​

Although it started as a personal tool, eggs has grown in recent years and is already used by some Linux distributions derived from Debian, Devuan or Ubuntu.

With the inclusion of manjaro we have a tool that allows us to create our own custom version of the system in an extremely fast and professional way, on a myriad of derived distributions.

In the long run it is more constructive to use the original material and have the possibility to handle and adapt it to our needs than to take for example the tools of one and recreate your own. It's simply faster!

The road to a school or corporate distro is paved and has been beaten since the days of systemback, now there are new possibilities and a better level.

eggs on other architectures arm64, armel​

With the transition from node 8.x to node 16.x, we had to give up the long-standing i386 compatibility. We could take the opportunity to test the arm64 and armel architectures, in this we are also helped by the fact that manjaro has its own development group on this architecture.

Conclusions​

I believe that this tool, the ability to "reproduce" the system may appeal to many and many may adopt it.

On the other hand, the concept of population diversification, reproduction and selection is not new and, according to observation of nature, quite powerful.

So it remains to be understood what the roads may be, but they are certainly open.

Yes, I think we found our wonderfull mascot: ironic, fat and - of course - italian. Not only, as eggs, inside contain mainly krill!

You never forget your first love

To tell the truth it's not quite true that linuxmint was my first love, initially I loved Knoppix and its KDE3 interface more and it didn't make me feel lonely in the unknown country.

But with the switch to KDE4 for a long time I found in cinnamon the favorite desktop and learned the name of Clement Lefebvre and his famous Linux Mint distribution.

So I have always considered Linux Mint even if derived from Ubuntu as a primary distribution and on the occasion of the release of version Una 20.3 I immediately made it compatible with eggs.

Linux Mint Uma remastered with eggs

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle

Il precedente post era del 24 novembre 2021, mi ero appena immerso nella riscrittura di eggs al fine di includere altre famiglie di Linux oltre a quelle di discendenza Debian, Devuan ed Ubuntu.

Giusto dopo un mese di lavoro, ho cominciato a vedere i primi risultati e sono stato contattato da Stefano Capitali di manjaro che, interessato ad eggs mi proponeva un suo aiuto.

Grazie all'esperienza di Stefano che mi ha dato le principali indicazioni, l'abbrivio ed è inoltre l'autore del pacchetto, giusto per l'epifania, la Befana ci ha portato il regalo della prima versione di eggs funzionante su Manjaro Linux.

Potete trovare altre informazioni sul forum di manjaro

Ho appena finito di aggiornare il manuale di eggs allineandolo alla versione 9.x.

Lo potete trovare, oltre che dal link fornito, dal menu Documents.

eggs in questo momento ha raggiunto praticamente la totalità delle distribuzioni basate su Debian e da queste derivate: Devuan, Ubuntu e le innumerevoli altre.

Un buon successo, per un software di sistema ed in particolare della rimasterizzazione del sistema stesso al fine di ottenere da un sistema installato una sua immagine installabile ed avviabile. Tuttavia da quando è stato pensato, la sua indole è stata sempre quella di essere per così dire "universale" ed allora come fare per includere le altre famiglie di Linux?

Vi sono almeno altre due famiglie Linux ampiamente diffuse: sono quelle di derivazione Fedora/Redhat e quelle di derivazione Arch. Ce ne sono anche altre, nondimento importati storicamente o che lo potrebbero diventare in seguito: penso a slackware, gnuix ed nixos in questo momento, ma sicuramente c'è e ci sarà, ancora dell'altro.

Bisognerebbe trovare qualcosa di comune a tutte esse, innanzitutto per distribuire il programma.

AppImage e flatpack potrebbero essere interessanti per questo. Se eggs fosse rilasciato come appImage, potremmo prescindere da apt e portarci direttamente su appImage alcuni degli strumenti di cui abbiamo bisogno:

• dosfstools
• parted
• rsync
• squash-tools
• xorriso

In aggiunta, credo che i seguenti pacchetti siano universalmente installti:

• coreutils (normalmente presenti)
• cryptsetup (normalmente presenti)

Abbiamo quindi, per la famiglia Debian le seguenti necessità:

• isolinux // indispensabile per boot
• syslinux-common
• live-boot
• live-boot-initramfs-tools

Occorre capire come nella famiglia redhat ed arch tutto ciò potrebbe realizzarsi e dovrebbe essere piuttosto fattibile visto che sia redhat che arch hanno strumenti validi di rimasterizzazione.

