Lunar Linux has a few issues still

03 Jan 2020

As I mentioned in my previous post, Lunar Linux has an odd problem when you install fresh from one of the recent daily ISO releases: you can’t install software which installs Linux modules. Something is missing from the kernel cache tarball created during the ISO build process, which makes things which want to build modules think they can’t.

I don’t know what that is, though–whether it’s a missing header, or some utility that’s gone missing, or whatever. It’s still under investigation, and I’m taking the week off to observe the New Year’s holiday here in Japan. And besides, simply reinstalling the kernel makes the problem go away. That’s the thing about a do-it-yourself Linux distro for knowledgeable people: its users tend to be so knowledgeable that they simply go strolling past problems without noticing them, because they know the workarounds so well.

Someone else noticed that the Python packages are broken in their own ways: bits and pieces of them are missing. Exactly which bits and pieces are missing I’m not sure of, for the exact same reason that I don’t know exactly which bits of Linux are missing: simply reinstalling Python and all of the Python-related modules makes the problem.

The Lunar Linux installer installs very quickly, because it just unpacks a bunch of tar archives of previously-compiled software, compiled on the ISO build system. The archives are created via the normal Lunar-Linux build process: compile the software in the normal way, then turn on installwatch and run the install process, then turn off installwatch and spelunk through its records to see what changes it made to the filesystem.

Apparently Linux and Python are installing content to the filesystem in a way that installwatch is failing to notice. This is actually an ongoing problem: with the evolution of Linux itself, there are more and more system calls which installwatch needs to know to monitor, so the maintainers of installwatch have to remain vigilant.

Which brings up the next thing: there are no maintainers of installwatch any more. The last official change to installwatch was in 2016. Which is why the Lunar Linux organization has forked installwatch and is maintaining their own branch.