Has anyone heard of, or have any feedback on Bedrock Linux?

Tracyorama, the developer of Bedrock Linux is on this forum:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...um-4175573685/

I haven't used it personally, but it does look like an interesting project.

I'm the Bedrock Linux founder/lead developer. As JWJones pointed out, I'm here and happy to answer any questions.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by feedback (wouldn't that be opinions directed "back" at me?). I'll give the current project state, including its strengths and weaknesses; hopefully that is what you're looking for. If not, feel free to rephrase your question and I'll try again. I'll try to be as fair and unbiased as I can, but do keep in mind who I am and thus read this with the appropriate amount of salt:

• Bedrock Linux's goal is to get features from multiple, other distributions, all working together cohesively in one distribution.
  • Note by "features" I do not mean specifically executables, or packages; the concept is more broad. Anything I can include there, I'd like to. Example "features" (both currently supported and planned) include: the installation process, kernel/initrd, init system, executables, man pages, application menu contents, icons/themes, fonts, et al. Always eager to add more where we can/where needed.
• Most of the underlying technologies work fairly well at this point. The theory Bedrock Linux is built around has been fairly well proven.
• There are still some desired features that don't "just work" cross-distro yet. Most of these features do work, but either you have to make sure all the requisite components from the same distro or you need to know how to manually hook them up. The most notable example is init system hooks - if you want something to start at boot (e.g. your GUI login manager or your networking daemon), you'll probably have to get it from the same distro that provides your init, or manually make a init hook (e.g. a runit run directory or a systemd unit file) to tell the init system about it. Usually less Linux-savvy users do the former, while more experienced do some mix of the former and latter options. Note that we may never get quite everything to work cross-distro; the aim is to get as much as possible.
• It's very possible things that the active Bedrock Linux community members don't use don't work on Bedrock. I wouldn't know, given that no one has tried. For example, flatpak looks neat, but I haven't tried it; I wouldn't be surprised if there's some surprise there that keeps it from working. Or maybe it works fine, I don't know.
• Where things don't work, it's usually obvious and they usually fail straight away. Its rare for Bedrock Linux to surprise someone after using a given workflow for a while. Thus, you can try Bedrock Linux and see if it works for your workflow before really committing to it without too much concern for getting burned.
• The focus of the project up until this point has been on the underlying technology. We've explicitly been forgoing "user experience" polish. In my opinion, there is little value in having a polished interface to something that doesn't actually do what is advertised, while the reverse is of use for more experienced/savvy/patient users.
  • If you're more of a it-just-works Linux user and don't like getting your hands dirty on the command line, the project isn't anwyhere near ready for you yet. My apologies.
  • If you have the background to get your hands dirty, but not the patience for it, we're not quite ready for you, but we're close.
    • We're finally passed that prove-the-tech/theory stage, and so the next release's focus is on user experience improvements. I'm reworking just about everything user-facing to make a smoother experience, which requires major changes to the under-the-hood bits as well. The scope for this is much larger than expected which (combine with external factors) has resulted in the upcoming release being delayed much longer than I had hoped. However, we seem to be at the tail end of that and the upcoming release should be out later this year (2018).
  • If you like getting your hands dirty on the command line and understand how bits of Linux fit together (e.g. what an initrd is), the project might be at a good stage for you now.
• Bedrock Linux uses more disk space than traditional distros, as there's some file duplication due to how it works. There is also some runtime overhead (e.g. switching contexts between distros), but most users find it negligable; it's hard to even find in benchmarks unless you know where to look. There is one subsystem which is apparently slow enough that some users have noticed an issue, which I plan to improve going forward.
  • I've successfully run Bedrock Linux on an Asus eeepc, and I know someone else who has gotten it running on a raspberry pi.
• I use Bedrock Linux as my daily driver, on my personal desktop, personal laptop, personal server, and even my work laptop. It is very much ready and usable, albeit for a very specific audience.
• The community is still very small (largely, I think, due to the current lack of user experience polish), and so there is a limit on how much hand holding or help the community can provide at the moment. We're happy to try, but it's nothing like the larger disros.

Hope that helps! If not, try a more narrow question and I'll see what I can do.

3 members found this post helpful.

I tried the hijack method with Bodhi linux, but ran into too many issues. May try it with something else

I can't say I recall anyone explicitly reporting hijacking Bodhi, but I also can't think of why it would be any different from other distros. IIRC it is very similar to Ubuntu, and I make a point to test with Ubuntu.