Dalla pagina di archiso

The following packages need to be installed to be able to create an image with the included scripts:

• arch-install-scripts
• awk
• dosfstools
• e2fsprogs
• erofs-utils (optional)
• findutils
• gzip
• libarchive
• libisoburn
• mtools
• openssl
• pacman
• sed
• squashfs-tools

Il problema di Arch linux è che è si un sistema pulito e documentato, ma è ... palloso!!!

Mandato alla malora Arch linux, ho scelto la prima distribuzione basata su Arch linux presente in distrowatch: EndeavourOS e non ho potuto che stupirmi.

Ho sempre utilizzato calamares per installare sistemi live e pensavo che fosse questo il modo, in EndeavourOS viene utilizzato in maniera diversa e permette - a partire dallo stesso disco di installazione, di installare l'interfaccia grafica che più ci aggrada.

Non dovendo andare troppo per il sottile, necessitando giusto di qualcosa di maneggiabile ho scelta xfce4 e dopo un breve minutaggio necessario a scaricare ed installare i vari pacchetti il sistema si è installato.

Da notare anche nella loro configurazione di calamares la presenza di un tasto per la visualizzazione della finestra di debug, utilissima a noi sviluppatori.

niente da dire... mi sto innamorando!

Pulito, bella grafica, snello. Me lo immagino installato su computer leggeri e datati...

Oggi ho provato a far girare eggs su Arch... risultati? Soddisfacenti, ma c'è lavoro da fare e, non voglio inguaiare la parte stable di eggs.

Sulla macchina di test, sono riuscito a far funzionare eggs dad -d ed iniziare la produzione. Ho però problemi con la comprensione di pacman, ad esempio sudo pacman -S calamares dovrebbe installare, appunto calamares, ma semplicemente non lo trova.

Una buona idea che replicherò sulla versione di eggs in linea, almeno sulla 14.18 che dovrà evolvere per abbracciare archlinux è quella di introdurre per ogni distribuzione il concetto di familyId, con tre possibilità: debian, fedora, arch.

Questo mi consente una migliore gestione dei processi di installazione, rimozione, controllo del pacchetto.

Un altro grosso problema è la non uniformità dei nomi dei pacchetti, così la famiglia debian ha dei nomi, la famiglia fedora degli altri ed anche la famiglia arch.

Dovrei, a priori tenere traccia di tutto quello che occorre - poche cose in verità - e organizzare una tabella a tre per ogni famiglia.

Per oggi basta così, s'è fatta 'na certa...

Appunti sparsi

pacchetti Debian utilizzati attualmente​

Abbiamo dei pacchetti comuni, alcuni già di norma installati, alcuni necessari semplicemente per la pacchettizzazione, altri necessari per comprimere e generare la immagine iso, boot etc. Li ho denominati common. Altri pacchetti invece, variano a seconda della architettura i386, amd64, armel o arm64. Altri pacchetti ancora variano a seconda della versione della distribuzione in uso. I pacchetti più "particolari" sono i pacchetti live-boot e live-config che sono perltro tipici di Debian e non presenti in altre distro.

common​

• coreutils // indispensabile whoami
• cryptsetup // indispensabile
• dosfstools // indispensabile creazione disco EFI
• dpkg-dev // necessario per la creazione della repository locale yolk
• isolinux // indispensabile per boot
• live-boot
• live-boot-initramfs-tools
• parted // indispensabile
• rsync // indispensabile
• squashfs-tools // indispensabile
• syslinux-common
• xorriso // indispensabile

dipendenti dalla architettura​

• package: syslinux, arch: ['amd64', 'i386']
• package: 'syslinux-efi', arch: ['arm64', 'armel']

dipendenti dalla versione​

• package: 'live-config', versions: ['jessie', 'stretch']
• package: 'live-config-systemd', versions: ['jessie', 'stretch', 'buster']
• package: 'live-config-sysvinit', versions: ['beowulf', 'chimaera', 'daedalus']
• package: 'open-infrastructure-system-config',versions: ['bionic']

Pacchetti live​

live-boot​

live-boot contains the components to configure a live system during the boot process (early userspace). Do not install this package on your regular system, it is only meant to be used in a live image.

live-boot-initramfs-tools Live System Boot Components (initramfs-tools backend)

live-config​

live-config contains the components to configure a live system during the boot process (late userspace).

You can use eggs on all the following distributions, always having an easy installer available: krill a console line tool, but usable as GUI for the "older" distributions like Debian jessie and Debian strecth or the versatile graphical installer calamares for all the others. Of course You can always use krill on system without GUI, this is a clear advantage if you want to build easy-to-install liveCDs for server systems.

• Debian: 8.x jessie, 9.x stretch, 10.x buster, 11.x bullseye (stable), bookworm (n development);

• Devuan: 3.x beowulf, 4.x chimaera (stable), 5.x daedalus (n development);

• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS bionic, 20.04 LTS focal, 21.10 hirsute, 21.10 impish, jammy (n development);

and all the derivates, including deepin, linuxmint, KDE neon and many, many others.

