Live ISO testing for Bluefin (round 2)

[j0rge]

Alright,

When it rains it pours, out of the ashes of failure comes some new updates. First off, this page is now up to date:

• Downloads | Bluefin

Ok so here’s the deal. M2 was able to spike on both titanoboa and anaconda, which means:

• All of our ISOs are now live CDs, this is nice!
• Bluefin LTS now has full ISOs, including aarch64 builds
• Bluefin has the new webui by default (see the screenshot).

Everything is up to date and live, we need to fix the website to point to aarch64 but we’re working on that.

The way it’s going to work out is Bluefin GTS and Bluefin LTS will end up on the older anaconda GTK installer, which works fine, it has a few cosmetic issues but it works fine.

The webui is good to go but F42 only, it just needs some tweaks (that version number in the top banner sure is a mouthful!)

Anyway more to follow, please kick the tyres and report back, thanks! And here’s the video!

Quick tour of the new Bluefin installation experience

[klmcw]

I tried to install using readymade-bluefin-gdx-x86_64.iso.

When I started the install process it was fiddly to select the correct destination drive. I ended up using the TAB key which caused mouse events to be recognized. I selected the /dev/sda entry in the list and started the install.

It failed right away because the drive was mounted. So I used the GNOME Disks tool to unmount the mounted partition and started the install again.

I am not a fan of the lack of progress info. It just says something like “Installing base system”. But what is it doing? Did it pick the correct drive to operate on? Where is the progress for partitioning the drive, other granular changes, etc. Something is better than just “click and pray”.

Was prompted to reboot and it took forever (>5 mins). I hit ESC and saw many errors from NVRM.

Once it finally rebooted the machine the boot menu had a few strange entries. One that looked like the manufacturer info for the external drive, another that said CoreOS Stream (I think) and a third that said CoreOS Linux.

I am not sure things went well so I have just deleted all partitions on the drive and am going to try again.

I’ll be back.

2nd attempt seemed to go better, but I still had 2 entries in the boot menu:

• CoreOS Stream
• ASMT ASM105x … (what I can see from efibootmgr)

The ASMT entry is not really bootable. I think it is the EFI partition of the external drive based on partuuid I could tie together from efibootmgr and lsblk -O.

I picked the CentOS Stream entry.

It started the initial setup process, but I soon realized that my keyboard was not working. I clicked Previous back to the kbd selection panel and explicitly clicked on US keyboard, but no go.

I could not type in my wifi password, skipped that. Then I could not type in user information.

The GNOME power off menu only had “Suspend” as an entry. I had not choice but to do a hard reset.

[EDIT] After removing the external drive the entry for it was still in the boot menu. I used efimanager -b 1 -B to remove it. The list appeared to have a couple of junk entries in the bios. I am hoping this resolves the issue that I can no longer boot from my thumb drive.

Weird stuff. But there you go.

I’ll try the bluefin-nvidia-open-stable iso next. I’ll report if anything is different.

Well that was a non-starter. Even using the workaround of deleting all the partitions it failed immediately.

Well, that is all spooky enough for me … readymade ain’t ready.

Going back to Anaconda …

[Niko]

Downloaded from projectbluefin.io, and it’s working great on Gnome Boxes over here!

What a friendly way to install, compared to Silverblue and the current Bluefin installs.

Then after rebooting and doing the Fedora initial setup, I have a fully working, virtual Bluefin!

Amazing job, team.

[klmcw]

I tried the GDX anaconda iso. Similar set of issues (but not the mount issue - reclaim worked as expected).

I tried the new ui in bluefin-nvidia-open-stable.iso. Wow. Very nice.

I wasn’t bothered by the title, But, “Bluefin 42 Installation” would be sufficient assuming the additional information is readily available somehow.

The level of progress detail is spot on. However, a percentage meter of some sort would be helpful. I had the presence of mind to open a shell and monitor the layer downloads with df -h. But …

Somehow the MBR partition was deleted on my Ventoy thumb drive. I don’t know if it is related, but I did select the “Try Bluefin (RAM only)” option from the grub menu.

