Calamares installer stopping at 2%

[ajd07]

OpenMandriva version: ID 3393 (X11) & 3366 (Wayland) Plasma 6

Describe the bug: Calamares refuses to continue installation

Steps to reproduce: UEFI & ISO used in Ventoy Attempt to install via Calamares Using manual partitioning if this matters! Installing to a 2nd partition on an SSD that I have. Error happens when install starts

Observed behavior: Error shows up & installation stops at approx. 2%

Expected behavior: Installs as normal

Additional comment: I seriously do want to try OpenMandriva but Calamares seems to be configured incorrectly? If this is an issue with Ventoy for whatever reason, I don't know why this would have issues and no other distribution.

Logs and screenshots if relevant Error provided: Bad unpackfs configuration: The source filesystem "/run/initramfs/omdv/LiveOS/squashfs.img" does not exist

[ajd07]

For the record, I did research this in the case that this is an issue with Calamares itself, and it seems to be an error that only occurs downstream. I don't know where I have any spare USB to try installing without Ventoy. If you need any more information about what I was doing, let me know.

[rugyada]

Error provided: Bad unpackfs configuration: The source filesystem "/run/initramfs/omdv/LiveOS/squashfs.img" does not exist

Is this post useful? https://forum.openmandriva.org/t/problem-upgrading-rome-lx-23-08/5404/8

[benbullard79]

I installed from ISO 3366 (Wayland) so I know that one works. One would suspect a corrupted download or some setting in Ventoy that keeps it from dealing with a squashfs.img. Regarding downloading did you check checksums?

We also know that there are OM users that use Ventoy successfully. FWIW the squashfs.img is the operating system. Unpacking that is the installation. You might try asking in the OM forum or better at OM-Chat about how to successfully use Ventoy to install OMLx. I do not use Ventoy I use om-imagewriter.

"I seriously do want to try OpenMandriva but Calamares seems to be configured incorrectly?" Not sure what to make of that "configured incorrectly"? We have users that are using ROME they did have to install it somehow. I am a tester and I have done 100's of installations of ROME myself in VBox, qemu, and on hardware.

So I am suggesting that we need to find out why in your situation we see:

Bad unpackfs configuration:
The source filesystem "/run/initramfs/omdv/LiveOS/squashfs.img" does not exist

As far as I know we do not have any testers that use Ventoy. We could use testers for that.

[benbullard79]

FWIW this is from ROME Release Notes:

Booting from USB

It is possible to boot this release from a USB storage device. To create the live/installation media you may:

Use isowriter tool available from our repos:

sudo dnf --refresh install om-imagewriter

Or, if you do not have OpenMandriva Lx yet, you can get rosa-imagewriter download links at this page. At least 4 GB of flash drive capacity is recommended. Persistent storage is not necessary. Note that this will erase everything on your USB!

Please do not use other usb-writing tools as some Windows tools (e.g. Rufus) truncate the volume name. This breaks the boot process.

Via dd
You may alternatively dd the image to your USB stick:

sudo dd if= of= bs=4M conv=fdatasync status=progress

Replace with the path to the ISO and with the device node of the USB drive, i.e. /dev/sdb.

SUSE Studio ImageWriter and Balena Etcher have also been tested and work to transfer ISO images to USB storage device.

Ventoy is not fully supported. Under some circumstances it may or may not work. Please create the live/installation media choosing one among the suggested methods here above.

Again if Ventoy users wish to change this we will need some of them to step up and test and work with us to solve problems. That is how a community distribution of Linux like OMLx works.

[ajd07]

Here's what happened after trying again:

Got error An error occurred while accessing 'OpenMandrivaLx_rolling', the system responded: The requested operation has failed: Error mounting /dev/dm-0 at /media/live/OpenMandrivaLx_rolling: /dev/mapper/ventoy already mounted or mount point busy when i tried to access the partition that has the .img file. Also, it unmounted itself during installation (I assume being intentional) & then became unable to be mounted again after the installation failed. I can confirm that everything is there & that this error is NOT unique to my iso, I saw that with the link that rugyada sent. And yes, it was helpful but I don't know how to apply what the solution was. Yes, I did confirm that the file is actually there, it seems like it cannot access it at a point though. If it does matter, I didn't check the SHA but considering this is across more than one version & similar issue I think this is a conflict with Ventoy most likely. I'll check the SHA if i have too but I don't think that's the issue here.

[benbullard79]

Looking at Ventoy website they have different versions for Windows and Linux. I can not test the Windows version and that might make a difference. Also the Linux versions are for Qt5 and that may also be a problem since the ISOs you are trying to use are Qt6 based. I am not sure about the Qt issue, that is just a guess at present.

[benbullard79]

I ran $ ./VentoyGUI.x86_64 and I got this:

Obviously I do not understand the Ventoy instructions under "Get Started". Or Ventoy won't work with OM Cooker Plasma6. Edit: So I am copying 2 .isos to that and will see if it works. But it looks suspiciously like nothing.

