PixieLive

52 reactions

• 1 From Pixel - 19/10/2010, 12:31

  Finally I got Pixielive running on my acer 751. :)
  Some things I found making it hard to use on my acer 751.

  1) The touch pad mouse seems to be too sensitive; the pointer seems to keep running away, even though the setting adjusted to minimum sensitivity and minimum acceleration.

  2) Cant use the touch pad to click, have to use the touch pad buttons.

  3) The screen too bright cannot control the brightness with the function key.

  Keep up the good work. Thanks.

• 2 From Christian Lorandi - 19/10/2010, 13:55

  @pixel:

  try this xorg.conf.psb to get synaptics touchpad to work better (put it in PixieLive/rootcopy/etc/X11)

• 3 From Pixel - 19/10/2010, 15:44

  1)Thanks. Now touch pad works well.

  2) After I adjust the screen brightness with the EDGM control panel. The screen becomes too dark and I cant adjust back again despite several attempt and restart.

  3) By the way what is persistant changes. You have 3 start up choices. What are the differences between them.
  Thanks.

• 4 From Christian Lorandi - 19/10/2010, 16:11

  @pixel:

  • normal one is normal live (no changes saved)
  • noauto doesn't mount your partitions in /mnt at boot
  • persistent changes save every chages you make in PixieLive/changes so it behaves like a normal distribution (an installed system) delete the PixieLive/changes directory to revert back to a clean (new) install, (you will loose every chages you made (like the brightness one)
  • you should use hotkeys to set brighness, or the applet, if they donesn't work on your PC i'm sorry, i hope to be able to enable them on the next release (stick to 1.0 if you don't use it just for testing purposes, beta means under development)

• 5 From MrTide - 20/10/2010, 01:04

  Thanks Christian. You are a good man !

  Downloading it. You'll have more feedback soon

• 6 From Alberto - 20/10/2010, 18:00

  Thankyou Christian for your mail, I appreciate your work.

  I would invite all people that use with success your os to donate if possible.

  Christian I think I'll wait a stable version if it will be, you know that I'm not expert.

  Have a nice work.

• 7 From milanp - 22/10/2010, 21:30

  Any chances to add support for touchscreen for Asus T91mt
  This will make the Pixielive the ultimate linux for the T91MT.
  These are the instructions for touchscreen under Ubuntu:

  http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ubuntu_9.10...
  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread....

• 8 From Richard Gill - 23/10/2010, 08:30

  Good work, Christian! And fast!

• 9 From Christian Lorandi - 23/10/2010, 10:17

  @milanp:

  i will try to include it in the next beta version, so you can test it before the official release

• 10 From milanp - 23/10/2010, 10:51

  Thank you in advance.

• 11 From MrTide - 23/10/2010, 18:46

  3D works like a charm! I can even play some games on mi Mini 1010!
  Video playback is perfect now! 720p videos are smooth as hell!

  BTW I have no stability issues so it is a big improvement ...
  Thanks a lot man :D

• 12 From Ciccio37 - 24/10/2010, 11:50

  Hi! Can you also make a guide to explain how can multiboot windows and pixielive (SD) using window bootloader or something else ? I tried EasyBCD with all the options but pixielive bootloader is not recognized :(
  Thanks.
  I love pixielive :D

• 13 From Christian Lorandi - 24/10/2010, 14:24

  @Ciccio37:

  i have no idea on how to make that, i'm not expert in windows...

  coringa wrote a comment about that here , take a look and google a little bit, you should be able to find an answer written somewhere

• 14 From Ciccio37 - 25/10/2010, 14:52

  I'm trying to do the opposite, using the syslinux bootloader of pixielive to boot windows 7 that is istalled on the hd0 in the first partition.
  I tryed to modify syslinux.cfg in this way:

  LABEL w7
  MENU LABEL Boot Windows 7
  COM32 /boot/chain.c32
  APPEND hd1 ntldr=/bootmgr

  what is wrong? someone knows how to edit it?
  Thanks

• 15 From Ciccio37 - 25/10/2010, 15:11

  **SOLVED**

  Correct syslinux.cfg add:

  LABEL w7
  MENU LABEL Boot Windows 7
  COM32 /boot/chain.c32
  APPEND hd1

  Where Hd1 is the internal disk where is installed windows 7.

