Apt Archive Transparency: debdistdiff & apt-canary

I’ve always found the operation of apt software package repositories to be a mystery. There appears to be a lack of transparency into which people have access to important apt package repositories out there, how the automatic non-human update mechanism is implemented, and what changes are published. I’m thinking of big distributions like Ubuntu and Debian, but also the free GNU/Linux distributions like Trisquel and PureOS that are derived from the more well-known distributions.

As far as I can tell, anyone who has the OpenPGP private key trusted by a apt-based GNU/Linux distribution can sign a modified Release/InRelease file and if my machine somehow downloads that version of the release file, my machine could be made to download and install packages that the distribution didn’t intend me to install. Further, it seems that anyone who has access to the main HTTP server, or any of its mirrors, or is anywhere on the network between them and my machine (when plaintext HTTP is used), can either stall security updates on my machine (on a per-IP basis), or use it to send my machine (again, on a per-IP basis to avoid detection) a modified Release/InRelease file if they had been able to obtain the private signing key for the archive. These are mighty powers that warrant overview.

I’ve always put off learning about the processes to protect the apt infrastructure, mentally filing it under “so many people rely on this infrastructure that enough people are likely to have invested time reviewing and improving these processes”. Simultaneous, I’ve always followed the more free-software friendly Debian-derived distributions such as gNewSense and have run it on some machines. I’ve never put them into serious production use, because the trust issues with their apt package repositories has been a big question mark for me. The “enough people” part of my rationale for deferring this is not convincing. Even the simple question of “is someone updating the apt repository” is not easy to understand on a running gNewSense system. At some point in time the gNewSense cron job to pull in security updates from Debian must have stopped working, and I wouldn’t have had any good mechanism to notice that. Most likely it happened without any public announcement. I’ve recently switched to Trisquel on production machines, and these questions has come back to haunt me.

The situation is unsatisfying and I looked into what could be done to improve it. I could try to understand who are the key people involved in each project, and may even learn what hardware component is used, or what software is involved to update and sign apt repositories. Is the server running non-free software? Proprietary BIOS or NIC firmware? Are the GnuPG private keys on disk? Smartcard? TPM? YubiKey? HSM? Where is the server co-located, and who has access to it? I tried to do a bit of this, and discovered things like Trisquel having a DSA1024 key in its default apt trust store (although for fairness, it seems that apt by default does not trust such signatures). However, I’m not certain understanding this more would scale to securing my machines against attacks on this infrastructure. Even people with the best intentions, and the state of the art hardware and software, will have problems.

To increase my trust in Trisquel I set out to understand how it worked. To make it easier to sort out what the interesting parts of the Trisquel archive to audit further were, I created debdistdiff to produce human readable text output comparing one apt archive with another apt archive. There is a GitLab CI/CD cron job that runs this every day, producing output comparing Trisquel vs Ubuntu and PureOS vs Debian. Working with these output files has made me learn more about how the process works, and I even stumbled upon something that is likely a bug where Trisquel aramo was imported from Ubuntu jammy while it contained a couple of package (e.g., gcc-8, python3.9) that were removed for the final Ubuntu jammy release.

After working on auditing the Trisquel archive manually that way, I realized that whatever I could tell from comparing Trisquel with Ubuntu, it would only be something based on a current snapshot of the archives. Tomorrow it may look completely different. What felt necessary was to audit the differences of the Trisquel archive continously. I was quite happy to have developed debdistdiff for one purpose (comparing two different archives like Trisquel and Ubuntu) and discovered that the tool could be used for another purpose (comparing the Trisquel archive at two different points in time). At this time I realized that I needed a log of all different apt archive metadata to be able to produce an audit log of the differences in time for the archive. I create manually curated git-repositories with the Release/InRelease and the Packages files for each architecture/component of the well-known distributions Trisquel, Ubuntu, Debian and PureOS. Eventually I wrote scripts to automate this, which are now published in the debdistget project.

