Previously: Asahi Linux alpha on M1 MacBook Air / Apple Silicon, first impressions
After a few months of idleness, I decided to revisit my Asahi Linux installation on my MacBook Air. As you may remember, Asahi Linux is adapted for the Apple Silicon (M1 and M2) chips, and is based on Arch Linux. It installs in a partiton on your Mac and you can dual boot it (long press the power key at start to bring up a menu).
The first snag in getting online was logging in. I am sure that I picked an easy to remember yet secure password five months ago, so easy to remember and so secure that I didn't write it down. Oops. Couldn't remember it, the usual tries didn't work, so it was time to break in.
Fortunately, Arch Linux has a nice primer on resetting a lost root password which jogged my memory as to what was possible. When you edit the boot sequence so that the init process is replaced with a shell - e.g "init=/bin/sh" - it's straightforward to boot into a single-user mode and run "passwd" to fix up the situation. Make sure that the drive in question is mounted read-write, and make sure you "sync" a few times after doing the edits so that the buffers are flushed to disk.
That little problem disposed with, it was time to update the system. Arch uses the "pacman" package manager, and the command "pacman -Syu" is all you need to trigger a complete update. There were 800+ packages that had updates. To be extra sure that everything was all in sync after all of those changes, I did a reboot and the system came up just fine.
When last I tried this, the Chromium browser didn't work because it didn't support the 16K pages that Asahi (and the Mac hardware) provides. Since then that bug has been fixed and Chromium starts just fine, with the caveat that it throws a couple of GPU related complaints along the lines of "Exiting GPU process due to errors during initialization" when starting. This is Chromium 104.0.5112.101 installed with "pacman -S chromium". Chromium did work well enough that a little bit of web browsing worked ok, but I didn't try anything very complex (the usual show-stopper is Youtube).
I had previously installed Firefox and that seems to continue to be just fine.
One goal I have on this system is to get some Electron based apps up and running, notably Obsidian. Obsidian has an "Appimage" flavor of distribution for arm64, so I tried that, and it immediately crashed with a segmentation fault (16K pages again). I can't tell at a glance which version of Electron that Obsidian ships with, but with a similar discussion for VSCode the winning version seems to be some flavor of Electron 19. I did not pursue trying VSCode out, but the VSCode issue Update to Electron 19 looks like the cutting edge of discussion. I'll make a point to try to get that working next time I'm in.
Asahi doesn't start up out of the box with an ssh daemon installed, so I put opensshd on the system and enabled it. Together with Tailscale, this got me to the point where I successfully logged into Asahi from my Android phone. A next step will be to enable "Tailscale ssh" on Asahi, but I stopped before adding that step.
My usual observations about the Linux desktop user interface still hold - everything feels just a little bit less precise than the Mac desktop (or even the Windows desktop) that I am used to, and there are enough key bindings that I am also used to that are different enough to make things confusing for occasional use.
All in all a good evening's exercise, good to have a system in reserve for when you need to see how things are. I'm not ready though to have Asahi as a daily driver.
