MX Linux 18

[fox]

....Does gparted or kparted see the partitions in live mode?

Yes gparted does see it in live mode. And interestingly, if going through the installer, that partition shows as a swap option. Weird, eh?

[Jason]

Yes gparted does see it in live mode. And interestingly, if going through the installer, that partition shows as a swap option. Weird, eh?

That is weird. Was the partition formatted? Perhaps the installer just didn't recognize it as a potential place to install? Or maybe it just thought it needed to be bigger?

Sometimes the installers just seem to get confused. Was putting Linux Mint on Ivo's notebook and it couldn't see the Windows partition. Offered to either use the entire drive for LM only or "Something Else". So I went that route but it's not something a beginner should be expected to do.

[buster]

Mike wrote: "the installer didn't see the partition that I had prepared for it, even when choosing the custom option."

That's a shame. Hope the problem resolves itself. Or you find a workaround.

[fox]

That is weird. Was the partition formatted? Perhaps the installer just didn't recognize it as a potential place to install? Or maybe it just thought it needed to be bigger?
....

I tried it formatted and not; didn't matter. I tried formatting it as ext4, xfs and fat32; didn't matter. It's size was larger than the minimum and larger than some partitions it was willing to format to. I think that if I want to install mx, it will have to wipe a Ubuntu partition.

[fox]

I have it installed now; I had to install it on a partition that had basic Ubuntu on it. I installed it without grub and just updated grub from the default Ubuntu partition. Only problem was it wouldn't boot until I turned off secure boot. I'm running a test now with the lid down to see how much power it consumes in hibernate. It will be interesting to see if it hibernates properly without consuming too much power, as Ubuntu hibernating is consuming 2% of battery charge per hour. Interesting also because MX had TLP already installed (an energy saving app). If MX performs better in hibernate mode, I'm going to wonder if it has anything to do with secure boot.

[fox]

Unfortunately, MX doesn't have the answer to excessive energy consumption in hibernation mode. Otherwise it's a nice distro.

[Jason]

True hibernate shouldn't have any energy consumption. It basically stores everything in RAM to a disk file and then shuts down. You do need a swap that is equal in size to the amount of RAM you have for it to work thought the option to hibernate shouldn't be there if you don't have it.

Sounds like you're using some kind of hybrid-sleep mode, a cross between hibernation and sleep. The laptop I bought from you have something like this mode but I was able to turn it off in the BIOS. Kept wondering why it had no energy left when I'd go to use it after not having used it for days. If I recall correctly, it's Intel Rapid Start which basically acts like hibernation but actually puts your system in a sleep mode but with a lot less power usage (but not zero). There is a delay setting associated with this in the BIOS that transfers the system from sleep to hibernation after this amount of time. The advantage is that your system starts up faster than from hibernation. This could be your culprit:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/what-is-intel-rapid-start-technology

[fox]

Thanks for that, Jason. I do have a swap file enabled, and it is larger than RAM. I'm certain that you are right about the Intel Rapid Start being the culprit, but I don't know how to fix this. Only S4 state is enabled in this laptop, and when looking at it from the Ubuntu side, the sleep mode enabled is called s2idle. The deep option is listed, but not enabled. I can enable it with a Terminal command, but then the laptop doesn't wake up. I'm pretty sure that the s2idle state itself isn't the problem because on my 2015 xps 13, the default is also s2idle, and less than 10% of battery life is lost after closing the lid for 24 hours. The older Broadwell processor in that laptop probably doesn't use Intel Rapid Start. Rapid Start might be a nice thing to have if one is using Windows, but I'm not.

Interesting also is that when running in Windows, closing the lid seems to invoke a deeper sleep state (judging by energy loss), but if left that way for more than an hour, it doesn't wake up at all and has to be rebooted. I'm sure that this isn't appropriate behaviour.