At this point, one of the early question about per-IP substitution of Release files were lingering in my mind. However with the tooling I now had available, coming up with a way to resolve this was simple! Merely have apt compute a SHA256 checksum of the just downloaded InRelease file, and see if my git repository had the same file. At this point I started reading the Apt source code, and now I had more doubts about the security of my systems than I ever had before. Oh boy how the name Apt has never before felt more… Apt?! Oh well, we must leave some exercises for the students. Eventually I realized I wanted to touch as little of apt code basis as possible, and noticed the SigVerify::CopyAndVerify function called ExecGPGV which called apt-key verify which called GnuPG’s gpgv. By setting Apt::Key::gpgvcommand I could get apt-key verify to call another tool than gpgv. See where I’m going? I thought wrapping this up would now be trivial but for some reason the hash checksum I computed locally never matched what was on my server. I gave up and started working on other things instead.

Today I came back to this idea, and started to debug exactly how the local files looked that I got from apt and how they differed from what I had in my git repositories, that came straight from the apt archives. Eventually I traced this back to SplitClearSignedFile which takes an InRelease file and splits it into two files, probably mimicking the (old?) way of distributing both Release and Release.gpg. So the clearsigned InRelease file is split into one cleartext file (similar to the Release file) and one OpenPGP signature file (similar to the Release.gpg file). But why didn’t the cleartext variant of the InRelease file hash to the same value as the hash of the Release file? Sadly they differ by the final newline.

Having solved this technicality, wrapping the pieces up was easy, and I came up with a project apt-canary that provides a script apt-canary-gpgv that verify the local apt release files against something I call a “apt canary witness” file stored at a URL somewhere.

I’m now running apt-canary on my Trisquel aramo laptop, a Trisquel nabia server, and Talos II ppc64el Debian machine. This means I have solved the per-IP substitution worries (or at least made them less likely to occur, having to send the same malicious release files to both GitLab and my system), and allow me to have an audit log of all release files that I actually use for installing and downloading packages.

What do you think? There are clearly a lot of work and improvements to be made. This is a proof-of-concept implementation of an idea, but instead of refining it until perfection and delaying feedback, I wanted to publish this to get others to think about the problems and various ways to resolve them.

Btw, I’m going to be at FOSDEM’23 this weekend, helping to manage the Security Devroom. Catch me if you want to chat about this or other things. Happy Hacking!

Understanding Trisquel

Ever wondered how Trisquel and Ubuntu differs and what’s behind the curtain from a developer perspective? I have. Sharing what I’ve learnt will allow you to increase knowledge and trust in Trisquel too.

Trisquel GNU/Linux logo

The scripts to convert an Ubuntu archive into a Trisquel archive are available in the ubuntu-purge repository. The easy to read purge-focal script lists the packages to remove from Ubuntu 20.04 Focal when it is imported into Trisquel 10.0 Nabia. The purge-jammy script provides the same for Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy and (the not yet released) Trisquel 11.0 Aramo. The list of packages is interesting, and by researching the reasons for each exclusion you can learn a lot about different attitudes towards free software and understand the desire to improve matters. I wish there were a wiki-page that for each removed package summarized relevant links to earlier discussions. At the end of the script there is a bunch of packages that are removed for branding purposes that are less interesting to review.

Trisquel adds a couple of Trisquel-specific packages. The source code for these packages are in the trisquel-packages repository, with sub-directories for each release: see 10.0/ for Nabia and 11.0/ for Aramo. These packages appears to be mostly for branding purposes.

Trisquel modify a set of packages, and here is starts to get interesting. Probably the most important package to modify is to use GNU Linux-libre instead of Linux as the kernel. The scripts to modify packages are in the package-helpers repository. The relevant scripts are in the helpers/ sub-directory. There is a branch for each Trisquel release, see helpers/ for Nabia and helpers/ for Aramo. To see how Linux is replaced with Linux-libre you can read the make-linux script.

This covers the basic of approaching Trisquel from a developers perspective. As a user, I have identified some areas that need more work to improve trust in Trisquel:

  • Auditing the Trisquel archive to confirm that the intended changes covered above are the only changes that are published.
  • Rebuild all packages that were added or modified by Trisquel and publish diffoscope output comparing them to what’s in the Trisquel archive. The goal would be to have reproducible builds of all Trisquel-related packages.
  • Publish an audit log of the Trisquel archive to allow auditing of what packages are published. This boils down to trust of the OpenPGP key used to sign the Trisquel archive.
  • Trisquel archive mirror auditing to confirm that they are publishing only what comes from the official archive, and that they do so timely.

