of 3 linux distros, 1 icon shows as penguin
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Just asking because I don't get why the 1 icon is shown incorrectly.
3 different distros, each in its own partition, and separate efi and home partitions.
All boot properly, so no problem there,. Only the one icon is a problem, so basically just an annoyance.
The icon replaced by the penguin is for the KaOS distro.
- the value of ID in os-release is "kaos".
- the icon, in the folder with all the others, is os_kaos.png
- the icon is viewable (i.e. not defective)
- its file permissions are the same as all the other icons
The only oddity I noted is that whereas the other two distros mount the efi partition on /boot/efi, kaos mounts it on /boot. But as I said earlier, rEFInd in not fooled by this and boots kaos, and the others, properly.
I know there are tricks to get the correct icon to show, but it seems like I shouldn't need them. Ideas?
Rod may be ignoring this one, or on vacation, but I realized I should also have mentioned the following:
* KaOS was the last distro I installed
* prior to that I was using rEFInd with the other two distros only
* during the KaOS install (from a usb stick ISO) it asked if I wanted to use rEFInd. I said yes, but later I realized that this might have caused a re-install
But again - the oddly missing icon is the only problem.
Just got an idea. /etc/os-release is in the KaOS partition, which they require to use an XFS filesystem. So I think rEFInd can't read that file ...
Get an XFS driver from the
Pete Batardlink here and add it to yourdriversfolder:https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/d1ef8ae6/#cd8c
Thanks! I downloaded xfs_x64.efi from Pete Batard's https://efi.akeo.ie/downloads/efifs-1.10/x64/ and put it into the refind/drivers_x64 directory.
But - it's still the penguin showing instead of the KaOS icon ...
On Rod's "Using EFI Drivers'" webpage, he says "When you reboot after installing drivers, rEFInd should automatically detect and use the drivers you install." I guess that means that tho XFS was probably a component of this (minor) problem, but there's still something else going on.
Last edit: George Pearson 2024-07-26
Well, output a log file, check what is happening on icons for that item and make adjustments.
Otherwise, a Linux icon being shown for a Linux instance is not the end of the world.
Good luck!
Last edit: dakanji 2024-07-27
Wow, I hadn't realized there was the ability to enable a log file. Thanks!
The refind documentation is very thorough, but its a bit difficult to find the information one needs.
Anyway, in refind.conf, I uncommented log_level and set it to 4.
I rebooted to create the log.
At first, the file looked mysterious until I discovered it was using UTF-16.
So I converted the file to UTF-8 to inspect it, using this command while in sudo bash:
iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 refind.log -o refind-utf-8.log
I can see that refind looks for, and finds, the IDs and thus icons for the other two distros, but NEVER looks for "kaos".
I will be looking at the log more carefully, but my new theory is that since the kaos kernels are stored in the efi partition, there's no /etc/os-release in that partition for refind to find.
For the KaOS distro, the refind log shows:
Trying to locate an icon based on hints 'boot,EFI,System,Partition,linux'
So it's not looking for "kaos".
So I decided a refind trick is really necessary, and therefore installed xfsprogs in one of the other distros. I ran xfs_admin there to change the filesystem name of the (unmounted) Kaos partition to "kaos" (wiithout the quotes of course) but got a whole raft of errors and the name remains empty, so no joy there.
I'll need to research why xfs_admin failed.
Found nothing on the xfs_admin errors.
Found that KDE partition manager will deal with XFS partitions, so tried using that, running on my KDE Neon distro, to change the filesystem name of the KaOS partition. It reported success, but yet the label is still empty!
Duh - slaps forehead. It's NOT the XFS partition that needs the filesystem name trick. I'd need to name the efi filesystem "kaos" because that's where the kaos kernels are.
That just seems like a wrong thing to do, so I guess I'm stuck with the penguin...
You could always rename your
os_kaosfile asos_linuxYep, I could rename the icon. It would work fine (unless I ever installed another distro that mounted the efi partition on /boot).
As an alternate idea, I noticed that Rod, in 2023, added an option to follow symlinks. So I could theoretically symlinks the kernels in the efi partition to the KaOS XFS partition . So rEFInd would see the kernels there and be able to read /etc/os-release there. I think there's also an option to STOP rEFInd from looking for kernels in the efi partition (to avoid seeing the kaos kernels again). However, I need to figure out where I saw this ...
HOWEVER, the big question to me is this: in creating symlinks in the XFS partition, they need to point to a mounted filesystem. Where is the efi partition "mounted" during rEFInd's scan? Rod doesn't mention this anywhere I've found yet.
With respect to renaming the icon, I thought better than a rename would be to symlink os_linux.png to os_kaos.png. That would make it more obvious what was going on.
However ln -s requires a full path as a target, which again brings up the symlink question - what is the mount point of the efi partition when rEFInd is running?
(Posting this prior to seeing joevt's post, which is right now "awaiting moderation".)
My latest thought for this icon issue is to create a stanza to handle the kaos distro, I need to research how to do this, but unfortunately I won't be able to get to that right away ...
OK, finally had time to time to try the stanza and that worked - the kaos icon is displayed now