New Phoenix 23.11 based on Funtoo Next!

Saturday, Nov 11, 2023| Tags: macaroni, release, phoenix

We are happy to announce that after three intense months we have finally completed the migration of Macaroni Phoenix to a Funtoo Next based system.

This is a really good milestone for us because after two years we have been a big step ahead, before becoming an independent project, entering in the Docker Sponsored program, and now with the first big release upgrade. The world is buggy so we are sure that something will be also present in this first big step but we hope the community and the users will be happy about how things grow. We have a lot of things to do, so stay tuned!

At the moment, the Funtoo Community officially doesn’t support the upgrade of a Funtoo 1.4 filesystem to Funtoo Next and we are happy to have a way that permits, eventually with a more tested tuning and with feedback from users, to help Funtoo users in this. We think that is important to create synergy between the community groups because only together we can grow fast and strong. This is the reason we have worked a lot to have a first version of the anise-portage-converter tool that could be easily used to work with anise (the new name of the luet tool) and emerge.

So, to help Funtoo users to identify the differences between Funtoo and Macaroni we have added a new Funtoo Zone area in the documentation page that wants to help to see how the two worlds can work together.

So, trying to organize the tons of pieces of information we have to share we divide these by argument hereinafter.

Phoenix 23.11, the reborn!

The Phoenix release is been our first release of Macaroni OS and only later with the Terragon and Eagle release we have found a better way to organize the build process to reduce the build time.

So, for this release, a lot is been done under the hood to reorganize the build pipeline to help integrate new software in the next releases. Just you can consider that the seed/funtoo-base of the 1.4-prime release was based on stage3-gnome with a lot of profiles enabled. This was expensive as time, it took about 16 hours to build that seed every time. Now we start from a Funtoo stage3 base that takes about 4 hours the build and all other packages are divided into different “races”. We tried to divide the races to divide the groups of packages and frameworks to build, for example, the Gtk stuff, qt stuff, xorg stuff, etc. This will permit to user to experiment on integrating new versions in a clearer way.

In this rework, we have rebuilt all packages and others will arrive in the next releases. At the moment, the new release contains about 2800 packages but we have decided to follow the kits paradigm for the games. We building the new macaroni-games repository that will supply the Games and the emulators instead of having them in the main repository.

Unluckily, when this big job started the GCC 12 was not available yet in Funtoo tree, for this reason, we have decided to stay with GCC 11 for now and because we have introduced a lot of experiments and patches that were too expensive to over buffer our time with a GCC upgrade in the middle. In particular, for what is possible we want to start a path where Macaroni OS is not only a user of Funtoo but it’s also a contributor.

To follow this idea, we are organizing these tasks:

  1. We have created a new repository labs where begin to introduce new packages and new autogen that will be added in the Funtoo tree after a first validation. In particular, working with autogen Budgie Desktop packages we have found that these packages require Gnome 40 at least and we want, really, to try to help the Funtoo Community on move ahead with these kinds of stuff that are very very complex and we think that to have a parallel tree where working and break everything could be good before begin trying to open single PR with a big impact and not easy to test.

  2. In this release, we have patched the vala.eclass to have all packages using Vala 0.54.1 and avoid to have multiple releases. This had a lot of impacts in the Gnome stuff and a lot of patches are been created. These types of changes are not so easy to send to the Funtoo Community without validating what happens in a big park of packages. For this reason, Shotwell and a few other Gnome packages aren’t yet been ported but will work on these soon.

  3. We starting to integrate Wayland to Xorg to be available to Funtoo users we hope soon.

Part of all patches are available and/or will be organized to be easily integrated with Funtoo when ready. The list is available here.

Unluckily, we do have not sufficient space and budget to maintain a temporary macaroni-phoenix-legacy repository based on Funtoo 1.4 to help users in the migration. So, with this release, the old desktop release will no longer be supported but we describe the upgrade process clearly for the migration.

Thanks to the job done by the Funtoo Community and our work, between the the big changes of this new release we have:

* GCC 11.3.0

* Python 3.9

* Ruby 3.1.4

* Golang 1.21.3

* PHP 8.2

* LXD 5.18

* Docker 24.0.6 (thanks to @siris to autogen this package)!

