I’ve installed Clear Linux a few times over the last 3-4 days inside a VirtualBox VM. One thing that struck me as an issue is the graphical installer – it seems to stop updating the progress indicator late in the install process, and if it weren’t for the disk and network I/O indicators in VirtualBox, I would have assumed the installer had hung.
As a matter of fact, the first time I saw this behavior, I assumed the installer had hung and reset the VM.
VirtualBox guest additions need a little love, too. I posed a topic in General about that…
If this is during the install and you are using the LiveCD, you can setup the wifi connection by clicking on the icon at the upper right and selecting wifi.
If this is after the install and you have not installed a graphical interface you can use nmcli to setup the wifi, though I am unsure if this is installed or if a package exists for it yet. If you are feeling adventurous, ifconfig and iwconfig can also be used and then use dhclient to get an address. I am not in front of my box to see if these are available by default on a clean install, some distro’s include them and others don’t during a default install.
@puneetse That link does not take into account the new installer. I was also unable to get to the kernel commandline during the install using Ctrl+Alt+F2 as suggested in the docs I could find. Not a huge issue but something to think about.
Having now done one successful installs and numerous failed ones, here goes:
Absolute must-have: my machines both have a 128 GB SSD and a terabyte spinning disk. I want root on the SSD and swap and /home on the spinning disk, everything encrypted. There doesn’t seem to be a way to get that at install time, even in the text installer. The best I can do is install destructive to the SSD then move stuff around and bind-mount once it comes back up.
I have one machine that neither the Live desktop nor server will boot on. It’s an AMD machine with an AMD GPU, but it passes Intel’s host test script. Both install ISOs boot and come up to the desktop / console, but the mouse and keyboard don’t work. Thus I can’t get a journactl dump to use for filing an issue - it’s just broken. So at the very least have a recovery mode on the installers so I can bring the machine up single-user and troubleshoot before it gets stuck in the weeds.
Virtual Machine Manager: this is a little less frustrating, since I can get a journactl. The host is Fedora 30 Silverblue (on the AMD box) with Virtual Machine Manager. The live desktop comes up with keyboard and mouse working but a black screen. I can get a console and take a journalctl dump out to a USB drive, and I can install the system with the text installer. But the installed system comes up with no screen - GDM is throwing some ugly errors.
I’m going to post the GDM journalctl errors to a GitHub issue tomorrow, My hope is that fixing the virtual issue will also fix the issue on bear metal.
The successful install is on a 15-inch HP Omen - I don’t remember which generation Core i7 it has but everything seems to work out of the box except the thrashing about I have to do to get a fully-encryted two-disk setup.
I usually find that torrent downloads for installation images are faster than the direct ones. Also, torrents automatically check the integrity of downloads once they are finished.
Adding a magnet link on the download page could be useful!
The installer only has three different languages. If there is an easy way (E.G. GitHub), I can help in translating it in Italian!
While installing Clear, I had to repeatedly wake up my laptop because of the Automatic suspend feature of GNOME. It could be disabled during the installation process, or at least show that the installation is continuing correctly.
I wanted to install Clear Linux on an empty partition along with my existing Linux distribution. I chose the install-desktop-beta image for my laptop. I wanted to use it as my secondary OS and when I am confortable with it, I will use it as a primary OS.
Select Installation Media doesn’t detect the empty partitions. Once I deleted that partition, and hit the Refresh button then it detects the unallocated space. I am OK with that.
It doesn’t make use of already existing esp and swap partitions. Instead it has created additional partitions for these. It’s good to have the option to select empty partitions and mount points.
Nothing to track whether the installation has hung or not because I have selected almost all bundles and waited long time to complete installation. Once the installation is finished, I see no way of booting into old Linux distribution. It’s gone.
Installed on my Eluktronics (Clevo) P670RS-G laptop (i7-6700HQ, 32Gb, GTX1070). Installed fine but on the 2nd reboot the trackpad isn’t seen anymore. Worked fine using live CD and on 1st boot after install but now isn’t seen.
Don’t like how during the install it somehow changed my boot-up order in the BIOS so the Clear Linux SSD (have 4 separate 512Gb SSDs in laptop, Win 10, Mint 19.1, Salient Arch & Clear Linux) is the 1st one, changed from the Mint SSD. Also it changed the partition on the Salient SSD so it now has 1/2 of it as unallocated. Don’t know how the hell it did that but I’m not happy about it.
Tried installing it on my main PC (i9-9900k, 32Gb, RTX2080Ti). Live CD works fine, after install just get a black screen.
From what I’ve seen using the Live CD and on my laptop Clear Linux is very fast. I’m a novice Linux user (been going between Mint & Salient for the past 5 months), mainly gaming and some content creation. Want to get Clear going on my i9 rig to see how Steam and the games I play work on it.
I wanted to install ClearLinux but found two hinderances.
1 ) USB can only boot from a UEFI system and not a legacy one , I think it is one big hurdle many users will not go for ClearLinux ( with intel based systems like me even if they want to because I have only a legacy based laptops available )
2 ) The installer is not offering a choice to install to a one particular target partition ( such approach is very good for multi-boot systems like mine ) e.g say /dev/sda5 . I would not want to kill my arch linux and witchOS to install ClearLinux. I believe this option can be easily adopted by ClearLinux and will attract more users.
Clearlinux isn’t like other distributions, and calamares doesn’t know about swupd or how to handle the specifics of installing clearlinux. It is an interesting thought however, but we’d need to look into it more first to see if it would fit the bill.
To be honest, I think the current installer is simpler, faster and overall better designed than calamares. Sure it lacks manual partitioning at the moment, but this can be added later.
• -p, --path={path}
Specify the path to use for operations. This can be used to point to a chroot instal‐
lation of the OS or a custom mount.
IOW, from a booted clearlinux install, you can install a copy of clearlinux into a path. You would probably do swupd verify --fix -m $version --path=/mnt or something like it.
ahkok ; I was just wondering if I can try a chroot install Clear Linux from my arch Linux or CentOS to a target partition I choose rather than downloading a whole new DVD iso file once again . I easily do a chroot install of arch Linux from an existing installed arch Linux or a live version of arch based distro , just wondering how better it would do on clearlinux
I downloaded clear-29540-live-desktop this morning and created a USB stick which booted just fine using “F12” on a Dell Inspiron i7 8-core processor. Yesterday I had tried 29520. When I tired to install it, I immediately got the “EFI firmware missing” message. The same thing happened again today. I investigated it yesterday and as best as I can tell I boot Kubuntu using UEFI. The installer needs a better explanation of what to do about this issue. How is it I can install these other distributions but not Clear? Why is Clear odd in this respect? It’s guaranteed that if people cannot install it, they are not going to use it. I am interested in Clear, but only to a point. I’m 76 years old, and have been using Linux exclusively for a long time. My interest is in systems that are easy to use and install. Actually Kubuntu works beautifully. There really isn’t any significant reason to fool with anything else. Whatever the issue is with my computer not meeting the EFI requirement, I would like to know. I am not booting in legacy mode.
On another subject these Dells tend to overheat because the fan system is a bit weird. A copper strip is affixed to the processor which leads to a fan on the side. It seems like a poor system and in fact it is a poor system. However a Linux program call TLP resolves the over heating issue. I suppose it is due to throttling the CPU. I bring this up because I think TPL will need to be working part of installations because Clear did freeze up yesterday running from the USB, and I’m quite sure it was related to this excessive heat issue and since you are Intel you should best know how to address the issue.
Finally, I’m posting here because it’s difficult to find the proper bug threads on Github.
