Manjaro KDE/Xfce for Raspberry Pi install fails: unzip and xhost missing

[RedBearAK]

Just tried to install from the new site page with the copied terminal command, and once again ran into the problem I had one the Manjaro "minimal" installs: The unzip binary is not installed.

This is on the latest Manjaro KDE Plasma 21.04 image for Raspberry Pi, which as far as I know was not listed as a "minimal" ISO. Just double-checked the site and it is described as a "full featured desktop experience", with no mention of it being a "minimal" installer.

Yet there is no unzip binary. Which means the install almost immediately fails (until I install unzip of course).

I'll recommend again that you switch to downloading a TAR.GZ archive format rather than ZIP for Linux to avoid this install failure. Or take the step of checking for unzip before attempting to use it, and try to install it if not available.

[RedBearAK]

Service is refusing to start on this system and despite my experience with troubleshooting the xkeysnail service I have no idea why it won't start. The service log is not helpful, just talking about "exit-code", and it just keeps trying to restart.

But it seems to work fine when started manually:

sudo xkeysnail ~/.config/kinto/kinto.py

There are a lot of quirks with the KDE edition and it's using more memory than expected. It's on a 2GB Pi so I'll probably wipe this install and try the Manjaro Xfce edition for Raspberry Pi tomorrow to see if it's more usable. I'll see if that edition has the same issues with the service not starting and if so try to further narrow down the root cause.

[RedBearAK]

Ah, ok, so if I try to run the actual command from the service file, I get: /usr/bin/xhost: No such file or directory

That would certainly explain why it won't start.

Installing package xorg-xhost makes it work.

Problem solved.

[RedBearAK]

Should probably make a note that a good improvement for the future installer script revamp would be to have it check to make sure essential components like xhost are available on the system, and prompt the user to install them if they are not found.

[rbreaves]

xhost checking I thought was in it but maybe not tested well w/ manjaro.. I do need to shift most testing to 20 & 21. I didn’t realize how much use 21 gets & that many fixes end up there that don’t get sent back to LTS 20.04.

[RedBearAK]

This seems completely random since the Manjaro Xfce edtion for Raspberry Pi has a smaller image file, but it has unzip pre-installed. Still no xhost in the base install though.

Installer quickly runs into a problem of not knowing how to install python3-pip, probably because I forgot to run `sudo pacman -Syyu" first, but I was also not prompted yet at this early juncture of the install process to run the update command before continuing with the Kinto install. It feels like that should have happened.

This appears to be why it is failing: Distro is identifying as "Manjaro-ARM" and some of the tests in the installer, like the one that tests for prompting the user to run pacman -Syyu, are still looking for "manjarolinux" rather than a more generic "manjaro"* pattern.

Don't know why this wasn't a problem on the KDE edition, since I didn't have this issue I didn't check to see what it was calling itself.

I did see the installer testing for xhost in the path, and I don't know why that didn't result in a failure or user prompt regarding xhost on the KDE edition. There might have been an error displayed during the install process but it certainly didn't stop the install so I don't recall seeing anything. Seems the test for xhost just needs to be strengthened so that it make sure the problem is dealt with somehow before completing the install.

Edit: OK, the install has a lot of problems because of the failure to properly identify the distro as Manjaro, so it's failing to install python-pip instead of python3-pip and the other things like setuptools, evdev, wheel and such that are needed to complete.

Once the Manjaro test condition is fixed to be more generic, all that should go away.