AV Linux 2020.4.10 Known Issues:

  Well… sometimes things don’t go exactly as planned and in the software world that is often the case, now that AV Linux 2020 has been out for a while some known issues have come to light so here is some information in case you’re affected..

Issue 1: Some Users have reported PulseAudio doesn’t connect to the Audio hardware or takes its sweet time to connect.. A Google search of this problem yields quite a few hits especially with Ubuntu users so this seems to be a known PulseAudio problem affecting some systems and not necessarily specific to AV Linux.. What happens is, if you boot into a session the PulseAudio applet on the panel displays with an ‘X’ which means it’s muted and a notification tells you “Establishing connection to PulseAudio. Please wait…”. Some people report that it doesn’t connect at all, some report that after a minute or two it connects and others report that on a reboot it works as expected with no further issues.. The problem seems to be with PulseAudio writing it’s config files in $HOME/.config/pulse and since it occurs elsewhere and doesn’t affect everyone the only ‘fix’ I can suggest is to try rewriting the pulse folder and files by opening a regular Terminal and using this command:

mv ~/.config/pulse ~/.config/pulse.old

Then restart PulseAudio’s sound server manually with this command:

pulseaudio --start

Issue 2: This is a big one…literally! AV Linux uses Systemback to create it’s bootable ISO files and to copy (install) and uncompress the Live ISO filesystem to your hard drive. The original developer of Systemback ceased development almost 4 years ago and as time has gone on more and more people with newer computer systems are needing support to install to NVMe SSD drives which Systemback didn’t support… just before AV Linux 2020 was released a User tipped me off to a fork of Systemback that now supports NVMe drives, of course I was ecstatic to see the NVMe problem solved just like that! Well… the good news is NVMe installs work, the bad news is that this fork of Systemback has a bug that seems to install AV Linux to NVMe and all types of hard drives as expected but it installs both the usual way to the User selected HDD partitions and it also additionally seems to retain the Live filesystem in a “/lib/live/mount” folder and copy it to the Users hard drive. Now “/lib/live/mount” is a necessary folder on the Live ISO but it is not necessary at all on the installed system so in effect Systemback is double-installing the AV Linux filesystem in 2 different locations which is not harmful or detrimental in any way to performance but it makes an install take up much more hard drive space than it should with a copied over useless folder containing the entire filesystem! A few Users had reported surprise at how large the installed filesystem was and one User did the homework necessary to identify the problem (thanks Dan!) So despite this annoying new issue let me reiterate it does no harm to your system and is quite unnoticeable in daily use but of course who wants Gb of wasted space on their HDD!? The solution is brutal but simple, we simply need to remove the useless /lib/live/mount folder which can be done in 2 ways… The simplest way is to open a Root Terminal and issue the following command:

*NOTE! THIS IS FOR INSTALLS OF AV LINUX ONLY, DO NOT DO THIS ON A LIVE ISO!!

rm -rf /lib/live/mount

Deleting the mount folder and contents may take several seconds…For those who don’t feel comfortable issuing a Root command and want to click a button I have made an updated AV Linux Assistant that will do this with a button, this updated Assistant also will install “winetricks” and provide a button to run it for those who want to further customize Wine-Staging as a newly added feature as well.

The updated AVL Assistant is here:

http://bandshed.net/packages/AVL-2020/avl-controlpanel/avlinux-assistant_12.0-buster1-3_all.deb

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*ADDENDUM: An updated 1.9.4 version of Systemback which fixes this issue has been provided (Thanks Franco Conidi!). If you’ve deleted the folder referred to above and wish to use Systemback to make your own customized ISO or for it’s backup capabilities then you will want grab it and install it. Download the ‘tar.gz’ folder and extract it, run the ‘install.sh’ script as Root and follow the terminal prompts and it will upgrade Systemback to 1.9.4.

Find it here: http://bandshed.net/packages/AVL-2020/systemback/systemback-install_pack-1.9.4.tar.gz

Issue 3: The ‘EQ10Q’ plugins don’t display their GUI’s in Ardour… Ugh, this is a long running issue that results from the EQ10Q Plugins being compiled with a different GTK2 version than the one in Ardour.. This type of persistent issue is the reason that many developers of Linux Audio plugins are abandoning Desktop toolkits (GTK 2,3 and QT) and using much more compatible X11 libs to create Plugin GUI’s. To obtain a set of these plugins that will work with Ardour is is necessary to uninstall the existing ‘eq10q’ package with Synaptic Package Manager and then go to the EQ10Q Website here:

Home

 

These may not be the only issues in AV Linux 2020 but these are the most currently prominent ones, more may be added to this post in the future…