• 16 From Christian Lorandi - 25/10/2010, 17:58

  @Ciccio37:
  good to know, thank you
  

• 17 From Richard - 30/10/2010, 09:05

  I got some errors during start-up and no graphical display. It could not find tuxonice and drm did not get loaded. Shall I send you system and X11 logs?

• 18 From Christian Lorandi - 30/10/2010, 10:24

  @Richard:

  a log would be nice, and also the computer hardware list "lspci -n" (post them on pastebin.com please), it's a strange behavior, specially for tuxonice, because it should not be hardware related, did you tried to load drm manually with "modprobe drm" (as root)?

  (Of course additional modules for 1.0 should not be used with 1.1beta)

• 19 From Richard - 30/10/2010, 15:16

  "modprobe drm" gives the message

  FATAL: could not load /lib/modules/2.6.35-tuxonice-r5/modules.dep: no such file or directory

  Indeed, "ls /lib/modules" gives only 2.6.32-gentoo-r7

  I re-unpacked the pixielive-beta.tar.gz file in case something had got lost but this did not change anything. The whole thing is on a usb stick.

• 20 From Richard - 30/10/2010, 15:30

  "uname -r" tells me that the kernel version is 2.6.35-tuxonice-r5. I renamed /lib/modules/2.6.32-gentoo-r7 accordingly, and tried "modprobe drm" again. This time I get the message FATAL: Module drm not found.

• 21 From Richard - 30/10/2010, 16:02

  Maybe there is a problem because there is a hard drive partition sda6 containing folders /boot and /Pixielive of my "permanent" pixielive 1.0, as well as the usb stick sdb with the live pixielive beta and also folders /boot and /Pixielive ?

• 22 From Richard Gill - 31/10/2010, 12:54

  I now tried Pixielive 1.1 beta installed to my hard-disk. That way it works fine!

  Now /lib/modules and "uname -r" agree that we are running 2.6.35-tuxonice-r5. So it looks to me that when I run it from a bootable usb stick, it gets confused by the existence of several /Pixielive directories (one on the usb stick, one on one of the hard disk partitions).

  "Save custom settings" does not work in the Pixielive Settings menu. I guess this means that the old ext4 fix for 1.0 does not work on the beta. I shall try again without.

  PS: this is on an Eee PC 1101 HA with 2GB internal memory. Pixielive, and (oh horror) Windows 7 and XP all seem to perfom very well. Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) with difficulty. I still have not been able to get psb to work with a newer kernel than the one shipped with the release, though the difference ought to be minimal (2.6.31-22 versus 2.6.21-14).

• 23 From Richard Gill - 31/10/2010, 13:32

  Yes! I moved the /PixieLive directory on the hard disk partition sda6. Now PixieLive 1.1 beta boots live from the usb stick sdb

• 24 From Christian Lorandi - 31/10/2010, 14:04

  @Richard Gill:

  • yes, during the boot the system search on every partition for a directory called PixieLive, starting from the first one (a.k.a /dev/sda1), until it find it, once it find a PixieLive directory, with a file named livecd.sgn inside it continue with the boot sequence using that directory, probably i should rename it during the creation (e.g. PixieLive-1.1beta1), so people can use both versions without mess up the things...
  • about etx4 and savings... gotta check it, thank you for report
  • about Ubuntu... that's a problem related to the old psb module (the one used in PixieLive-1.0), it require a specific kernel configuration (it's own DRM) which is bad for other graphic cards, so you need to use it with a specific kernel version, that's no more required with EMGD drivers (PixieLive-1.1beta1)

  
  

• 25 From Richard - 31/10/2010, 18:02

  Here is the good way to boot multiple pixielive's from the hard disk and a live pixielive from usb: change the name of the file livecd.sgn on each of your hard disk /PixieLive directories, and give the appropriate name to the kernel via kernel option livecd=livecd_alt_name.sgn

  livedcd.sgn is actually a little text file which contains these instructions!

  The directory /PixieLive can have the same name everywhere.

• 26 From Richard - 02/11/2010, 15:40

  Can you give us a glxgears for Pixielive 1.0, for comparison?