I hope to publish more about my work into these areas. Hopefully this will inspire similar efforts in related distributions like PureOS and the upstream distributions Ubuntu and Debian.

Happy hacking!

Preseeding Trisquel Virtual Machines Using “netinst” Images

I’m migrating some self-hosted virtual machines to Trisquel, and noticed that Trisquel does not offer cloud-images similar to the Debian Cloud and Ubuntu Cloud images. Thus my earlier approach based on virt-install --cloud-init and cloud-localds does not work with Trisquel. While I hope that Trisquel will eventually publish cloud-compatible images, I wanted to document an alternative approach for Trisquel based on preseeding. This is how I used to install Debian and Ubuntu in the old days, and the automated preseed method is best documented in the Debian installation manual. I was hoping to forget about the preseed format, but maybe it will become one of those legacy technologies that never really disappears? Like FAT16 and 8-bit microcontrollers.

Below I assume you have a virtual machine host server up that runs libvirt and has virt-install and similar tools; install them with the following command. I run Trisquel 11 aramo on my VM-host, but I believe any recent dpkg-based distribution like Trisquel 9/10, PureOS 10, Debian 11 or Ubuntu 20.04/22.04 would work with minor adjustments.

apt-get install libvirt-daemon-system virtinst genisoimage cloud-image-utils osinfo-db-tools

The approach can install Trisquel 9 (etiona), Trisquel 10 (nabia) and Trisquel 11 (aramo). First download and verify the integrity of the netinst images that we will need.

mkdir -p /root/iso
cd /root/iso
wget -q https://mirror.fsf.org/trisquel-images/trisquel-netinst_9.0.2_amd64.iso
wget -q https://mirror.fsf.org/trisquel-images/trisquel-netinst_9.0.2_amd64.iso.asc
wget -q https://mirror.fsf.org/trisquel-images/trisquel-netinst_9.0.2_amd64.iso.sha256
wget -q https://mirror.fsf.org/trisquel-images/trisquel-netinst_10.0.1_amd64.iso
wget -q https://mirror.fsf.org/trisquel-images/trisquel-netinst_10.0.1_amd64.iso.asc
wget -q https://mirror.fsf.org/trisquel-images/trisquel-netinst_10.0.1_amd64.iso.sha256
wget -q https://cdimage.trisquel.org/trisquel-images/trisquel-netinst_11.0_amd64.iso
wget -q https://cdimage.trisquel.org/trisquel-images/trisquel-netinst_11.0_amd64.iso.asc
wget -q https://cdimage.trisquel.org/trisquel-images/trisquel-netinst_11.0_amd64.iso.sha256
wget -q -O- https://archive.trisquel.info/trisquel/trisquel-archive-signkey.gpg | gpg --import
sha256sum -c trisquel-netinst_9.0.2_amd64.iso.sha256
gpg --verify trisquel-netinst_9.0.2_amd64.iso.asc
sha256sum -c trisquel-netinst_10.0.1_amd64.iso.sha256
gpg --verify trisquel-netinst_10.0.1_amd64.iso.asc
sha256sum -c trisquel-netinst_11.0_amd64.iso.sha256
gpg --verify trisquel-netinst_11.0_amd64.iso.asc

I have developed the following fairly minimal preseed file that works with all three Trisquel releases. Compare it against the official Trisquel 11 preseed skeleton and the Debian 11 example preseed file. You should modify obvious things like SSH key, host/IP settings, partition layout and decide for yourself how to deal with passwords. While Ubuntu/Trisquel usually wants to setup a user account, I prefer to login as root hence setting ‘passwd/root-login‘ to true and ‘passwd/make-user‘ to false.


