"Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

seb3773 · 2024-07-18 22:06

Hello, I started a new little project: a live linux system rescue toolkit based on q4os Trinity

I think q4os trinity is perfect for a live rescue system: small footprint, fast & efficient interface and low ressources requirements.

The goal is to have a bootable live system with all the needed tools to backup/restore/clone/repair any linux/windows system.

I know there's already some live systems like that, but nothing really 'complete' at my opinion, and I'm tired of having my ventoy usb key filled with too much differents iso for tasks that can be accomplish in one unique system. (and one I love which is cool too)

So, here it is: https://sourceforge.net/projects/q4rescue/

Tools included (for now, I planned to add some more; waiting for your suggestions too by the way):

-Rescuezilla
-Clonezilla
-DDrescue-gui
-qtfsarchiver
-Testdisk
-Photorec
-Boot Repair
-WoeUSB
-Q4OS imager
-UNetbootin
-usbimager
-Kdirstats
-Kdiskmark
-Rclone & Rclone BRowser
-Reminna
-Filezilla
-qbittorrent
-gohttpserver
-chromium
-nwipe
-ntpw-gui
-efibootmgr
-zenmap (nmap gui)
-wxHexEditor
...
and some other usefull terminal tools. + of course, it's q4os, so there are the specific q4os tools and the familiar interface you love
(interface theme: tweaked windows 10 theme applied for easier handling by a large number of users.)

It's a work in progress, and I really need to have some reports of how it works on other machines.

** password for user & root when needed: "live" (without quotes)

Please report any bugs, and any improvements ideas

Last edited by seb3773 (2024-08-19 16:35)

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Midas · 2024-07-19 12:23

Just an idle thought, don't mind me, but...

Do you plan to include Wine in order to run native Windows programs?

If so, the first that come to mind are Rufus and Bootice, as well as Ventoy itself...

seb3773 · 2024-07-19 13:13

Midas wrote:

Just an idle thought, don't mind me, but...
Do you plan to include Wine in order to run native Windows programs?
If so, the first that come to mind are Rufus and Bootice, as well as Ventoy itself...

Yes, this can be done ! Will take a look at it; thanks for the suggestion

By the way, I found a bug: tdm is restarting xserver sometimes because of a strange timeout, I think I found the solution, will post an updated iso soon

bin · 2024-07-20 07:23

seb3773 wrote:

By the way, I found a bug: tdm is restarting xserver sometimes because of a strange timeout, I think I found the solution, will post an updated iso soon

I thought this was just me -seen it a number of times on using TDE live. In which case it probably needs reporting to devs - along with your solution???

seb3773 · 2024-07-20 09:35

bin wrote:

seb3773 wrote:
By the way, I found a bug: tdm is restarting xserver sometimes because of a strange timeout, I think I found the solution, will post an updated iso soon
I thought this was just me -seen it a number of times on using TDE live. In which case it probably needs reporting to devs - along with your solution???

The reason in my case: tdm was launched 2 times (one time by q4os autologin and another time by live.autologin) resulting in one of the tdm instance believed xserver was timeout, so killed xserver then restart it. My solution was simply to disable live.autologin (and keep q4os mechanism for autologin activated)

I uploaded a new version with this correction and added ventoy by the way

Last edited by seb3773 (2024-07-20 13:32)

q4osteam · 2024-07-21 14:44

seb3773 wrote:

...:tdm was launched 2 times (one time by q4os autologin and another time by live.autologin) resulting in one of the tdm instance believed xserver was timeout, so killed xserver then restart it. My solution was simply to disable live.autologin (and keep q4os mechanism for autologin activated)

We will check the fix and update Q4OS live media as soon as possible. Thanks for this valuable report.