  I notice that Pixielive 1.0 allowed screen rotation, 1.1-beta does not allow this.

• 27 From Christian Lorandi - 02/11/2010, 16:32

  @Richard:

  • about glxgears, ok, ill prepare it as soon as possible
  • about rotation... yes, it's a EMGD problem, it doesn't support randr extension

• 28 From Christian Lorandi - 02/11/2010, 17:40

  @Richard:

  Glxgears for PixieLive-1.0

• 29 From Richard - 03/11/2010, 11:05

  According to glxgears, Pixielive-1.1 (emgd) beats everything else on my Eee PC 1101HA, at 300 fps; in particular, better than Ubuntu 9.10 & Pixielive-1.0 with psb. Windows XP comes close to PL-1.1. Windows 7 is nowhere near, which must be due to the over-heavy OS.

• 30 From rolftest99 - 13/11/2010, 18:33

  Is it done with Sony VGN-P11Z?

• 31 From Christian Lorandi - 13/11/2010, 18:43

  @rolftest99:

  no idea, test it and let me know please :-)

• 32 From coringa - 16/11/2010, 01:18

  regarding vaio p: I installed it just. It boots via Instant On. I did not play with it. I had some issues: There was only 2/3 of the screen in use, external monitors, webcam, usb harddrives not recognized. Some of the issues one can probably fix - I hope. A question I have: I did not find mplayer installed and wondered with which player ppl tested the video performance. VLC? It seemed like VLC would not start on my system. Good luck and let me know if someone has fixes for one of the issues above.

• 33 From Christian Lorandi - 16/11/2010, 08:42

  @coringa:

  thank you for feedback, they used glxgears for video (3D) performance, mplayer is present just for PixieLive-1.0 because libva was not correctly implemented in 1.1-beta1.

  About screen size, due to a problem with emgd and automatic resolution detection you have to set it manually in PixieLive/rootcopy/etc/X11/xorg.conf.psb if is different from 1366x768 (i don't know if the desktop applet works on your graphic card)

  Libva is now ready and will be included in the next beta version, I'm currently working on vlc because (mplayer without user interface) is not enough "user friendly" for unexperienced users, i hope to be able to get it to work (actually mplayer works like a charm with libva, but since no GUI is present...)

• 34 From coringa - 17/11/2010, 02:07

  ok, thanks for your suggestion. Unfortunately I could not get the resolution corrected: I changed the files xorg.conf, xorg.conf.completo and xorg.conf.psb and also the file you mentioned but this does not seem to affect anything. Do I have to run a setup program to get the changes into effect?

• 35 From Christian Lorandi - 17/11/2010, 08:23

  @coringa:

  nope, after the modification of the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.psb you should just restart the x server with /etc/init.d/xdm restart, but if you put the file in PixieLive/rootcopy/etc/X11/xorg.conf.psb it should be already correct at boot time.

  is your card a Poulsbo or not? (use the command lspci to determine that)

• 36 From coringa - 17/11/2010, 21:31

  yes, I have a Sony Vaio P. It has a GMA 500 (aka Poulsbo) chip build in for graphics. I did copy the files into the folder but it did not work. When I ran xdm restart I got a black screen :-( but thanks for your support anyways.

• 37 From rolftest99 - 18/11/2010, 23:06

  I have read your discussion about VGN-P11Z.
  lspci says it has GMA500 devices!
  Very nice your comments and tips.
  I also cannot start the Xserver!
  xserver says no useable configuration

• 38 From thomas - 24/11/2010, 14:34

  I will try pixielive on my Archos 9. This cheap tablet has GMA500 and touchscreen, and still ubuntu is the only alternative to Win7 that I got running on it.
  On the web, tehre is MeeGo mentioned, but those kickstart-files do not work anymore.
  And ubuntu, which I got working, has still problems with speed and hibernation.

  So I serached for fast, small, GMA500-enabled distros and found pixielive. If one manages to include the touchscreen drivers, which are available at
  
  http://home.eeti.com.tw/web20/eGala...

  this distro could become the best one for this ipad competitor.