* Docker Compose 2.21.0

* Firefox 118.0.2: we have finally the compiled version with our branding

* Google Chrome 118.0.5993.70

* Brave 1.59.117

* Vivaldi 6.2.3105.58

* Thunderbird 115.3.2

* MongoDB Compass 1.40.3

* Libreoffice 7.6.2.1

* Inkscape 1.3

See the complete changelog of Phoenix 23.11 release.

Know issues

These the know issues after the upgrades that will be fixed in the next releases:

  1. the new Inkscape release v1.3 has an annoying warning about using the sans-serif that seems related to the upstream issue #4651.

  2. the games will be available only in the next weeks after that the first stable release of the macaroni-games repository will be available. So, the installed games (Wesnoth, Warhammer, etc.) could be broken after the upgrade.

  3. The package ArangoDB needs maintenance as been reported in the Funtoo issue #FL-11506 and will be not available after the upgrade. We will take care of this soon.

New versions of the Package Manager

In order to rename the our Package Manager luet in anise the new releases is installed with the link /usr/bin/anise to begin migration all tasks and pipeline with the new name.

In particular, are been released two versions:

  • v0.40-0-geaaru:

      - the render engine using Helm framework is been totally rewritten and will be used
    soon to complete the refactor of the solver for the build phase of the `luet-build`
    tool

  - a new command `luet-build tree render` is been added in order to have a preview of
    the `build.yaml` file rendered.

  - a new environment variable `ANISE_SUBSETS` is automatically injected in the
    finalizer in order to customize commands based on the subsets enabled.

  • v0.40-1-geaaru:

      - contains a review of the Solver to support better the provides and the conflicts.

macaronictl get power!

After upgrading to Phoenix 23.11 we found an unexpected surprise: with the upgrade of the Chromium engine from version 116 to version 117 the browsers Google Chrome and Brave try to use by default the 3D acceleration and this breaks the startup in the installation with poor cards. I personally had a bad experience in my ASUS Trasform T300 with a poor Intel GPU after the upgrade and we want to avoid sharing this experience with other users.

For this reason, we have added a new customization that permits control of the startup flags of the browsers and by default, we disable 3D acceleration that seems the default behavior of the previous releases.

This is done by replacing the links under /usr/bin/ with a bash script that could be controlled by the macaronictl browser configure command.

We have planned to improve these command to have more control but for this tool permits to configure only Google Chrome (Stable, Unstable, Beta) and Brave. In particular, the finalizer of this package creates automatically the right setup that could be controller by the root users or specifically but every user

$> macaronictl browser available
|              PACKAGE              | PACKAGE VERSION  | SYSTEM OPTIONS | USER OPTIONS |  ENGINE  |            BINARIES             |
|-----------------------------------|------------------|----------------|--------------|----------|---------------------------------|
| www-client/brave-bin              | v1.59.117+2      | true           | false        | chromium | /usr/bin/brave-bin              |
| www-client/firefox                | v118.0.2         | false          | false        | N/A      | N/A                             |
| www-client/firefox-beta-bin       | v119.0           | false          | false        | N/A      | N/A                             |
| www-client/firefox-bin            | v118.0.2         | false          | false        | N/A      | N/A                             |
| www-client/google-chrome          | v118.0.5993.70+2 | false          | false        | chromium | /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable   |
| www-client/google-chrome-beta     | v119.0.6045.21+2 | false          | false        | chromium | /usr/bin/google-chrome-beta     |
| www-client/google-chrome-unstable | v120.0.6062.2+2  | false          | false        | chromium | /usr/bin/google-chrome-unstable |
| www-client/opera                  | v99.0.4788.9+1   | false          | false        | N/A      | N/A                             |
| www-client/vivaldi                | v6.2.3105.58     | false          | false        | N/A      | N/A                             |
| www-client/vivaldi-snapshot       | v6.4.3152.3      | false          | false        | N/A      | N/A                             |

and customized with this command:

$ macaronictl browser configure --help
Shows browsers available in configured repositories.

