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GroovyArcade live-CD 2022 (collaborative effort)

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Substring:
Thank you for testing !

There is a lcd setting that you can choose at boot, it's aoubd the 9th position i think, you must scroll down :)

Still much work to do on it, but first, i need to split the repo in 2 : one for building packages and deploying them (need to find a solution to host them). I'd like to have a testing/unstable repo + a stable repo. The other result of the split would be to solely build the iso. And i need to totally rewrite that part.

Won't spend much time on it during july though, need a well deserved holidays break ^^

Substring:
So, little news before holidays break !

The way I made the whole process was too monolithic. Building packages was tied to building the iso, so there was no way to build arch packages on their own. Things are solved now and available at http://https://github.com/substring/packages/releases

You'll notice a stable and a testing release. Testing is built everyday, to match as closely as possible any updates that would happen on packages that I've included. This means for example that a kernel update would be available within 24h after the official update on Arch linux side (if no patching is implied). The idea is to let that part live on its own as much as possible. Well sometimes I may need to patch here and there, but at least, it's as much "rolling release" as possible with the few server resources I have at disposal.

The next step will be to rewrite the iso building part. As for now it's just remastering the Arch linux iso, but I'm cyrrently rewriting that part to use the archiso utility. Things are going fine so far, I hope to have a working iso by the end of August.

Then, the biggest part will come : improve gasetup ! I have quite a few ideas, I'll give some news here anyway.

And finally : documentation !!! Most of the interesting ideas are summed up in http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,160440.0.html so i'll setup a repo and let others easily contribute, this must be a community effort.

Substring:
Time for some news !

So, been working on it lately, things are in good shape for the September release:
- split packages building and iso building in 2 different repos, so 2 different CI
- I'm almost done with CI stuff and so
- UEFI boot works with the ISO, but it's definitely useless : it bypassses the boot menu, so no video configuration. This just sucks so stick to legacy BIOS boot method
- need to spend again some time with EDID at boot, it's not working as it should yet
- fixes here and there, like applying the good mame.dat file at every groovymame upgrade. This makes advancemenu+ terribly slow to load, i'm thinking about switching to attract mode for good
- add a small web server that helps user to set volumes in alsa (the audio part). This is just a pain to be done in console, abd absolutely not user friendly

At this point, I will now focus on 2 things:
- user experience through gasetup. I'm working on adding a easygashgui backend so the very same menu would work the very same way in console or desktop environment. Less effort to maintain all that, easier configuration
- have the boot menu work in 15kHz straight away. This won't be easy, it's meant to run at 61kHz no matter what, but the code looks flexible enough to allow some patching. This part will be pretty "fun" to code/patch/test/add to GA

Also need to write some basc dics for users and contributers ...

Now the important links :
- https://gitlab.com/groovyarcade for all the dev stuff
- https://github.com/substring/packages/releases for arch linux packages
- https://github.com/substring/os/releases for OS releases. Don't bother with anything else than GroovyArcade 2019.XX releases, others are made for testing, labels sometimes get messed up

Feedback is welcome

Substring:
Time to give some news hehehe

I'm still actively working on my "fork". Been focusing on EDID stuff and see how to make things as much "plug'n'play" as possible. Have an interesting result to share : I can boot GroovyArcade without any specific kernel setting (no forced resolution, which means linux 15kHz patches are useless in that case), without any Xorg configuration, and I do get 15kHz on my setup ! There is a trick of course : I'm using a EDID dongle that has a switchres-generated EDID inside. This EDID has a good old 640x480i custom resolution inside. The kernel reads it and applies the modeline without a problem. So does Xorg ! I may post a video if people ask. The only downside of it : only works with ATI/AMD cards. I could get it working with NVidia but it requires a kernel patch. I sadly had some teearing that I never had when using ATI. Intel i915 is probably not going to make it.

So, appart from usual maintenance when Arch Linux changes things here and there, or manual package bumps required, I am now focusing on making GA as configurationless as possibe. I plan to add a web UI to set up volume (quite useful when you're allergic to linux console tools), got much work to do on gasetup to split modules (system, video, network etc ...), change the bootloader handling or khow kernel parameters are processed etc ... I also want to "modernize" things, and run some code checking tools on gasetup. Devs call that "lint". This will mean that I will have to correct really many small mistakes here and there, give more consistency on bash syntax etc ...

One last thing : every day, the testing repo is rebuilt. Most of times, kernel changes are automatically built. Can't be the same for GroovyMAME as I must wait for the official release of the groovy patch + suppression patch. Most tools do rebuild fine when they are bumped and I hardly need to put my hands in it. Anf from time to time, I update the stable branch with the testing one. That's a manual step, can't launch packages in the wild just because they built fine  :laugh:

keilmillerjr:
I’m excited for the progress.

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