None of this has anything directly to do with MX Linux, although in the test I did, hibernating in MX caused a much greater battery loss than it did in Ubuntu. I have no idea why. But by trying alternate distros, I'm hoping for a "Linux Mint effect" on this laptop. I am referring to my experience in running various distros on my 2015 5k iMac. The problem was support for the relatively new Radeon video card in that computer. Initially, all distros were taking 5 minutes to boot it up; that is all distros except Linux Mint, which for some reason worked fine. (Later kernels supported the 2015 iMac out of the box without that delay.) If I can find my "Linux Mint" distro for this laptop, I'll use it most of the time because when not traveling, I mostly use the laptop in the evening for an hour or less and then put it back to sleep. I suppose I could just shut it down when not in use, but this deep sleep/hibernation mode is very convenient for me.

[Jason]

Per a suggestion from Bill (ssfc72), we split off this discussion into a new topic here because it became more a discussion of power modes and Linux. We'll leave this topic open for more discussion of MX Linux 18.

[fox]

To bring it back to MX, any idea why it wouldn't run after it was installed without turning secure boot off? The only "unusual" thing I did during installation was to not let it install a bootloader. I did this because Ubuntu is my main distro on this laptop, and I have it's bootloader customized (with grub-customizer). I know that updating grub in Ubuntu would add MX to the menu, which it did.

[Jason]

I'm not sure. MX Linux is based on Debian but I don't know if they do any other kernel customizations and if they do that would affect whether their kernel is recognized as I would imagine that Debian kernels are in the list of recognized kernel images. A document about secure boot here:

Secure boot is a security standard developed by members of the PC industry to help make sure that a device boots using only software that is trusted by the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). When the PC starts, the firmware checks the signature of each piece of boot software, including UEFI firmware drivers (also known as Option ROMs), EFI applications, and the operating system. If the signatures are valid, the PC boots, and the firmware gives control to the operating system.

The TL;DR of it is that MX Linux isn't recognized by the signatures or keys in the database stored in UEFI, at least I think that's the case. Are any other distros installed without boot managers?

[fox]

I should have checked this beforehand. According to this document, MX Linux only boots with secure boot off.

I may have also discovered how to make this distro hibernate properly; see this. I'll have to try this to see the effect because MX Linux does appear to be hibernating "properly" in that it hibernates and wakes up. Problem is that when I tried it, it used up way too much power while it was in hibernation. But I didn't do any of the suggested edits.

[Jason]

Interesting. And their wiki pages look quite helpful judging based on these two.

When you say it is "hibernating 'properly' in that it hibernates and wakes up", what do you mean? From what you posted before it sounds like you expect to tap a key and a system will wake up from hibernation, if it's doing it properly, is that correct? Because even the page of the document you cited from the wiki says that's not how hibernation works, it writes the RAM to the disk and shuts down.

[fox]

All I meant was that it goes into hibernation or some low-power state when I close the lid or select "hibernate" from the menu, and it comes out of that state when I raise the lid. As to what it's actually doing, I don't know. Whatever it's doing, it's using more power than it should in a low-power state.

However, I just checked again in MX. The menu allows for suspension; no mention of hibernation. If I type "sudo hibernate" in a terminal, I get "hibernate warning: Tuxonice signature file not found". So I found in Synaptic a package called "Tuxonice-rui" and installed it. Trying to hibernate again from the terminal, though, I get the same error message. A google search on the message doesn't bring up anything on MX at all, and nothing in the links for other distros (mostly Ubuntu) tell me anything I can use to solve this.

I'm guessing from all this that closing the lid is just suspending the laptop and that isn't a super low-power state.

[buster]

Mike, while you are in MX Linux, you might want to try the Budgie desktop. I have KDE installed as well an Xfce, and I can log out of one and change the login to try another. (Top right corner of sign in page.) Using a very nice, and quick, KDE for the last week or so.

Find MXTools > Simple Package Installer > Desktop Environments

Pretty slick.