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Meilix Blank Screen

Meilix has recently faced a blank screen issue where while booting the system, it leads to a screen as follows:

We thought it to be virtual machine issue, and build the Meilix ISO in local system from scratch. But it still coming up with the same error.

Then we started to search for the commit which seems to be breaking the ISO. There is no such commit which actually breaks the ISO. So we can’t remove/revert to any particular commit.

Then we started searching in the history to search for the latest working ISO and found that this commit actually gives a working ISO 6f287ea and below this commit, none of the others are giving an ISO which works.

So we started to look into the particular commit to find the code which is breaking the system, but actually none of them actually seems to do so. It raises more unobvious issue.

If I searched for the error, it doesn’t seems to be error from the ISO side.Even I tried building the ISO locally and test it, it is giving the same result.

It looks like it’s more than a hardware error than the error on the iso side. I tried different qemu, virtualbox, VMware on different machines.

Another Idea tried for working of the ISO

  1. initramfs is a small linux shell. please use ls and cd to find the file containing the file system filesystem.squashfs. in this black shell (initramfs)
  2. try to mount the ISO file manually

I local mount using:

sudo mount -o loop /home/meilix.iso /home/user
sudo umount /home/user

 

I mount the March 18 (good) and the closest April (bad)l ISO image and run a diff between both directories. the result is possibly large.

Finally tabesin made a commit dce3b08 which resolves the issue. It just the removal of language pack.

We can find the ISO link: https://github.com/fossasia/meilix/releases/tag/untagged-e337428be18400673be6

References:

USB Boot Issue

Initramfs error

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