But once booted, I experience the same “no keyboard” issue.

I stopped there.

But I really like the new UI.

[red11]

I did some tests on Gnome Boxes:

• Anaconda: simple to use; good: keyboard selection is simple to select
• Readymade: even simpler to use; no keyboard selection (before reboot); I see nothing new here from last time I did a test like two weeks ago
• Titanoboa: c’mon @j0rge this is granpa like installer 3 times Next and Finish - who is going to call me as local guru now? (This is amazing).

Now when installer is simple as simple can be, it looks to me that enroll new UEFI key is going to be the most difficult (and if not reading the docs it is not able to accomplish). Maybe at the last dialog before first reboot some info like “After reboot for the first time you need to enroll UEFI key, use: univeralblue as enroll password” or something similar, so user do not need to read docs - most don’t until issue appears.

I don’t know how much of “freedom” you have, but keyboard selection should be done as second selection (first is language selection) and then after reboot there is no need to ask for keyboard again.

[m2Giles]

I like this. We have zenity on the liveiso so the post script that does the Mok enrollment can also pop an a zenity window (similar to what you get on the start)

We can modify the first run options by hiding some of those cards. We are already hiding the enable third-party repos card.

[JohnAtl]

I really like the webui installer!

To sing my old song, it would make life easier for people with more than one of the same model drive if readymade and the webui installers would display the serial numbers.

[klmcw]

For me the web ui did show the device (sda in my case) so I could cross check it with lsblk in the shell. But agreed the mfr, model and size would eliminate a trip to the shell.

[JohnAtl]

Not sure where to say it, but I really like that there is a community button on the live isos.
I also like that there is a system update icon.

[mheuvel-dev]

I also like it that you can continue the live experience during installation. While running the installer (I just tried the LTS one), you can click the community- or documentation button and continue browsing. What a relief compared to those static bill-board installers

[znmeb]

I tested https://download.projectbluefin.io/bluefin-gdx-lts-x86_64.iso on my Acer laptop. For some reason, the USB drive made with Fedora Media Writer didn’t boot, but Balena Etcher made one that did boot.

It came up fine. I didn’t try an install because it doesn’t have NVIDIA drivers and I didn’t see any applications on it that I don’t have already. Is there a list of applications that will be on the final version?

[NoYards]

I tested the Centos Beta DX (GDX?) version … I ran it live, but I couldn’t get the video to display on both my displays.

I wanted to run that version as my ‘production’ (or at least build up to it being my production driver) but the lack of display support was a deal breaker (it may have worked better if fully installed, or had I gone searching for a fix, but I decided I would just live with the Fedora 42 version for now, see how that goes, and move over to Centos if the Fedora is too flakey (so far so good.)

[knock]

Would it be possible to somehow still use the upsrtream Anaconda installer? I’m actually a fan of how granular it can be, and always appreciated the control it gave.

[inffy]

Well the Live ISO is using the upstream Anaconda installer but with the new WebUI.

[knock]

To rephrase that, is there/will there be a way to use the more granular/less simplified Anaconda-GTK installer? I’m not a fan of “quick and easy” installs because I like to be able to keep an eye on what’s going on behind the scenes or make adjustments if needed, such as to keep a separate EFI partition on each hard disk for my dual boots. If installs are supposed to be the done once and never again, I’d prefer to be able to ensure everything I need is precisely in place, such as my GRUB install/EFI partitions. Anaconda’s GTK interface, to me at least, provides a consistent interface I feel I can trust more, instead of “Select a disk with no additional information and install.” Frankly, I consider it to be major reason why I even switched to Fedora before getting on board with Aurora.

I like the concept and don’t want to come across as a naysayer as it’s great for people who don’t have these concerns with their configurations. I guess if it does everything akin to the Anaconda GTK installer with the EFI partition on the chosen disk, it checks off my boxes.