Could it be connected to this one ? https://sourceforge.net/p/q4os/tickets/227/

Last edited by q4osteam (2024-07-21 15:31)

seb3773 · 2024-07-22 12:55

q4osteam wrote:

Could it be connected to this one ? https://sourceforge.net/p/q4os/tickets/227/

very likely yes. I understood it was a "double" launch of tdm that caused the problem when using autologin by changing the 'ServerTimeout' value in [X-*-Core] section in /etc/trinity/tdm/tdmrc and looking at the logs after a tdm restart: the restart was exactly after the value specified here. So, I search what caused this "double" start; and it was because in live mode there's an autologin mechanism which is launching tdm too.
I resolved the problem by disabling this mechanism : put "live-config.noautologin" in /etc/live/config.conf and it is ok. (it was needed even when disabling q4os autologin, because it was autolaunching tdm even in 'manual' login case)
(again this is in my specific case, don't know what is exactly the problem with trinity live version)

Last edited by seb3773 (2024-07-22 12:57)

q4osteam · 2024-07-28 16:31

seb3773 wrote:

... I found a bug: tdm is restarting xserver sometimes because of a strange timeout ...

The bug is now fixed within the new live media release q4os-5.5-x64-tde.r3.iso , we have added "nox11autologin" boot option. Thanks for valuable reporting and sharing the fix.

seb3773 · 2024-08-19 16:31

q4osteam wrote:

seb3773 wrote:
... I found a bug: tdm is restarting xserver sometimes because of a strange timeout ...
The bug is now fixed within the new live media release q4os-5.5-x64-tde.r3.iso , we have added "nox11autologin" boot option. Thanks for valuable reporting and sharing the fix.

You're welcome, thanks to you for q4os !

seb3773 · 2024-08-19 16:45

Midas wrote:

Just an idle thought, don't mind me, but...
Do you plan to include Wine in order to run native Windows programs?
If so, the first that come to mind are Rufus and Bootice, as well as Ventoy itself...

I did some tests, wine is adding a big footprint to media size, and I'm trying to make it smaller as possible (faster boot time, smaller ram footprint if loaded in ram etc...). So I found an alternative to bootice: bootrepair which is very good, and an alternative to rufus (well, with less features but it does the job): woeUSB.

I included ventoy in previous versions but now it's removed: it takes valuable space and it is not really needed: if you're using the iso "as is" you are probably already using ventoy or something similar; and the ability to create a ventoy key is not really needed in this case. Ventoy is about creating a sort of recovery/live kit by assembling lots of different isos, and this project is aimed at avoiding this I can't really see a scenario where we will need the ventoy installer from the q4rescue media, but maybe I'm wrong and can't see all possibles scenarios. What do you think ?

By the way I added a little program to create a bootable usb with persistence partition creation option (this way everything you modify/install is persistent) and formatting the remaining space if you want:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/q4resc … 4/download

Tell me if it works ok for you

Last edited by seb3773 (2024-08-19 16:47)

Midas · 2024-08-19 16:51

Cool, whatever works best.

I'm away from home ATM, but will do ASAP.

Last edited by Midas (2024-08-19 16:52)

Midas · 2024-08-21 14:29

Hi. Have now tested the v0.39 ISO, launched through Ventoy.

AFAIK, everything works, except keyboard switching -- mine is none of the defaults and after changing, Konsole wouldn't abide it.

Other than that, my only suggestion is changing the default theme so that UI elements are more clearly defined -- as it is, window title bars are the same color of the rest, making my waning vision struggle with them.

Midas · 2024-08-21 14:34

Oh, and please include Firefox (preferably ESR) cause I'd rather not use Chrome. Thanks.

seb3773 · 2024-08-22 10:41

Midas wrote:

AFAIK, everything works, except keyboard switching -- mine is none of the defaults and after changing, Konsole wouldn't abide it.

It's strange because it's the native q4os (trinity) system for setting kb layout, did you try a right click on the icon to set your keyboard layout with the settings windows ? I will investigate that, I must admit I have only an "azerty" french keyboard to test, so thank you for the return

For the UI theme it's the "windows 10" classic style, but I totally understand a better contrast will be better, will take a look at it too

About the web browser, it's not chrome, it's chromium (big difference in fact, you don't have all the google crap and user spying); I made this choice because it seems chromium has better performance & low specs machines handling than firefox. But you're right, choice is better, so I will maybe offer an iso bundled with chromium and another one with firefox, won't be too difficult to maintain; or maybe the two together if it doesn't increase the size too much.