# Generate the system yaml file with the default options from catalog.
$> macaronictl browser conf www-client/brave-bin --system --defaults

# Generate the user yaml file with the default options from catalog.
$> macaronictl browser conf www-client/brave-bin --user --defaults

# Generate the user yaml file without options for the selected package.
$> macaronictl browser conf www-client/brave-bin --user --without-opts

# Generate the user yaml file awithout options and the user include file
# for the selected package.
$> macaronictl browser conf www-client/brave-bin --user --without-opts --exec

# Generate the binary script of the package and the system includes scripts.
# Normally, this command is executed on package finalizer.
$> macaronictl browser conf www-client/brave-bin --exec --system  --defaults

# Generate the user include and YAML files with the default options
$> macaronictl browser conf www-client/brave-bin --exec --user  --defaults

# Remove the user include file.
$> macaronictl browser conf www-client/brave-bin --purge --user

# Remove the sytem include file and the binary of the package
$> macaronictl browser conf www-client/brave-bin --purge --system

# Update the user include file. Normally, used when the user YAML file
# is been modified manually.
$> macaronictl browser conf www-client/brave-bin --user --only-update-includes

# Update the system include file. Normally, used when the user YAML file
# is been modified manually.
$> macaronictl browser conf www-client/brave-bin --system --only-update-includes

NOTE: It works only if the repositories are synced.

Usage:
   browser configure [pkg] [flags]

Aliases:
  configure, conf, c

Flags:
      --catalog-file string    Specify the directory of the catalog file of all engines options. (default "/usr/share/macaroni/browsers/catalog")
      --defaults               Set catalog defaults options to specified package.
      --exec                   Update script of the binary. Need root permissions.
  -h, --help                   help for configure
      --home-dir string        Override the directory of the user with engines options. (default "/home/geaaru/.local/share/macaroni/browsers")
      --only-update-includes   Update script includes file.
      --purge                  Remove system option from system. Need root permissions.
      --system                 Set bootstrap option on system. Need root permissions.
      --system-dir string      Override the directory of the system configuration with engines options. (default "/etc/macaroni/browsers")
      --user                   Set bootstrap option for user.
      --without-opts           Disable all options to specified package.

Global Flags:
  -c, --config string   Macaronictl configuration file
  -d, --debug           Enable debug output.

In particular, it’s possible to restore the default behaviour without customization from the user with this command:

$ macaronictl browser configure   www-client/brave-bin --user --without-opts
Configuring browser start flags:
Package:         www-client/brave-bin
User options:

Generated engine file:	/home/geaaru/.local/share/macaroni/browsers/chromium.yml
Generated include file:	/home/geaaru/.local/share/macaroni/browsers/chromium.brave-bin.inc
All done.

The file chromium.brave-bin.inc is included by the script under /usr/bin for the specified browser selected.

NOTE: To use the new command is needed add the desktop subset in order to install the browser catalog on upgrading macaronictl package.

Openshot is now integrated with Blender!

Thanks to the upgrade of Python to version 3.9 is now possible to use the integration of the Openshot QT Video editor with Blender for animations!

In particular, the migration to Funtoo Next required the upgrade of his packages with the last release that will be added to Funtoo soon.

Considering that Macaroni OS uses the blender-bin package the users need some tricks to use the integration with Blender, these the steps that we report hereinafter:

$> mkdir $HOME/bin

$> echo "
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin
" >> $HOME/.bashrc

$> cd $HOME/bin
$> ln -s /opt/bin/blender-bin blender

It’s possible that in the near future, we will move to the blender compiled release and these steps will no longer be needed.

Security updates

The list of the major security fix:

  • CVE-2023-39232 - Go 1.21.3

  • CVE-2023-38545 - Curl

  • CVE-2023-4911 - Looney tunables - Local Privilege Escalation in glibc

  • CVE-2023-4863 - libwebp

  • CVE-2022-36019 - Docker

  • CVE-2022-39253 - Docker

  • CVE-2023-5217 - libvpx

  • CVE-2023-25809 - runc

  • CVE-2023-27561 - runc

Upgrade existing Macaroni OS filesytem to Phoenix 23.11

Before beginning the upgrade you need to be sure to have a backup of your data and sufficient space in the filesystem to download all packages installed because will be replaced and installed.

