How can we improve our installation experience?

We are on a solution for this. @mhorn any opinion?

For a multiuser environment, I think that 027 is more common to keep read/execute on the group and mask off other/world.

Multiuser environments can share data based on additional sharing groups.

The default is to have a group with the same name as the login name with the default membership of just that user. So having 027 is still restricted by default, but allows the users to have a shared group with others without everyone needing to change their default umask.

This is based on many years of sys-admin work in multiuser environments. If you plan to change from the most common default if 022, I think 027 is a much better choice than 077.

@mhorn: agreed. 0027 is a reasonable middle-ground. My Fedora defaults to 0077, I think(?) and I know that my Ubuntu(Debian) installs default to 0022(which just makes me $CRAZY in this post-GDPR, fill-in your , etc. climate. sigh)

Thanks to all for your prompt attention to this delicate matter!

Clear Linux is chaining the mode of creating new user $HOME directory.
useradd and newusers commands will use UMASK=027 as default.

This change will be public in 1 or 2 days.

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Make it install on pc’s without AES?

In progress:

I’ve been trying to manually partition my hard drives and find it impossible to do with the latest tui installer, under advanced options. CGDisk no longer initiates during install.

Also posted on Reddit

If I didn’t like the significant boost in performance, this would be a complete deal breaker.

Please make it easier to manually partition during install.

Also in the case of this manual partion issue (tui installer not allowing it) it would be great if there was some documentation for a work around.

The workarounds are easy if you don’t want install-time encryption on pre-formatted partitions. Just partition everything the way you want with GParted before doing the install. Then when the install finishes, mount the new / partition, do the mkdir -p commands you need for mount points and add an /etc/fstab to mount the partitions.

I have a persistent /home that never gets erased - I over-write / all the time. But if you need install-time encryption that won’t work.

I noticed the install documentation mentions an ideal swap size for Clear (E.G. in my case at least 4GB of swap for 4-16GB of RAM).

However, when selecting the automatic bare metal installation, the size for that partition defaults to 256MB instead of using the recommended size.

Wouldn’t it be better to set the ideal swap size instead of the minimum one for automatic install?

The “best practice” these days seems to be to use a swapfile on a regular filesystem instead of juggling precious disk space for a partition dedicated to Linux swap. So if you use the default 256 MB you can add a swapfile later.

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I didn’t know about swap files, thank you @znmeb!

So it’s not created by default during the installation process. However, I was expecting the automatic installer to be plug-and-play and pick the ideal swap size by itself, whether it’s a partition or a file, instead of defaulting to the minimum one and require further intervention.

I heard about Clear Linux and tried it last night. The thought of a fast linux with rolling releases is too tempting for me to not try. Please for the love that is all linux, warn people the install will not dual boot. Do it on that page where it wants to partition or take the whole drive? Just get rid of the option to install to a partition. I’ve done lots of linux installs and it never occurred to me to consider the idea a linux post 1998 wouldn’t dual boot.

I think if someone more familiar with UEFI and Clear Linux would spend a few minutes, they could get it to dual boot with windows using rEFInd. I got my hp Envy x360 (AMD Ryzen 7) to boot up and then when I selected any of the org.clearlinux choices, it ended with a kernel panic.

Also, when I tried the various ubuntu live attempts to get grub, anytime I did a chroot into clear linux, I got a working prompt in Clear.

Observations

  • The installer simply adds a new EFI parition with each attempt to install. It obviously doesn’t look for an existing EFI partition.
  • I read another observation that the installer needs to better indicate progress… and they ended up installing twice. This happened to me, however, the installing from live OS popped up requiring authentication. Since there isn’t a root (or sudo) password, this failed. My workaround for the 2nd install was to sudo su, create a password, then run clr-installer-gui from root on the terminal.
  • Everything worked on the new Ryzen mobile chipset… the only missing function I noticed was the touch screen not working, which is the same for every linux I’ve tried on this laptop.
  • I also tried copying the EFI files from the new Clear EFI partition to /dev/sda1 but that didn’t really work. The laptop’s bios for booting from EFI isn’t really smart. Here is a pastepin from the UI efi boot tools: http://paste.ubuntu.com/p/mp7k7Mh63j/

And the results of the failed Clear install followed by the successful one:

I think the installer should have “Profiles”

Like:

  1. Minimal Installation - installs minimal desktop and nothing else.
  2. Standard Installation - installs the desktop and all the software that Clear devs think should be there

And then have an Advanced tab where the user could select all the additional software he/she may need + drivers/multimedia support.

Basically if someone needs to deploy quickly - s/he can select standard and be set, while the minimal install would make the tinkerers happy.

That would be perfect.

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Easy way to use dedicated /home partition without reformat will be great.

Also swap partition should be optional.

Is clear Linux moving towards desktop?

It is not moving towards desktop, but we’d like to offer a great developer experience, and we see the desktop as part of it.

This isn’t exactly “easy”, but an option would be to use ubuntu live CD to resize your / partition and then add and format another partition for /home. Then in Clear, create an /etc/fstab to mount /home on that other partition. Then you’ll need to reboot to live distro in the middle of this to rename the old /home and copy its subfolders to the new partition before finally booting into Clear again.

2 Likes

Thought about it, but then just created the symlinks for Documents, Videos, Photos, etc :slight_smile: Not ideal solution, but works.

Hi,
For me the most frustrating part was, the first time I downloaded clear linux and tried to boot, it would do kernel panics or unable to find the installation file.
I’ve had over 5/10 success on daily builds, and every single time, I would have to go back and find a working daily build.
Which becomes extremely annoying. Basically when you want to install clearlinux and download from the website, it is a 50-50 chance that it won’t even boot.
At least please confirm that the images are bootable before you have a download link in the main website please!
Also, a faster way to report problems.
One last thing, being able to install it side by side with other operating systems. I had 0 chances, this prevents me from using clearlinux on a daily basis,
I am writing to you from clearlinux now though. Once things work, they work wonderfully.
Cheers
Oz