root@trana:~# cat>trisquel.preseed 
d-i debian-installer/locale select en_US
d-i keyboard-configuration/xkb-keymap select us

d-i netcfg/choose_interface select auto
d-i netcfg/disable_autoconfig boolean true

d-i netcfg/get_ipaddress string 192.168.122.201
d-i netcfg/get_netmask string 255.255.255.0
d-i netcfg/get_gateway string 192.168.122.46
d-i netcfg/get_nameservers string 192.168.122.46

d-i netcfg/get_hostname string trisquel
d-i netcfg/get_domain string sjd.se

d-i clock-setup/utc boolean true
d-i time/zone string UTC

d-i mirror/country string manual
d-i mirror/http/hostname string ftp.acc.umu.se
d-i mirror/http/directory string /mirror/trisquel/packages
d-i mirror/http/proxy string

d-i partman-auto/method string regular
d-i partman-partitioning/confirm_write_new_label boolean true
d-i partman/choose_partition select finish
d-i partman/confirm boolean true
d-i partman/confirm_nooverwrite boolean true
d-i partman-basicfilesystems/no_swap boolean false
d-i partman-auto/expert_recipe string myroot :: 1000 50 -1 ext4 \
     $primary{ } $bootable{ } method{ format } \
     format{ } use_filesystem{ } filesystem{ ext4 } \
     mountpoint{ / } \
    .
d-i partman-auto/choose_recipe select myroot

d-i passwd/root-login boolean true
d-i user-setup/allow-password-weak boolean true
d-i passwd/root-password password r00tme
d-i passwd/root-password-again password r00tme
d-i passwd/make-user boolean false

tasksel tasksel/first multiselect
d-i pkgsel/include string openssh-server

popularity-contest popularity-contest/participate boolean false

d-i grub-installer/only_debian boolean true
d-i grub-installer/with_other_os boolean true
d-i grub-installer/bootdev string default

d-i finish-install/reboot_in_progress note

d-i preseed/late_command string mkdir /target/root/.ssh ; echo ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAILzCFcHHrKzVSPDDarZPYqn89H5TPaxwcORgRg+4DagE cardno:FFFE67252015 > /target/root/.ssh/authorized_keys
^D
root@trana:~# 

Use the file above as a skeleton for preparing a VM-specific preseed file as follows. The environment variables HOST and IPS will be used later on too.


root@trana:~# HOST=foo
root@trana:~# IP=192.168.122.197
root@trana:~# sed -e "s,get_ipaddress string.*,get_ipaddress string $IP," -e "s,get_hostname string.*,get_hostname string $HOST," < trisquel.preseed > vm-$HOST.preseed
root@trana:~# 

The following script is used to prepare the ISO images with the preseed file that we will need. This script is inspired by the Debian Wiki Preseed EditIso page and the Trisquel ISO customization wiki page. There are a couple of variations based on earlier works. Paths are updated to match the Trisquel netinst ISO layout, which differ slightly from Debian. We modify isolinux.cfg to boot the auto label without a timeout. On Trisquel 11 the auto boot label exists, but on Trisquel 9 and Trisquel 10 it does not exist so we add it in order to be able to start the automated preseed installation.


root@trana:~# cat gen-preseed-iso 
#!/bin/sh

# Copyright (C) 2018-2022 Simon Josefsson -- GPLv3+
# https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed/EditIso
# https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/customizing-trisquel-iso

set -e
set -x

ISO="$1"
PRESEED="$2"
OUTISO="$3"
LASTPWD="$PWD"

test -f "$ISO"
test -f "$PRESEED"
test ! -f "$OUTISO"

TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)
mkdir "$TMPDIR/mnt"
mkdir "$TMPDIR/tmp"

cp "$PRESEED" "$TMPDIR"/preseed.cfg
cd "$TMPDIR"

mount "$ISO" mnt/
cp -rT mnt/ tmp/
umount mnt/

chmod +w -R tmp/
gunzip tmp/initrd.gz
echo preseed.cfg | cpio -H newc -o -A -F tmp/initrd
gzip tmp/initrd
chmod -w -R tmp/

sed -i "s/timeout 0/timeout 1/" tmp/isolinux.cfg
sed -i "s/default vesamenu.c32/default auto/" tmp/isolinux.cfg

if ! grep -q auto tmp/adtxt.cfg; then
    cat<<EOF >> tmp/adtxt.cfg
label auto
	menu label ^Automated install
	kernel linux
	append auto=true priority=critical vga=788 initrd=initrd.gz --- quiet
EOF
fi

cd tmp/
find -follow -type f | xargs md5sum  > md5sum.txt
cd ..