If you try with something else and it fails as well, I'm happy to try and help debug where it went awry.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for your reply. I was just asking in hopes someone would give me a clue which distros are easily integrated with Bedrock? I'm very interested in this project. I attempted the hijack method with bohdi, but gave up because there was too much to configure. I'm attempting it with Deepin 15.5 right now and having some issues. Not as many as with Bodhi though. I'll probably figure it out sooner or later, but here is where I'm stuck:

root@:/home/tracyorama/bedrocklinux-userland# make
cd src/libattr/ && \
make configure && \
./configure --prefix=/home/tracyorama/bedrocklinux-userland/build && \
make CC=/home/tracyorama/bedrocklinux-userland/build/bin/musl-gcc libattr && \
make install-lib
make[1]: Entering directory '/home/tracyorama/bedrocklinux-userland/src/libattr'
libtoolize -c `libtoolize -n -i >/dev/null 2>/dev/null && echo -i` -f
libtoolize: putting auxiliary files in AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR, '.'.
libtoolize: copying file './ltmain.sh'
libtoolize: putting macros in AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS, 'm4'.
libtoolize: copying file 'm4/libtool.m4'
libtoolize: copying file 'm4/ltoptions.m4'
libtoolize: copying file 'm4/ltsugar.m4'
libtoolize: copying file 'm4/ltversion.m4'
libtoolize: copying file 'm4/lt~obsolete.m4'
libtoolize: Consider adding '-I m4' to ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS in Makefile.am.
cp include/install-sh .
aclocal -I m4
make[1]: aclocal: Command not found
Makefile:67: recipe for target 'configure' failed
make[1]: *** [configure] Error 127
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/tracyorama/bedrocklinux-userland/src/libattr'
Makefile:112: recipe for target 'build/.success_build_libattr' failed
make: *** [build/.success_build_libattr] Error 2
root@:/home/tracyorama/bedrocklinux-userland# Makefile.am.
bash: Makefile.am.: command not found
root@/home/tracyorama/bedrocklinux-userland# locate Makefile.am
bash: locate: command not found
/bedrocklinux-userland# fgrep Makefile.am

=========================================
I managed to get by that one after adding -I m4 to ACLOCAL_FLAGS.
I still had aclocal: Command not found, but I followed steps in this URL:
https://kerneltalks.com/troubleshoot...ror-in-ubuntu/
and solved it

You're very welcome

The ones which historically have received the most attention are listed here:

https://bedrocklinux.org/1.0beta2/strata.html

We'll have a more concrete list in the next release.

Nice detective work!

Many distros provide some means to search their repositories for the package which provides a given file. When I'm building something, as you are here, I usually search the repositories for packages that provide missing dependencies.

I think Deepin is Debian-based, and thus it probably has `apt-file`. Try installing that `apt-file` and updating its database:

After that you can ask `apt-file` which package provides aclocal:

This gave me way too many files. The error said "Command not found" - this is a hint that it expects aclocal to be an executable, and on Linux systems executables are typically in a "bin" directory. Trying again, looking for a bin directory:

Bingo! As you found out separately, looks like automake is package you need.

In case you run into something similar in the future and querying a search engine doesn't help, that's another route to take.

However, I don't expect most users to go through that process. The Bedrock Linux installation instructions do explicitly list commonly needed packages to build it, which include automake. From both the quickstart and full installation packages for the current release on bedrocklinux.org:

• gcc. Note there is a bug in gcc 4.8.2 and 4.9.0 (and 4.9.1?) which will keep it from being able to properly compile one of Bedrock Linux's dependences, the musl libc. Thus, it would be useful to pick a distro that can provide either an older or newer version of gcc, such as 4.7.X or below, or 4.9.2 or higher.
• make
• git version 1.8 or above. This will be used to acquire source code, both Bedrock Linux's and source code for required third party software.
• standard UNIX tools such as sh, grep, sed, awk, and tar.
• autoconf (needed for FUSE)
• automake (needed for FUSE)
• libtool (needed for FUSE)
• gettext (needed for FUSE)
  • and possibly gettext-dev or gettext-devel depending on your distro
• fakeroot (for building tarball with proper permissions)

Make sure you grab all of those.

Careful when reading the installation instructions, as it is easy to miss an essential step and end up with an inoperable system. As mentioned earlier, I'm working to make the project more accessible, and so hopefully that will become less of an issue in the future.

1 members found this post helpful.