This upgrade is a dist-upgrade and it needs additional support.

Obviously, it’s also possible to just reinstall a fresh installation from the new ISO 23.11.

The whip hook will remove the packages:

  1. sys-firmware/ed2k-ovmf: we will move to sys-firmware/ed2k-ovmf-bin package

  2. net-misc/openntpd: No more available in our repository and with this conflict:

    Error file conflict between 'net-misc/openntpd-6.2+2' and 'net-misc/ntp-4.2.8' ( file: etc/conf.d/ntpd )

  3. sys-firmware/seabios: we will move to sys-firmware/seabios-bin package

**ATTENTION: In order to avoid errors on upgrade if the system to upgrade contains browsers you need to add the desktop subset before start the upgrade.

$> luet subsets enable desktop

So, these the steps to follow on upgrade your Macaroni system based on Funtoo 1.4:

1. Get last release of anise (luet) Package Manager

To do this you need disable all repositories exclude geaaru-repo-index and mottainai-stable:

$> luet repo disable macaroni-commons macaroni-phoenix macaroni-security

Upgrade the repositories:

$> luet repo update

Upgrade luet to last release:

$> luet upgrade -y

2. Enable repositories

You can enable the previous disabled repositories (you can maintain disabled the repository macaroni-security because it doesn’t contain new packages for now):

$> anise repo enable macaroni-commons macaroni-phoenix

and then update the local metadata:

$> anise repo update

3. Get the last version of the whip-catalog

In order to start the upgrade process you need to have the last version of the macaroni/whip-catalog package:

$> anise rm macaroni/whip-catalog --nodeps

$> anise i macaroni/whip-catalog

4. Start the upgrade

You can start the upgrade and to use the environment variable SKIP_REINDEX=1 if the luet version is greather then v0.39.0 else it’s better to run this without the variable.

$> SKIP_REINDEX=1 whip h macaroni.upgrade2funtoo-next

5. Run macaronictl etc-update

Due to big upgrades done will be a lot of files to check and merge eventually. This phase requires attention.

$> macaronictl etc-update

NOTE: Normally, you need to avoid the override of the file /etc/default/grub. Check what are the differences and if it makes sense merge changes.

6. Run macaronictl env-update

This command updates the /etc/profile.env and regenerates the file ld.so.cache like the Funtoo env-update command:

$> macaronictl env-update
>>> Generating /etc/profile.env...
>>> Generating /etc/ld.so.conf...
>>> Regenerating /etc/ld.so.cache...

7. Verify the linking of the installed files

It’s available a whip hook that permits to verify if there are libraries or binaries with links to no more available libraries.

It’s a good idea to run this command on every upgrade:

$> whip h linking.check
Checking directory /usr/lib64...
Checking directory /usr/lib...
Checking directory /usr/bin...
Checking directory /bin...
Checking directory /usr/sbin...
Checking directory /usr/libexec...
[linking.check] Completed correctly.

The directories checked by default are these:

  • /usr/lib64
  • /usr/lib
  • /usr/bin
  • /bin
  • /usr/sbin
  • /usr/libexec

But could be changed overriding the environment variable DIRS:

$> DIRS="/usr/lib64" whip h linking.check

12. Remove orphans packages (optional)

When the upgrade is ended, it’s possible check what packages installed are no more available in the Macaroni repositories that could be removed through the anise query orphans command:

$> anise q orphans

Between the orphans list will be present the old GCC 9.2.0 that could be removed:

$> anise rm sys-devel-9.2.0/gcc

13. Verify if the kernel is correctly installed

If you have upgrade the system before get the last release of the package macaroni/whip-catalog could be possible that the system detection hasn’t correctly detect the system between Macaroni and Funtoo. If this is happens the packages:

  • virtual/base
  • virtual/grub
  • virtual/sh

will not be present.