Distros derivated from Debian, Devuan and Ubuntu

Prior to the release of eggs-8.17.11 a big effort was also made to review many old iso's previously released from Debian jessie in naked and minino versions, to naked versions of stretch and buster with both amd64 and i386 architecture.

In this screenshot you can see the eggs krill installer in action on a Debian jessie derivative that does not support calamares minino-TDE

Again calamares installing Linux Mint tricia i386, based on Ubuntu bionic and remastered with eggs-8.17.11.

This is a latest addition Kali Linux a security distribution. Some people will turn up their nose at the idea of a remastered security distro and I can agree. But with eggs we can remaster it ourselves and decide in which way to modify it, so - all in all - the problem does not arise. Moreover it can be used directly live with our configurations, etc.

Once the ISO image is obtained, the installation takes place with calamares in no time, moreover being a live system it can also perform its tasks directly.

This is what kali linux remastered looks like, of course you can apply any customization.

In my adventure to create an updated remastering tool compatible with the Debian, Ubuntu, Devuan world I'm running into the following problem:

I can remaster practically everything from Debian Jessie to bookworm and from Ubuntu bionic up to the development version jammy - instead, I can not and I have not understood why - to do the same with the latest version of neon with plasma-5.23. I also report that the problem does not occur, however, with Kubuntu 21.10 impish with the beta of plasma-5.23 installed. From a neon system installed, the ISO builds normally and is bootable, but when I go to boot from the liveCD obtained, the system does not come to show the monitor and moreover giving ALT-CTRL F2, F3, etc can not open the console.

Someone, could give me some clues or suggest me a way to debug?

Contact​

• mail: piero.proietti@gmail.com

• meeting: jitsi meet

• gitter: penguin's eggs chat

• issues: github.

• facebook:  

  • penguin's eggs Group
  • penguin's eggs Page

After a bit of trial and error I finally managed to recreate the ppa penguins-eggs-ppa repository.

This repository currently includes only the amd64 version, I don't know the method to include also the i386 and ARM versions.

I think it's not so difficult to create this repository with all architectures but, unfortunately, I'm not an expert in this field. If someone can help is, of course, welcome.

Copy and past the follow two lines:

curl -SsL  https://pieroproietti.github.io/penguins-eggs-ppa/KEY.gpg | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/penguins-eggs-ppa-keyring.gpg
sudo curl -s --compressed -o /etc/apt/sources.list.d/penguins-eggs-ppa.list "https://pieroproietti.github.io/penguins-eggs-ppa/penguins-eggs-ppa.list"

Then

sudo apt update
sudo install eggs

After that you can continue following the eggs official book.

Since October 20 I removed the penguins-eggs forum, unfortunately I didn't have time to consult it and I prefer so there is only one place for assistance and support, in this case facebook group penguins-eggs where most users - technical or not - can easily sign up.

Similarly I removed the link to devpost, for the same reasons, I do not have time to update it. You can find videos on youtube.

I also have problems with the penguins-eggs-ppa repository. I created it following this guide but at the moment I have no way to update it, I should redo it from scratch. If someone is expert can contact me either on facebook group or email me.

the ppa repository is important because it would allow the upgrade in standard mode through apt of the remastering software. I plan on recreating it, but I wouldn't mind some assistance and help.

I believe that this remastering tool can be of great use and necessary to facilitate the existence of small and large remasters of Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Unfortunately, keeping up with a myriad of cases is difficult and, lately, I don't have too much time to devote to penguins-eggs.

Basically keeping general purpose remastering software up to date requires more of an organization than an individual, I've achieved a good level of quality in the product, but keeping it up to date continually requires new development, debugging and feedback.

At the moment eggs is probably the only software capable of remastering for both i386 and amd64 Debian, Devuan, Ubuntu and derivatives. Also, in perspective, it is compiled for arm64 and armel as well, but it is too big for one developer.

Thanks for your attention

Some time ago, after an incautious update, I found myself in the unpleasant situation of removing node8 from the compatibility list with eggs. Node8 is, however, the only version of node compatible with i386 architecture and therefore, for a remastering program, important.

Since then, this happened roughly at the end of June 2021, I have also made subsequent changes alas lost or to be recovered in the maze of git.

I took the last working version of eggs the 8.0.30 and recompiled it as eggs-8.17.0 with the intention to update the upgradable, I've already seen that a simple npm update blows compatibility, and reintroduce the changes after the switch, especially the calamares configuration without the need for password entry.