Triple boot face off - Trisquel vs Parabola vs Hyperbola

5 replies [Last post]
andyprough
Offline
Joined: 02/12/2015

I've got a laptop with a Qualcomm Atheros AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express), Intel cpu and graphics, 8gb of ram, and a 250gb ssd. I've re-partitioned the ssd to create 3 equal sized 64gb partitions and installed Trisquel 9 on the first partition, upgrading it to the testing/beta version of Trisquel 10.

I'm going to fill the other two 64gb partitions with Hyperbola, which I'll upgrade to the testing/beta 0.4 version, and Parabola, using the LXDE/openRC version. I've downloaded my ISO's, and I'll post some notes here on anything noteworthy about the installation procedure.

INSTALLATION OF TRISQUEL 10 TESTING/BETA

Upgrading to Trisquel 10 testing/beta was a process of changing all the lines in /etc/apt/sources.list to the "http" versions (to overcome some certification errors thrown up by apt-get) and to "nabia" instead of "etiona". That was followed by 'sudo apt-get update' and a very lengthy 'sudo apt-get upgrade', reboot, another 'sudo apt-get update' and another very lengthy 'sudo apt-get upgrade', reboot, and another 'sudo apt-get update' followed by a very lengthy 'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade' and a reboot.

I was worried during some of the reboots, as I would be staring at a blank screen for a long time hoping I hadn't bricked the system, but Trisquel was just busy in the background during those times and is now running really well. I enabled backports before upgrading, and have a couple of "latest" versions of software as a result, such as the latest version of Libreoffice. Boot times are now just a few seconds, and Trisquel 10 testing/beta is very impressive on this hardware. Trisquel really likes this Atheros wifi card, I hope that Hyperbola and Parabola play nicely with it as well.

I downloaded the Numix theme and icon packs from the Trisquel repos and I am using them - I can't stand the default Mate theming and icons. I installed one of my favorite writing programs, FocusWriter, which is in the repos. Other than that, I haven't had to change much of anything. Sound and video, of course, were working perfectly without any manual intervention.

AttachmentSize
trisquel10.jpg189.36 KB
focuswriter.jpg204.11 KB
damidu
Offline
Joined: 03/30/2021

Hey great post! Do you think you can install all the fsf endorsed distrubutions on your ssd hardrive? You will be a hero if you can add GNU Guix to the list and why not dragora. Can you install 6 distros on your harddrive? lol

That will be a crazy machine. Do you have sound with hyperbola? I don't understand because there are pulseaudio and alsa in the packages list. I think that they use sndio https://sndio.org that come from openbsd.

If you want to know what I do with my laptops and why I break things. It's not me https://yewtu.be/watch?v=1YPQTR-02_Q

andyprough
Offline
Joined: 02/12/2015

>"Do you think you can install all the fsf endorsed distrubutions on your ssd hardrive? You will be a hero if you can add GNU Guix to the list and why not dragora. Can you install 6 distros on your harddrive?"

No, because you are going to install the rest of them on your shiny new Thinkpad, including PureOS. And write all the how-to's. There's no need for me to duplicate your effort!!

andyprough
Offline
Joined: 02/12/2015

>"Do you have sound with hyperbola? I don't understand because there are pulseaudio and alsa in the packages list. I think that they use sndio https://sndio.org that come from openbsd."

The way I got sound was upgrading to Hyperbola 0.4 beta, and installing the iceweasal-uxp browser which Hyperbola compiles to work with sndio. I made a thread about upgrading to the 0.4 beta.

Also mpv sound works with sndio if you start it with this command:
mpv --audio-device=sndio [link_to_media_file]
Sometimes mpv gives me sound with just 'mpv [mp3-file]', but it works for sure with the '--audio-device=sndio' option.

My only volume control is through alsamixer, which I can only get to work with root right now. I haven't tried to install other mixers or sound control programs.

From my understanding, the Hyperbola devs are doing a lot of work with audio, and hopefully a lot of this will be resolved by the time the 0.4 version is fully released.

andyprough
Offline
Joined: 02/12/2015

I had to reboot (of course) after installing iceweasel-uxp and mpv in order to get sound.

andyprough
Offline
Joined: 02/12/2015

Worth noting - in order to install ublock-origin on iceweasel-uxp, you need to go to the "legacy" version github page here: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock-for-firefox-legacy

It is kept up-to-date, but it installs on legacy forks of firefox like iceweasel-uxp and palemoon.