You can verify this with:

$> anise s --installed -p virtual/base -p virtual/grub -p virtual/sh --quiet
virtual/sh
virtual/base
virtual/grub

If the output is not this you need to reinstall them before generate initramfs:

$> anise i virtual/base virtual/grub virtual/sh

It’s important to verify if the kernel is been correctly upgraded. To do this the first check is related to the content of the /boot directory that will be with at least on kernel:

$> ls /boot/
Initrd                                       config-vanilla-x86_64-5.15.137-macaroni  initramfs-vanilla-x86_64-5.15.137-macaroni  lost+found
System.map-vanilla-x86_64-5.15.137-macaroni  config-vanilla-x86_64-6.1.60-macaroni    initramfs-vanilla-x86_64-6.1.60-macaroni
System.map-vanilla-x86_64-6.1.60-macaroni    efi                                      kernel-vanilla-x86_64-5.15.137-macaroni
bzImage                                      grub                                     kernel-vanilla-x86_64-6.1.60-macaroni

In the example, it’s available both kernel 6.1.60 and 5.15.137.

If the directory is without the kernel is better to reinstall it, by first trying this:

$> anise i kernel-6.1/macaroni-full kernel-6.1/macaroni-modules \
        kernel-6.1/nvidia-kernel-modules kernel-6.1/zfs-kmod

If anise saids that all packages are installed trying with:

$> anise miner ri kernel-6.1/macaroni-full kernel-6.1/macaroni-modules \
        kernel-6.1/nvidia-kernel-modules kernel-6.1/zfs-kmod

14. Regenerate the kernel initrd image

It’s important to run this command to build an initrd image updated and aligned to the merge configurations with macaronictl etc-update.

$> macaronictl kernel geninitrd --all --set-links --purge --grub

NOTE: Before restart your system you need to be sure that the initramfs is been generated correctly.

Based on the installed kernel the output of the kernel geninitrd will be without warning or errors:

$> macaronictl kernel geninitrd --all --set-links --purge --grub
Creating initrd image /boot/initramfs-vanilla-x86_64-5.15.137-macaroni...DONE
Creating initrd image /boot/initramfs-vanilla-x86_64-6.1.60-macaroni...DONE
No valid links found. I set links to kernel 6.1.60.
Creating grub config file /boot/grub/grub.cfg...
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found linux image: /boot/kernel-vanilla-x86_64-6.1.60-macaroni
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-vanilla-x86_64-6.1.60-macaroni
fgrep: warning: fgrep is obsolescent; using /bin/grep -F
Found linux image: /boot/kernel-vanilla-x86_64-5.15.137-macaroni
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-vanilla-x86_64-5.15.137-macaroni
fgrep: warning: fgrep is obsolescent; using /bin/grep -F
Adding boot menu entry for UEFI Firmware Settings ...
done

15. Reboot and starting to play with the new Macaroni Phoenix release

The job is done!

$> reboot

If you have the subsets devel and portage enable and you want to setup the new GCC it’s better to run:

$> gcc-config 1

16. Optional steps

If you have Virtualbox installed could be a good idea to execute this command:

$> whip h vbox.vbox_setup

not yet present in the finalize.

A new Partner join the project

We are happy to share that the TOP-IX consortium donated a VM to the Macaroni OS Project and this is great news because will help on work parallel to compile the new packages from the different releases.

Really thanks for your support TOP-IX!

What next?

Hereinafter, out hot points in our backlog:

  1. After the rewrite of the render engine of the anise-build (luet-build) tool we want to continue the refactoring of the Macaroni build tool.

  2. Complete the migration of the Macaroni Eagle release to Funtoo Next

  3. Bump the first release of the macaroni-games repository

  4. Starting setup of labs repository

  5. Continue the improvement of our documentation

We are waiting for you

We waiting for you in our Discord Server.

Thanks

Many thanks to all Funtoo devs that are the sap of all this and to all people that helps us with testing and donations.

Support Us

Any user that wants to support our work for Macaroni could do this through the Github Sponsor.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Do you think I could integrate more features?

Contact us