In the stratum guide it says "The next step is to configure </bedrock/strata/gentoo/etc/portage/make.conf". Do I have to make this file, because Gentoo is not listed in strata folder and make.conf is nonexistent after unpacking stage 3 tarball or am I supposed to format my harddrive and mount it?

Apologies, the instructions aren't the most clear there. It seems the person who wrote that bit of the instructions left out a detail, assuming the audience would figure it out. I'll look into fixing that this weekend, if I remember. A quick scan makes it look like all the other strata setup instructions mention what is needed, and so it probably makes more sense if Gentoo isn't the first stratum being acquired.

When you get a new distro for use as a Bedrock Linux stratum, the goal is get the give distro's files in the appropriate `/bedrock/strata/<stratum>` directory. The Gentoo stage3 tarball you're downloading and extracting contains Gentoo's files, and so our goal is to get those files into `/bedrock/strata/gentoo`. Depending on where you are during the install process, you might have to prefix the mount point to that path - something like `/mnt/bedrock/bedrock/strata/gentoo`. Or maybe not, if you're far enough along.

Make `/bedrock/strata/gentoo` (or whatever you want to call the stratum), download or move the stage3 tarball into that directory, then `cd` to that directory and unpack the tarball with the provided command. Once that works you don't need the tarball anymore; you can remove it. Something like:

From there you should be able to continue with the instructions to modify `make.conf` (again, prefixing the mount point if necessary depending on where you are in the instructions).

If you downloaded the tarball and extracted elsewhere, it might have made a mess of the directory you were in by making a bunch of files (like make.conf) in that directory. May have to do some detective work to figure where you were if/when you extracted it if you want to clean it up.

You should NOT have to format your harddrive to acquire any of the distros listed on that webpage.

I suspected that I might have to make it myself, so I guess I never finished hijacking Deepin then? I ended up ruining my Deepin install, but I don't think it was do to Bedrock. I got stuck in a login loop after an update and ended up installing Calculate linux over it. I ruined the install trying to fix it. I tried every fix I could find and nothing worked and then I remember when I tried to install Nutyx linux that I was caught in a login loop and they mentioned a fix for it, so I think I'll try to get that one going on a spare hard drive and I'll try hijacking that with Bedrock. Calculate Linux makes too many partitions when it installs so I better not try hijacking that. I already ruined the Calculate install trying to flash a new bios version and had to reinstall it. I still need to update my bios, but I have to find a method that works for that in linux.

You didn't supply enough information to say with any certainty either way. I'd guess not.

I'm not sure what you mean by login loop, but that doesn't sound fun. Good luck!

It may be worth re-emphasizing that the current Bedrock Linux release isn't the most user friendly, and that the focus for the next release is to make it more user friendly. Many of your troubles may be related to the current lack of user friendliness, and might be resolved with the next release. I don't want to discourage you if you think you can get around the issues and make it work for you here and now, but my guess is you'll have much less of a headache if you wait for the next release, which should be later this year.

The login loops I think are are problem with xorg and I haven't been able to find anything that resolves it, so I just move to another os. Bedrock's documentation isn't the most user friendly, but it's still better than allot of other distro's documentation that I've been messing with. I'm still gonna keep trying with Bedrock on a spare laptop on an external hardrive. I installed AntiX linux and I'm trying to hijack it right now and everything went alright up until this point:

tar does not track extended filesystem attributes, and brc requires a special attribute to allow non-root users to utilize it. To set this attribute, run:

/bedrock/libexec/setcap cap_sys_chroot=ep /bedrock/bin/brc

When I run that I get this:

bedrocklinux-userland# /bedrock/libexec/setcap cap_sys_chroot=ep /bedrock/bin/brc
bash: /bedrock/libexec/setcap: No such file or directory

I don't know if this is a critical issue or not and when I navigate to it manually and click on setcap file it prompts me asking which Program to choose to open it.

I guess I'll just skip this for now and try to add some other stratum and see what happens

That's not good.

It's essential for Bedrock Linux to work properly.

My guess is you're crossing CPU architectures / instruction sets. Maybe you compiled it on an amd64 box/os and then are now trying to hijack a (32-bit) x86 install. Either that, or somehow the binary became corrupt and is no longer valid ELF.

Setting the chroot capability on brc is essential; Bedrock won't work without that. You're welcome work on other bits as an exercise, but until the setcap thing is fixed you won't get a working system. Also, if my guess about the instruction set thing is correct, other Bedrock bits will also be broken in other ways.

I'm using 64 bit and I downloaded 64 bit iso: antiX-17.1_x64-full.iso