Carbon alpha iso available for testing

johnraff · 2025-09-28 00:15:22

There's an alpha issue of the BunsenLabs Carbon iso file here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/bunsen … hybrid.iso
sha256: 4093e8b934afbff530720ac8ba3b105bc761ff94e6137f5afd61278cd199e36a

There are still things that need to be done before we can do an official release, but it's usable, and looks pretty nice, thanks especially to the work of @hhh and @micko01.

Anyone who would like to install it now - fixes that we do later will arrive via package upgrades so you won't miss out on anything.

All comments, criticism and suggestions are most welcome!

PackRat · 2025-09-28 00:40:57

Installed to metal.

No problems with installation or the first-run welcome script to install additional software. Everything working OOTB - brightness keys etc ...

Modified the default vertical taksbar a bit and turned off compositing. Otherwise default setup:

@johnraff (any user). Changing:

backend = "glx"

to

backend = "xrender"

fixed the non-working picom issue.

vic · 2025-09-28 07:58:02

No problems with live session, installation or welcome script. Great work guys, as always, thank you!

rusmack · 2025-09-28 09:16:06

Hi Folks.

Installed on bare metal, i5-6500, 8gb ram, 256gb ssd, intel nic.

Live session worked perfectly.

Installing to disk hangs at "configure the network".
I had the same problem with the current version.
Adding "ipv6.disable=1" to the installer parameters bypasses the problem.
I did not have to make any changes when I installed unmodified Debian.

Thanks for the hard work, I am keen to dig into the new version.

darknetmatrix · 2025-09-28 09:46:18

I made the announcement on our reddit community page
https://www.reddit.com/r/BunsenLabs/com … r_testing/

Last edited by darknetmatrix (2025-09-28 09:47:18)

johnraff · 2025-09-28 11:13:59

rusmack wrote:

Installing to disk hangs at "configure the network".
I had the same problem with the current version.
Adding "ipv6.disable=1" to the installer parameters bypasses the problem.
I did not have to make any changes when I installed unmodified Debian.

Thanks for reporting this. It does strike a faint memory - I hope we'll get to the bottom of it.

Head_on_a_Stick · 2025-09-29 15:55:24

Tried the live session in gnome-boxes but the compositor doesn't play nicely with the prehistoric QXL video driver, even rendering the keyboard unusable. I don't think many people use gnome-boxes though.

Under plain QEMU/KVM it works superbly well, both live and installed. The en_US.UTF-8 locale is installed and the sources work fine. My GPU is passed through nicely using virtio-gpu straight OOTB and the screen will auto-resize.

I couldn't find any problems at all in my brief foray, very impressive work

johnraff · 2025-09-30 02:23:53

Hi HoaS thanks for checking it out!

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

...the compositor doesn't play nicely with the prehistoric QXL video driver

No indeed. Picom requires virtio + opengl + 3d acceleration, as you helped me discover a while ago. If you turn off Picom (eg 'pkill picom' on another TTY) it seems to run OK though. People with old hardware will probably want to comment out compositing from their autostart after installation.

Meanwhile, it seems that Wayland will only run smoothly on QXL. Unless you know some workaround?

This time around I was getting all kinds of issues building the iso, and a lot of them turned out to be from qemu, where I've been doing all my testing. Never had this kind of trouble before, ie up to Bookworm, but eventually once you find the right settings it works nicely. ( Now there's no 32bit support for installer or kernel I can no longer use my old laptop for real hardware testing. )

The en_US.UTF-8 locale is installed

Good to know! I hadn't yet got round to checking if that preseed line had worked or not.

Last edited by johnraff (2025-09-30 02:27:33)

MarkW · 2025-09-30 09:31:51

What's the plan for if Debian upstream goes full Wayland?

johnraff · 2025-09-30 09:54:53

^You mean if Debian drop support for X11?
By that time we'll be Wayland too.
Maybe 10 years from now...

bendingoutward · 2025-09-30 21:09:04

johnraff wrote:

^You mean if Debian drop support for X11?
By that time we'll be Wayland too.
Maybe 10 years from now...

With the awesome progress @micko01 et al made on that earlier, I'd say that we'd have to try very hard not to beat that

I'm hopeful that if there's not time to get something like it integrated before the Carbon release, a guide might be made available to do a post-install towards that setup.

Last edited by bendingoutward (2025-09-30 22:10:46)

hhh · 2025-09-30 23:50:07

@bendingoutward, we'll definitely have a thread about adding a labwc/Wayland session to the carbon OS.

johnraff · Yesterday 01:23:42

^ & ^^ and while right now all our energy is focussed on getting the finished X11 iso out, there will be a "plug-in" Wayland session available not too long after that, in a "bunsen-configs-wayland" package. Install that on top of regular Carbon, and a Wayland option will appear in the login screen giving a basic Wayland session that's very close to Carbon X11 and that users can use as a platform for experimenting.

Thanks to @micko01 most of the work has been done, and we've made some package choices in Carbon (eg tint2 > xfce4-panel) to make the Wayland shift easier.

Head_on_a_Stick · Yesterday 07:14:52

johnraff wrote:

it seems that Wayland will only run smoothly on QXL. Unless you know some workaround?

Wayland works just fine for me with the virtio-pci driver running with virtio-gpu passthrough from the host; glmark2-wayland reports no errors and records decent framerates, even on my low end hardware.

johnraff · Yesterday 07:19:03

^hmmm... I'll have to have another look.
I seem to remember it being very sluggish till I switched to qxl.

unklar · Today 08:34:06

It's the same as always, 1 hour and 47 minutes at a measly 354 kbit...

Is there a download link in Europe in the meantime? Or an address with wget?

#1 2025-09-28 00:15:22

Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#2 2025-09-28 00:40:57

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#3 2025-09-28 07:58:02

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#4 2025-09-28 09:16:06

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#5 2025-09-28 09:46:18

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#6 2025-09-28 11:13:59

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#7 2025-09-29 15:55:24

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#8 2025-09-30 02:23:53

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#9 2025-09-30 09:31:51

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#10 2025-09-30 09:54:53

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#11 2025-09-30 21:09:04

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#12 2025-09-30 23:50:07

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#13 Yesterday 01:23:42

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#14 Yesterday 07:14:52

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#15 Yesterday 07:19:03

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#16 Today 08:34:06

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

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