cd "$LASTPWD"

genisoimage -r -J -b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat \
            -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table \
            -o "$OUTISO" "$TMPDIR/tmp/"

rm -rf "$TMPDIR"

exit 0
^D
root@trana:~# chmod +x gen-preseed-iso 
root@trana:~# 

Next run the command on one of the downloaded ISO image and the generated preseed file.


root@trana:~# ./gen-preseed-iso /root/iso/trisquel-netinst_10.0.1_amd64.iso vm-$HOST.preseed vm-$HOST.iso
+ ISO=/root/iso/trisquel-netinst_10.0.1_amd64.iso
+ PRESEED=vm-foo.preseed
+ OUTISO=vm-foo.iso
+ LASTPWD=/root
+ test -f /root/iso/trisquel-netinst_10.0.1_amd64.iso
+ test -f vm-foo.preseed
+ test ! -f vm-foo.iso
+ mktemp -d
+ TMPDIR=/tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9
+ mkdir /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/mnt
+ mkdir /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/tmp
+ cp vm-foo.preseed /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/preseed.cfg
+ cd /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9
+ mount /root/iso/trisquel-netinst_10.0.1_amd64.iso mnt/
mount: /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/mnt: WARNING: source write-protected, mounted read-only.
+ cp -rT mnt/ tmp/
+ umount mnt/
+ chmod +w -R tmp/
+ gunzip tmp/initrd.gz
+ echo preseed.cfg
+ cpio -H newc -o -A -F tmp/initrd
5 blocks
+ gzip tmp/initrd
+ chmod -w -R tmp/
+ sed -i s/timeout 0/timeout 1/ tmp/isolinux.cfg
+ sed -i s/default vesamenu.c32/default auto/ tmp/isolinux.cfg
+ grep -q auto tmp/adtxt.cfg
+ cat
+ cd tmp/
+ find -follow -type f
+ xargs md5sum
+ cd ..
+ cd /root
+ genisoimage -r -J -b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -o vm-foo.iso /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/tmp/
I: -input-charset not specified, using utf-8 (detected in locale settings)
Using GCRY_000.MOD;1 for  /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/tmp/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/gcry_sha512.mod (gcry_sha256.mod)
Using XNU_U000.MOD;1 for  /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/tmp/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/xnu_uuid.mod (xnu_uuid_test.mod)
Using PASSW000.MOD;1 for  /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/tmp/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/password_pbkdf2.mod (password.mod)
Using PART_000.MOD;1 for  /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/tmp/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/part_sunpc.mod (part_sun.mod)
Using USBSE000.MOD;1 for  /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/tmp/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/usbserial_pl2303.mod (usbserial_ftdi.mod)
Using USBSE001.MOD;1 for  /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/tmp/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/usbserial_ftdi.mod (usbserial_usbdebug.mod)
Using VIDEO000.MOD;1 for  /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/tmp/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/videotest.mod (videotest_checksum.mod)
Using GFXTE000.MOD;1 for  /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/tmp/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/gfxterm_background.mod (gfxterm_menu.mod)
Using GCRY_001.MOD;1 for  /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/tmp/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/gcry_sha256.mod (gcry_sha1.mod)
Using MULTI000.MOD;1 for  /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/tmp/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/multiboot2.mod (multiboot.mod)
Using USBSE002.MOD;1 for  /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/tmp/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/usbserial_usbdebug.mod (usbserial_common.mod)
Using MDRAI000.MOD;1 for  /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9/tmp/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/mdraid09.mod (mdraid09_be.mod)
Size of boot image is 4 sectors -> No emulation
 22.89% done, estimate finish Thu Dec 29 23:36:18 2022
 45.70% done, estimate finish Thu Dec 29 23:36:18 2022
 68.56% done, estimate finish Thu Dec 29 23:36:18 2022
 91.45% done, estimate finish Thu Dec 29 23:36:18 2022
Total translation table size: 2048
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 24816
Total directory bytes: 40960
Path table size(bytes): 64
Max brk space used 46000
21885 extents written (42 MB)
+ rm -rf /tmp/tmp.mNEprT4Tx9
+ exit 0
root@trana:~#