• 39 From Christian Lorandi - 24/11/2010, 15:41

  @thomas:

  if possible (i.e. easy enough for my knowledge) i will integrate it for sure

  I'm currently downloading the driver to take a look

  Christian

• 40 From diterium - 27/11/2010, 23:20

  @Christian: thank you for your great work! how is your progress with vlc? maybe it is easier & better to use this mplayer gui instead of another player? http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/

• 41 From Christian Lorandi - 28/11/2010, 16:40

  @diterium:

  theoretically yes, but i'm not able to get vaapi to work with any mplayer gui...

  in fact, it works just with some video formats :-/

  that's why it's taking so long, i cannot compile my own libva for emgd, but gotta use the one provided as binary, obtaining some libs errors

• 42 From diterium - 08/12/2010, 13:19

  i thought smplayer is one of the few vaapi capable mplayer frontends (besides gnome-mplayer), so when you got mplayer with vaapi running (without gui) then you should be able to use smplayer with vaapi support as well or is there some other problem? http://www.loggn.de/ubuntu-mplayer-...

  i'm looking forward to your new pixielive 1.1 release, maybe already include the new emgd drivers intel likely releases on q1 2011 (for meego 1.1)? http://embedded.communities.intel.c...

• 43 From diterium - 08/12/2010, 13:28

  http://www.tuxmind.org/2010/01/08/a...

  would love to have the smplayer frontend in your distri ;-)

• 44 From Christian Lorandi - 08/12/2010, 22:52

  @diterium:

  smplayer will be included in the next release for sure, since it will support graphic cards different from GMA500, but in every test i made with smplayer and libva, it failed

  christian

• 45 From jsajczuk - 20/01/2011, 17:48

  Absoultely love 1.1-beta.

  I am using it on a Dell Inspiron Mini 1010 and everything works except my built in Verizon Modem. I believe it is a Novatel Wireles CDMA.

  is there some way or thing I can do to make it work?
  will it work in the final release of v1.1?

• 46 From Christian Lorandi - 21/01/2011, 23:30

  @jsajczuk:
  i don't know about the modem, but i can upload a new version tomorrow so you can try it (networkmanager + modem-manager included) ;)
  

• 47 From jsajczuk - 22/01/2011, 15:56

  thanks. I am new at this, so how will i know that you posted? after i download and use it, i will let you know what i think and what happened.

  i appreciated the fast response.

• 48 From jsajczuk - 22/01/2011, 15:58

  sorry, posted wrong e-mail; should be .com not .net

• 49 From vik - 25/01/2011, 05:31

  I run you beta on a Asus 1101HA. Very speedy! Better then on my Tower PC.I like it. My Problem: The USB-Stick plugged out since testing. The X-Server dont start again i fall back to the login console. What must i do? May i recover the Home Directory and the adjustments i does on the OS. The brightness control does not work on the Asus. Ill test the Beta2 to continue,

• 50 From Christian Lorandi - 25/01/2011, 09:02

  @vik:

  probably your filesystem is corrupted, the best thing you can do at the moment is in my opinion to save all your personal data from the pendrive, format it, and install the beta2.

  Not just because beta2 is better, but because probably your pendrive filesystem (i suppose FAT32) is damaged, so formatting it again could be a good idea, if you want to save your system modification you could try to copy your settings packages (modules/*_settings.lzm i suppose) into the beta2 (settings files are placed in the settings directory now, no more in modules) but the result is not guaranteed, it depends on what you have saved / modified)

  brightness works with hotkeys FN+F5 FN+F6 not with the applet (i have the same pc)

  Regards Christian

• 51 From vik - 25/01/2011, 16:17

  Yes brightness is F5 and F6. In the stable V1 OS brightness was controllable by the applet. How i unpack and repack "LZM"-Files. Is there a way? Form now on you will meet me in the Beta2 Comments but put the last answer here. May you include OSMO - Organizer in the OS.
  Best Regards Viktor

• 52 From Christian Lorandi - 25/01/2011, 16:39

  @vik:

  about unpacking: unsquashfs filename.lzm

  about repack: mksquashfs targetDir filename.lzm -b 256k

  take care, if you are running pixielive, you must deactivate a module (deactivate filename.lzm)  before try to replace it (otherwise you will get some filesystem corruption)