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 · 2025-10-01 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 · 2025-10-01 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 · 2025-10-01 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 · 2025-10-02 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?

johnraff · 2025-10-05 04:58:53

^You can certainly give the same url to wget, but I don't know if the download speed will be improved for you or not.
Sourceforge downloads are fast enough for me here in Japan. Is 354kb much slower than you get with other downloads? I wonder what the issue is?

Setting up a European server for alpha releases, or just putting them on our BL server, is probably not an option right now. Our server's disk drive is getting close to full already.

In the past I put a couple of BL alphas on my personal Google Drive, but got criticism (Google is Evil etc) so we switched to Sourceforge.

johnraff · 2025-10-05 05:53:54

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

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 wrote:

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

I had another look, and it wasn't sluggishness, but the mouse pointer and keyboard are pretty much unusable - it's just possible to bring up the exit dialogue. The whole Wayland session is broken on any video settings I tried except QXL. (X11 is fine with Virtio + openGXL)

I don't know if you can suggest anything?

PS I installed and ran glmark2-wayland and got a report I can't copy/paste from the terminal - another of Wayland's features - but the final score was 148. I don't know if that's good or not, but the pretty effects seemed to display OK.

But the mouse pointer is broken.

Last edited by johnraff (2025-10-05 07:08:17)

unklar · 2025-10-05 09:37:32

johnraff wrote:

Is 354kb much slower than you get with other downloads? I wonder what the issue is?

Yes.
My connection can reach up to 21MB/s.

Sourceforge has always been a problem here.
For example, with lilidog, I always waited (up to 14 days) until other servers in the EU were available.

Secretly, I always hoped you would join @cog/hatchery. This nearly 2GiB ISO takes ~15 minutes.

unklar · 2025-10-05 13:25:32

@johnraff, take a look at this, this is how I want it:

2,01G  19,1MB/s    in 2m 2s

wget -c https://sourceforge.net/projects/bunsenlabs-releases/files/isos/carbon-alpha4-250927-amd64.hybrid.iso
--2025-10-05 15:02:07--  https://sourceforge.net/projects/bunsenlabs-releases/files/isos/carbon-alpha4-250927-amd64.hybrid.iso
Auflösen des Hostnamens sourceforge.net (sourceforge.net)… 2606:4700::6812:d95, 2606:4700::6812:c95, 104.18.13.149, ...
Verbindungsaufbau zu sourceforge.net (sourceforge.net)|2606:4700::6812:d95|:443 … verbunden.
HTTP-Anforderung gesendet, auf Antwort wird gewartet … 301 Moved Permanently
Platz: https://sourceforge.net/projects/bunsenlabs-releases/files/isos/carbon-alpha4-250927-amd64.hybrid.iso/ [folgend]
--2025-10-05 15:02:08--  https://sourceforge.net/projects/bunsenlabs-releases/files/isos/carbon-alpha4-250927-amd64.hybrid.iso/
Wiederverwendung der bestehenden Verbindung zu [sourceforge.net]:443.
HTTP-Anforderung gesendet, auf Antwort wird gewartet … 301 Moved Permanently
Platz: https://sourceforge.net/projects/bunsenlabs-releases/files/isos/carbon-alpha4-250927-amd64.hybrid.iso/download [folgend]
--2025-10-05 15:02:08--  https://sourceforge.net/projects/bunsenlabs-releases/files/isos/carbon-alpha4-250927-amd64.hybrid.iso/download
Wiederverwendung der bestehenden Verbindung zu [sourceforge.net]:443.
HTTP-Anforderung gesendet, auf Antwort wird gewartet … 302 Found
Platz: https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/bunsenlabs-releases/isos/carbon-alpha4-250927-amd64.hybrid.iso?ts=gAAAAABo4mxQHyNA438brgQ090z7KiBZ-sz_K5S6S5lT9v6dvs1f_qub9rz2ELjhhd8mukjSedOk3-VNDjf91-VMJnaZNMTu9w%3D%3D&use_mirror=altushost-swe&r= [folgend]
--2025-10-05 15:02:08--  https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/bunsenlabs-releases/isos/carbon-alpha4-250927-amd64.hybrid.iso?ts=gAAAAABo4mxQHyNA438brgQ090z7KiBZ-sz_K5S6S5lT9v6dvs1f_qub9rz2ELjhhd8mukjSedOk3-VNDjf91-VMJnaZNMTu9w%3D%3D&use_mirror=altushost-swe&r=
Auflösen des Hostnamens downloads.sourceforge.net (downloads.sourceforge.net)… 2606:4700::6812:c95, 2606:4700::6812:d95, 104.18.13.149, ...
Verbindungsaufbau zu downloads.sourceforge.net (downloads.sourceforge.net)|2606:4700::6812:c95|:443 … verbunden.
HTTP-Anforderung gesendet, auf Antwort wird gewartet … 302 Found
Platz: https://altushost-swe.dl.sourceforge.net/project/bunsenlabs-releases/isos/carbon-alpha4-250927-amd64.hybrid.iso?viasf=1 [folgend]
--2025-10-05 15:02:08--  https://altushost-swe.dl.sourceforge.net/project/bunsenlabs-releases/isos/carbon-alpha4-250927-amd64.hybrid.iso?viasf=1
Auflösen des Hostnamens altushost-swe.dl.sourceforge.net (altushost-swe.dl.sourceforge.net)… 79.142.76.130
Verbindungsaufbau zu altushost-swe.dl.sourceforge.net (altushost-swe.dl.sourceforge.net)|79.142.76.130|:443 … verbunden.
HTTP-Anforderung gesendet, auf Antwort wird gewartet … 200 OK
Länge: 2157920256 (2,0G) [application/octet-stream]
Wird in »carbon-alpha4-250927-amd64.hybrid.iso« gespeichert.

carbon-alpha4-250927-amd64.hybrid.iso       100%[=========================================================================================>]   2,01G  19,1MB/s    in 2m 2s   

2025-10-05 15:04:29 (16,9 MB/s) - »carbon-alpha4-250927-amd64.hybrid.iso« gespeichert [2157920256/2157920256]

sha256: 4093e8b934afbff530720ac8ba3b105bc761ff94e6137f5afd61278cd199e36a

sha256sum carbon-alpha4-250927-amd64.hybrid.iso 
4093e8b934afbff530720ac8ba3b105bc761ff94e6137f5afd61278cd199e36a  carbon-alpha4-250927-amd64.hybrid.iso

Thank you for wget!

Last edited by unklar (2025-10-05 13:33:56)

#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 2025-10-01 01:23:42

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#14 2025-10-01 07:14:52

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#15 2025-10-01 07:19:03

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#16 2025-10-02 08:34:06

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#17 2025-10-05 04:58:53

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#18 2025-10-05 05:53:54

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#19 2025-10-05 09:37:32

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#20 2025-10-05 13:25:32

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

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