[benbullard79]

This we know will not work:

# ls -la /media/live
total 0
drwxr-x---+ 2 root root 40 Oct 18 12:28 .
drwxr-xr-x  1 root root 60 Oct 18 12:02 ..

# ls -la /run/initramfs/omdv/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root  40 Oct 18 11:55 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 160 Oct 18 11:55 ..
-image

The question is why with Ventoy those directories is empty but if I copy the same .iso file using om-imagewriter or rosa-imagewriter the .iso will install.

[benbullard79]

I have tried install ROME P5 & P6 x86_64 .isos on hardware with Ventoy. I can get the .isos to boot but they will not install. Something in Ventoy is causing the squashfs.img to not be recognized. Maybe there is a trick to this but I do not know what that would be. I suspect this is an upstream issue but am not sure about that. The .isos I tested (3250 and 3372) are .isos that I know work if copied to flash drive in the conventional manner such as using om-imagewriter or:

sudo dd if=<iso_name> of=<usb_drive> bs=4M conv=fdatasync status=progress

I am going to suggest that we edit ROME release notes to reflect this.

[ajd07]

Interesting, I installed Ventoy onto my USB when I still used Windows, and OpenMandriva is the only distro I've had an issue with Ventoy on. I've installed Endeavour before and it installed completely fine. Maybe when it becomes unmountable mid-install maybe that's when it causes problems?

[ajd07]

Like I said as well: When the installer starts, you can see the OpenMandriva partition (the one that actually has the .img file) becomes unmountable even though it was mountable before, and cannot be remounted after the installer fails. This is likely what's causing it but I don't know how to bypass this?

[ajd07]

UPDATE found my other usb drive, so I have a fallback if we can't figure out why Ventoy isn't working

[benbullard79]

UPDATE found my other usb drive, so I have a fallback if we can't figure out why Ventoy isn't working

Excellent. See this in Ventoy forum. Please add to it if you have anything. I am a novice with Ventoy.

https://forums.ventoy.net/showthread.php?tid=2976

[omakuta]

This issue has been mentioned on OpenMandriva forum. There might be relevant details there:

https://forum.openmandriva.org/t/does-anyone-use-ventoy-to-install-omlx/5420/1

Edit: This appears to answer this issue: https://github.com/calamares/calamares/issues/1161

[benbullard79]

OK ajd07 I was able to do one install of ROME iso #3364 booted from Ventoy. Here are the steps I used to accomplish that:

1. In Konsole, cd to /run/initramfs/omdv/LiveOS, then cp squashfs.img /live You have to do this step immediately after booting the ‘Live’ ISO or the folder /run/initramfs/omdv/LiveOS will either disappear or somehow not get recognized. After doing that cp then that folder will disappear so next:

   2. $ sudo mkdir /run/initramfs/omdv/LiveOS
   3. $ sudo cp /live/squashfs.img /run/initramfs/omdv/LiveOS
   4. To check:

      $ ls -la /run/initramfs/omdv/LiveOS
      total 2867796
      drwxr-xr-x 2 root root         60 Oct 19 20:30 .
      drwxr-xr-x 3 root root         60 Oct 19 20:29 ..
      -r--r--r-- 1 root root 2936623104 Oct 19 20:30 squashfs.img

2. Install OMLx

Step 1 was a tip on OM forum from @Ojoyer.

This does not make sense but what I keep seeing over and over is that something is causing the directory/run/initramfs/omdv/LiveOS to disappear or not be recognized. I have in the last 2 days make 8-12 install attempts with an OMLx iso booted off of Ventoy.

So after doing all the steps above I did get iso #3364 booted from Ventoy to install. I will want to do a few more tests to confirm this before I say this problem is solved.

As far as I can see Calamares looks for squashfs.img in /run/initramfs/omdv/LiveOS so /run/initramfs/omdv/LiveOS/squashfs.img must exist for there to be a successful install. This is not optional.

The larger issue seems to be wtf is causing that folder to be there and then if you do the cp to /live or try to do an install that folder disappears or is no longer recognized. That is bleeping weird.

Edit: It is likely that the above steps would work with most if not all current OMLx isos.

[benbullard79]

Well I'll be a monkey's uncle. I may have found an easier way to do this.

Copy your desired OMLx .iso file to the Ventoy partiton on the Ventoy flash drive. Boot that.

1. Open Konsole and cd /run/initramfs/omdv/LiveOS
2. type ls and check that squashfs.img is present
3. Leave Konsole open in that directory
4. Open OMLx Calamares installer and install your new system

It seems as long as that directory is open and ls shows squashfs.img is present then user will be able to install their desired OMLx system booted from the Ventoy flash drive.

I did successful installs this way using:

Rock znver1 iso # 2719 (using xfs file system type) Cooker x86_64 iso # 3401 (using xfs file system type)

and previously had done:

ROME x86_64 iso # 3364 (using ext4 file system type)

I am believing this issue is solved. I have not tried using f2fs or btrfs. It is time for other folks to do some testing of those.

I would like confirmation from OP ajd07 before closing this bug report.

[ajd07]

I installed using my spare USB just to see what OMLx has built in, but I'll reinstall it & use Ventoy with this workaround. We'll see if this works when I get around to it!