By the way, if you enable persistence, either by creating a custom usb key with the tool provided; or by having an ext4 partition on your system -can be on the usb key, a partition on another storage device, etc.. doesnt' matter as long as it's an ext4 partition labelled "persistence" with only one file on it: "persistence.conf" with this content:

/ union

You will be able to install everything you want and it will persist after reboot This way, you can customize q4rescue as you want (you can install, uninstall, modify everything like on a 'real' installed system)

I really need to write a Readme file to explain this better among other things, it's in the todo list

Thanks you very much for your valuables returns

Last edited by seb3773 (2024-08-22 10:56)

Midas · 2024-08-22 12:46

seb3773 wrote:

did you try a right click on the icon to set your keyboard layout with the settings windows ?

That's exactly what I did so got surprised afterwards when typing in Konsole -- even dashes weren't at the usual place and I have to fish for them...

seb3773 wrote:

For the UI theme it's the "windows 10" classic style, but I totally understand a better contrast will be better, will take a look at it too

And thank you in advance for that.

seb3773 wrote:

About the web browser, it's not chrome, it's chromium (big difference in fact, you don't have all the google crap and user spying); I made this choice because it seems chromium has better performance & low specs machines handling than firefox. But you're right, choice is better, so I will maybe offer an iso bundled with chromium and another one with firefox, won't be too difficult to maintain; or maybe the two together if it doesn't increase the size too much.

Maybe you'll be able to get something like an AppImage -- I know for sure that Firefox can easily be made portable in Windows, i.e., standalone, no installation -- and check the disk cost outright -- which, on Windows again, is less than 100MB.

seb3773 wrote:

By the way, if you enable persistence, either by creating a custom usb key with the tool provided; or by having an ext4 partition on your system -can be on the usb key, a partition on another storage device, etc.. doesnt' matter as long as it's an ext4 partition labelled "persistence" with only one file on it: "persistence.conf" with this content:
/ union
You will be able to install everything you want and it will persist after reboot.

It's great to have that documented -- even though my use case is rather to have the ISO laying around in my boot partition and just select it in Ventoy (which I use to run OSes from virtual disks) should an emergency arise.

seb3773 · 2024-08-22 18:18

@Midas may I ask you what is your language/keyboard layout so I can 'investigate' the problem ?

Initially, the layout is set to qwerty/us language (and it seems to work as intended) and when I switch to azerty/fr it works too (and the change is reflected in konsole). I can see when I switch to other layouts it has an effect but of course I can't test if it is correct (and clearly it isn't for you). The problem is I don't know what can cause this problem as I didn't mess with this part of q4os Trinity (yet ). Maybe the Q4OSTEAM can help ? So:

@Q4OsTeam : did you try the last version, and do you have problems with the keyboard layout too ? (and what could be the cause ?). Thanks by advance.

Last edited by seb3773 (2024-08-22 18:19)

q4osteam · 2024-08-22 18:53

seb3773 wrote:

@Q4OsTeam : did you try the last version, and do you have problems with the keyboard layout too ? (and what could be the cause ?). Thanks by advance.

We didn't try your latest version, no problems with keyboard layouts on Q4OS.

seb3773 · 2024-08-22 19:04

q4osteam wrote:

no problems with keyboard layouts on Q4OS.

Yes, as Midas reported he doesn't have problem with q4os (nor trinity live I presume); I think it's something related to something I did but I'm nearly sure I didn't altered this part... Well, I know your time is precious, but if you have the opportunity to test it one of these days, I'm waiting about your 'diagnostic'.

seb3773 · 2024-08-22 19:18

Midas wrote:

Maybe you'll be able to get something like an AppImage -- I know for sure that Firefox can easily be made portable in Windows, i.e., standalone, no installation -- and check the disk cost outright -- which, on Windows again, is less than 100MB.

