Howdy y’all, for the past few weeks ive been trying to get two different SystemD free distros working on my recently acquired pocket reform, This process has been headache inducing but recently I’ve made a breakthrough, and I’ve come to understand where a lot of my problem come from
Anything on the side of reform-tools to make this easier? It ships some systemd services which could probably easily be turned into something other init systems understand because it’s just shell scripts.
If your problems come from something which our tool could have prevented I will gladly read any such bug reports.
A lot of the problems I’ve encountered weren’t exactly related to reform tools, when I was trying to get void working most problems came from the kernel/boot side of things I tried to use the debian kernel but dkms failed because void hasn’t updated to gcc-15. Denuvin had some minor issues, mostly from reform-tools and that was due to their systemd dependency. Migrating from trixie went well except for the step where I had to uninstall systemd. If I may ask what parts of reform tools need systemd
You probably should use the way which Void Linux uses to build a kernel with only the Reform-specific modifications on top. That’s what I did for Debian when I started working on this in 2021. Using the Debian kernel for Void Linux would be like using the Void Linux kernel in Debian.
If reform2_lpc.c fails to compile with older gcc versions, I take patches which make it work.
Care to list them?
All of it is in the systemd directory. You don’t need reform-sleep.service nor reform-sleep.conf unless you are on imx8mq and want to be able to suspend. You don’t need reform-power-daemon.service unless you are on the Pocket Reform but that one is easy to replace as all it does is to run /usr/libexec/reform-tools/reform-power-daemon. The most crucial component is reform-hw-setup.service but all it does is to run /usr/bin/reform-hw-setup so that should also be trivial to replace in any given init system.
Apologies for not responding earlier, work and some other rather depressing stuff was personally happening irl
- The way xbps-src was building the kernel didn’t seem to be setting the dtbs folder up in a usable manner even after multiple attempts
- it wasn’t reform2_lpc that was breaking it was the fact that the kernel/kernel headers were compiled using gcc-15 which would cause dkms to fail
- I had to uninstall reform tools just to uninstall systemd to complete the migration I was able to reinstall them by using apt-get download then using dpkg cryptsetup had to be reinstalled, Devuan removes gnome as they use a non-systemd friendly form. This is more on the side of devuan but when you migrate it does accidentally disable systemd networking and resolution so you loose networking before the next step of installation chrooting in from the barely functional void sd card allowed me to finish the instillation
Thank you for posting the last part, I might go back to void if I can actually figure out why xbps-src isn’t compiling the dtbs folder properly otherwise ill be sticking to devuin. It does seem to be stable besides the broken dependency with systemd on the reform-tools and the broken service. If xbps-src pocket-reform-kernel can be fixed or if its some other issue like dracut not only would that be wonderful to fix but It should make it possible to create an unofficial image for people to use
Alright, I got kde working. Allthough it is very laggy and the cursor is a black box
That’s this workaround shipped by reform-tools: etc/profile.d/reform-kwin.sh · main · Reform / MNT Reform Tools · GitLab
I’m hoping to give OpenBSD a look once my RCore gets here. No systemd in that.
From what research i’ve done the mnt reform can use openbsd easily thanks to the display being an iDP while the pocket reform is a DSI display. Josch can correct me if i’m wrong, UBoot doesn’t use the DSI displat which is why you can connect the micro-hdmi and see a little logo and some uboot text in the top left corner when booting
Yes, only imx8mq has early display support in u-boot.
For the pocket reform with rk3588 there is barebox which has early display support.