Now the image is ready for installation, so invoke virt-install as follows. For older virt-install (for example on Trisquel 10 nabia), replace --osinfo linux2020 with --os-variant linux2020.The machine will start directly, launching the preseed automatic installation. At this point, I usually click on the virtual machine in virt-manager to follow screen output until the installation has finished. If everything works OK the machines comes up and I can ssh into it.


root@trana:~# virt-install --name $HOST --disk vm-$HOST.img,size=5 --cdrom vm-$HOST.iso --osinfo linux2020 --autostart --noautoconsole --wait
Using linux2020 default --memory 4096

Starting install...
Allocating 'vm-foo.img'                                                                                                                                |    0 B  00:00:00 ... 
Creating domain...                                                                                                                                     |    0 B  00:00:00     

Domain is still running. Installation may be in progress.
Waiting for the installation to complete.
Domain has shutdown. Continuing.
Domain creation completed.
Restarting guest.
root@trana:~# 

There are some problems that I have noticed that would be nice to fix, but are easy to work around. The first is that at the end of the installation of Trisquel 9 and Trisquel 10, the VM hangs after displaying Sent SIGKILL to all processes followed by Requesting system reboot. I kill the VM manually using virsh destroy foo and start it up again using virsh start foo. For production use I expect to be running Trisquel 11, where the problem doesn’t happen, so this does not bother me enough to debug further.

Update 2023-03-21: The following issue was fixed between the final release of aramo and the pre-release of aramo that this blog post was originally written for, so the following no longer applies: The remaining issue that once booted, a Trisquel 11 VM has lost its DNS nameserver configuration, presumably due to poor integration with systemd-resolved. Both Trisquel 9 and Trisquel 10 uses systemd-resolved where DNS works after first boot, so this appears to be a Trisquel 11 bug. You can work around it with rm -f /etc/resolv.conf && echo 'nameserver A.B.C.D' > /etc/resolv.conf or drink the systemd Kool-Aid.

If you want to clean up and re-start the process, here is how you wipe out what you did. After this, you may run the sed, ./gen-preseed-iso and virt-install commands again. Remember, use virsh shutdown foo to gracefully shutdown a VM.


root@trana:~# virsh destroy foo
Domain 'foo' destroyed

root@trana:~# virsh undefine foo --remove-all-storage
Domain 'foo' has been undefined
Volume 'vda'(/root/vm-foo.img) removed.

root@trana:~# rm vm-foo.*
root@trana:~# 

Happy hacking on your virtal machines!

Guix 1.4 on NV41PZ

On the shortlist of things to try on my new laptop has been Guix. I have been using Guix on my rsnapshot-based backup server since 2018, and experimented using it on a second laptop but never on my primary daily work machine. The main difference with Guix for me, compared to Debian (or Trisquel), is that Guix follows a rolling release model, even though they prepare stable versioned installation images once in a while. It seems the trend for operating system software releases is to either following a Long-Term-Support approach or adopt a rolling approach. Historically I have found that the rolling release approach, such as following Debian testing, has lead to unreliable systems, since little focus was given to system integration stability. This probably changed in the last 10 years or so, and today add-on systems like Homebrew on macOS gives me access to modern releases of free software easily. While I am likely to stay with LTS releases of GNU/Linux on many systems, the experience with rolling Guix (with unattended-upgrades from a cron job to pull in new code continously) on my backup servers has been smooth: no need for re-installation or debugging of installations for over four years!

I tried the Guix 1.4 rc2 installation image on top of my previous Trisquel 11 installation; following the guided Guix installation menus was simple. I installed using wired network, since the WiFi dongle I had did not automatically become available. I put the Guix system on a separate partition, that I left empty when I installed Trisquel, and mounted the same /home that I used for Trisquel. Everything booted fine, and while I had some issues doing guix pull followed by guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm I eventually got it working by using --allow-downgrade once. I believe this was a symptom of using a release candidate installation image. Guix did not auto-detect Trisquel or set up a Grub boot menu for it, and I have been unable to come up with the right Guix bootloader magic to add a Trisquel boot item again. Fortunately, the EFI boot choser allows me to boot Trisquel again.