For this project I'm trying to avoid as much as possible AppImages versions. The reason for that is that appimages are embedding the libraries they need, even if they are presents on the system (so they can work without installing any dependencies: they are already in a squashed filesystem). Allthough this is very usefull, (I personnaly prefer appimages rather than flatpak nonsense or even worse snap madness...) this result in a much more bigger footprint in size than the packaged versions who are sharing libraries.
Of course, if you have none of the dependencies required already installed, it won't make much of a difference. But if you install something later that needs these dependencies, the result is you will have them 'twice', even worse, maybe multiple times if you have multiple appimages installed with these libraries for example. You see the idea

So it will be a packaged version, I think it will "cost" around 90/100Mo in size. Not too much
In fact I'm maybe wrong focusing on the size too much, it's not a problem nowadays, and the boot time is not horrible. I'm even beginning to think boot time is not really an issue (as long as it's reasonnable, a notion to define ); because this project is designed to be a 'disaster recovery / emergency OS' solution more than something you're using all day, so waiting a bit for it to start maybe is not a problem ?

Something else, do you think it will "need" something like a media player (I'm thinking of smp/mpv) ? (for example to test if a recovered video file is valid ?)
And, maybe, something like AbiWord (OpenOffice seems too large, but will take a look) for simple documents handling ?

Last edited by seb3773 (2024-08-22 20:56)

Midas · 2024-08-23 13:27

seb3773 wrote:

@Midas may I ask you what is your language/keyboard layout so I can 'investigate' the problem ?

Sure, it's Portuguese (but not BR).

seb3773 wrote:

For this project I'm trying to avoid as much as possible AppImages versions.

I totally get it, you're in command.

seb3773 wrote:

So it will be a packaged version, I think it will "cost" around 90/100Mo in size.

I was merely addressing what I erroneously thought your concern was...

seb3773 wrote:

In fact I'm maybe wrong focusing on the size too much, it's not a problem nowadays, and the boot time is not horrible. I'm even beginning to think boot time is not really an issue (as long as it's reasonable, a notion to define ); because this project is designed to be a 'disaster recovery / emergency OS' solution more than something you're using all day, so waiting a bit for it to start maybe is not a problem ?

As long as it stays reasonable, boot time isn't a big concern, IMHO. But image size can be -- on constrained legacy systems, while aiming to boot from a physical CD-ROM, for instance...

seb3773 wrote:

And, maybe, something like AbiWord (OpenOffice seems too large, but will take a look) for simple documents handling ?

Nah, some kind of document viewer (can Okulus display office documents?) along with a fairly capable text editor will be more than enough.

BTW, text editors are one aspect of Linux I have struggled with for years...

Without some very involved tweaking, most of them aren't even up to my very basic needs (e.g., in Windows I can freely use Notepad3, Akelpad or NFOPad of the shelf, so to speak, to cover for my simple needs... and go for something like shareware UltraEdit for particular power usage cases). The last I was able to get the same mileage out in Linux was Medit, which has been abandoned for ages.

Last edited by Midas (2024-08-23 13:29)

Q4OS Forum

#1 2024-07-18 22:06

"Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#2 2024-07-19 12:23

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#3 2024-07-19 13:13

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#4 2024-07-20 07:23

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#5 2024-07-20 09:35

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#6 2024-07-21 14:44

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#7 2024-07-22 12:55

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#8 2024-07-28 16:31

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#9 2024-08-19 16:31

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#10 2024-08-19 16:45

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#11 2024-08-19 16:51

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#12 2024-08-21 14:29

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#13 2024-08-21 14:34

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#14 2024-08-22 10:41

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#15 2024-08-22 12:46

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#16 2024-08-22 18:18

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#17 2024-08-22 18:53

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#18 2024-08-22 19:04

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#19 2024-08-22 19:18

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

#20 2024-08-23 13:27

Re: "Q4rescue" project - testers needed :)

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