Recent changes to tickets

#4 is wmlive trixie what it claims to be?

Window Maker Live — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 18:13:40 -0000

status: open --> closed

is wmlive trixie what it claims to be?

Rade Milijasevic — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:32:27 -0000

wmlive 13.2 is allegedly based on trixie debian. I don't think this build uses trixie as its base because of the old problems I am seeing during and after install which I reported in a separate ticket and it was closed. For the rest of us please describe how was this release built and what bugs were fixed? The ISO script is broken it probably never worked. So how was this release built? What tools were used and what was its base build?

is wmlive trixie what it claims to be?

Rade Milijasevic — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:32:27 -0000

Ticket 4 has been modified: is wmlive trixie what it claims to be?
Edited By: Window Maker Live (wmlive)
Status updated: 'open' => 'closed'

#3 Unable to install wmlive 13.2 trixie

Window Maker Live — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 09:47:19 -0000

status: pending --> wont-fix
discussion: enabled --> disabled

#3 Unable to install wmlive 13.2 trixie

Window Maker Live — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 09:46:37 -0000

Please be aware that wmlive is to about 99% composed of original Debian/Trixie packages, and just a fraction of add-on packages is managed by ourselves.
If you are experiencing issues with Xorg, then please open a bug report with the Debian Xorg package maintenance team who manage this software.
Nvidia is known for not playing well with Linux in general and should therefore be generally avoided. To only use hardware that is known to work well with Linux is the best advice that can be given for aspiring Linux users.
You may want to refer to the developers of Window Maker (the window manager) and open a bug with them regarding the resolution issues. Better yet, provide patches to them to fix the missing high resolution features, instead.

If Window Maker and wmlive doesn't work for your hardware, please just drop it and use one of the distributions you already said don't show any such issues. There is no need to waste any time with wmlive if it doesn't work for you.

Kindly refrain from opening any further tickets for issues not directly related to anything wmlive specific just because you are insisting to use unsuitable hardware.

This bug report will be closed.

#3 Unable to install wmlive 13.2 trixie

Window Maker Live — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 09:30:09 -0000

Since i am unable to reproduce the claimed errors for the grub installation, there is nothing that can be done from my side.
There is no missing firmware after installation is complete. All available Debian firmware packages are already included in the squashfs that is used for the installation to disk.
So if there are still firmware related issues after installation, maybe your hardware is simply not yet compatible with the installed system version.
Maybe you are better served with another distribution for your hardware.

#3 Unable to install wmlive 13.2 trixie

Rade Milijasevic — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 22:08:56 -0000

Another problem with not having necessary firmware during and after install is inability to adjust display resolution in wmlive Settings menu. But it does work from debian trixie as well as bullseye mxlinux with xfce4. This is perhaps the biggest issue for me because I have a high resolution laptops one X1 Lenovo with 2500 horiz resolution and another ASUS gaming laptop with nvidia graphic card and 3k horiz resolution and I cannot possibly see such a small fonts on the display. So being able to adjust the display resolution from window maker after installation is a strong reason to include vendor specific firmware during installation and warn a user if network is disabled during install HW specific drivers will not be installed. I should probably open a new ticket about display resolution not being adjustable.

#3 Unable to install wmlive 13.2 trixie

Rade Milijasevic — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 21:48:31 -0000

There was no prompt as to where to install grub. I just came across an old bug in 0.95.7 from 2017 where grub wouldn't install if no network is provisioned. Are you sure this is not the same issue since I did not configure networking before running the installer?

Referring to building my ISO, I would like to do that but after following the README I got nowhere, I pm-ed you about that Paul. If you could provide us with updated instructions how to build wmlive ISO I would be very grateful.

Is there a workaround to install missing firmware post install?

thanks, RM

#3 Unable to install wmlive 13.2 trixie

Window Maker Live — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 08:11:12 -0000

Hi Rade,

thanks for the very helpful debug logs!

Apparently, the debian-installer tries to initially load some firmware files but which are not available at this time. While the firmware files are readily available in the squashfs image, they are not during installation time. This may change for the next release by including the firmware binaries also during installation time, but it will increase the ISO image size by yet another 250MB.
In case you build the ISO image yourself, set the parameter '--firmware-binary' in wmlive-trixie_13.2/wmlive-amd64/auto/config from 'false' to 'true' to ensure avilability of the firmware also during installation time.

Installation of wmlive typically takes much longer than a standard Debian installation because in the last stages two preseed/late_command 'wmlive-custom-ex/in-target' scripts are run. So the installation doesn't just "stall for 4-5 minutes" but is simply busy executing these scripts. You can follow its execution during the installation process by switching to the console using the ctrl-alt-f4 keyboard shortcut. After completed installation, the installer's output can be viewed by reading /var/log/installer/syslog which also includes the output of the mentioned scripts.

According to the entries in /var/log/installer/syslog the grub installation appears to have succeeded. But the line reporting "grub-installer: info: Installing grub on 'dummy'" is rather suspicious. What kind of device is 'dummy'? Why doesn't it refer to an actual storage device? When asked by the installer on which storage device to install grub, did you manually insert 'dummy' instead of choosing one of the offered storage devices?
Makes me wonder what (or who) went wrong here...

Best regards

#3 Unable to install wmlive 13.2 trixie

Rade Milijasevic — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:15:43 -0000

First the laptop I used wasn't Dell but Lenovo yoga X1 G3, my bad. This hardware never worked well with wm, I went all the way back to 0.96 and still I couldn't use the trackpad buttons. This bug or lack of drivers persisted to release 13.2. Perhaps the owner of this distro should consider re basing the build back to debian, because my X1 works fine with trixie such as mxlinux 25. So to recap, the screen went dim during install. On 0.96 this worked fine and so it does in mxlinux 25. There are two stages of the install during "Finishing Installation..." stage when the install stalls for several minutes. First is disabling netinst CD in sources.list, even though I didn't configure networking. Second is right after that "update-iniramfs" step where is stalls for 4-5 minutes. Then it continues but it never installs grub. My grub list from previous installations was wiped out clean! Basically the install never completes. The laptop boots into trixie 13.2 without trackpad buttons. As requested, I attached the debug log I ran after install. This release needs some patch work. Thank you.