Guix 1.4 uses Linux-libre 6.0 which is newer than Trisquel 11’s Linux-libre 5.15. The WiFi dongle worked automatically once the system was installed. I will continue to tweak the default system configuration that was generated, it seems a standard GNOME installation does not include Evolution on Guix. Everything else I have tested works fine, including closing the lid and suspend and then resume, however the builtin webcam has a distorted image which does not happen on Trisquel. All in all, it seems the resulting system would be usable enough for me. I will be switching between Trisquel and Guix, but expect to spend most of time for daily work within Trisquel because it gives me the stable Debian-like environment that I’ve been used to for ~20 years. Sharing the same /home between Trisquel and Guix may have been a mistake: GNOME handles this badly, and the dock will only contain the lowest-common-denominator of available applications, with the rest removed permanently.

Trisquel 11 on NV41PZ: First impressions

My NovaCustom NV41PZ laptop arrived a couple of days ago, and today I had some time to install it. You may want to read about my purchasing decision process first. I expected a rough ride to get it to work, given the number of people claiming that modern laptops can’t run fully free operating systems. I first tried the Trisquel 10 live DVD and it booted fine including network, but the mouse trackpad did not work. Before investigating it, I noticed a forum thread about Trisquel 11 beta3 images, and being based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and has Linux-libre 5.15 it seemed better to start with more modern software. After installing through the live DVD successfully, I realized I didn’t like MATE but wanted to keep using GNOME. I reverted back to installing a minimal environment through the netinst image, and manually installed GNOME (apt-get install gnome) since I prefer that over MATE, together with a bunch of other packages. I’ve been running it for a couple of hours now, and here is a brief summary of the hardware components that works.

CPUAlder Lake Intel i7-1260P
Memory2x32GB Kingston DDR4 SODIMM 3200MHz
StorageSamsung 980 Pro 2TB NVME
BIOSDasharo Coreboot
GraphicsIntel Xe
Screen (internal)14″ 1920×1080
Screen (HDMI)Dell 27″ 2560×1440 and Ben-Q PD3220U 3840×1260 works fine
Screen (USB-C)Via Wavlink USB-C/HDMI port extender: Dell 27″ 2560×1440 and Ben-Q PD3220U 3840×1260
WebcamBuiltin 1MP Camera
MicrophoneIntel Alder Lake
KeyboardISO layout, all function keys working
MouseTrackpad, tap clicking and gestures
Ethernet RJ45Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 with r8169 driver
Memory cardO2 Micro comes up as /dev/mmcblk0
Docking stationWavlink 4xUSB, 2xHDMI, DP, RJ45, …
ConnectivityUSB-A, USB-C
AudioIntel Alder Lake
Hardware components and status

So what’s not working? Unfortunately, NovaCustom does not offer any WiFi or Bluetooth module that is compatible with Trisquel, so the AX211 (1675x) Wifi/Bluetooth card in it is just dead weight. I imagine it would be possible to get the card to work if non-free firmware is loaded. I don’t need Bluetooth right now, and use the Technoetic N-150 USB WiFi dongle when I’m not connected to wired network.

Compared against my X201, the following factors have improved.

  • Faster – CPU benchmark suggests it is 8 times faster than my old i7-620M. While it feels snappier it is not a huge difference. While NVMe should improve SSD performance, benchmark wise the NVMe 980Pro only seems around 2-3 faster than the SATA-based 860 Evo. Going from 6GB to 64GB is 10 times more memory, which is useful for disk caching.
  • BIOS is free software.
  • EC firmware is free.
  • Operating system follows the FSDG.

I’m still unhappy about the following properties with both the NV41PZ and the X201.

  • CPU microcode is not available under free license.
  • Intel Mangement Engine is still present in the CPU.
  • No builtin WiFi/Bluetooth that works with free software.
  • Some other secondary processors (e.g., disk or screen) may be running non-free software but at least none requires non-free firmware.

Hopefully my next laptop will have improved on this further. I hope to be able to resolve the WiFi part by replacing the WiFi module, there appears to be options available but I have not tested them on this laptop yet. Does anyone know of a combined WiFi and Bluetooth M.2 module that would work on Trisquel?

While I haven’t put the laptop to heavy testing yet, everything that I would expect a laptop to be able to do seems to work fine. Including writing this blog post!