Wrapping text to 80 characters works but due to font size and padding
the maximum 80 character lines start to get truncated. Extending the
window to 90 characters will resolve this.
While the whiptail program wraps text appropriately based on column
size, the fbwhiptail program doesn't, leading to text that scrolls off
the window where it can no longer be read. This change wraps the longer
text output so it all fits.
Since fbwhiptail allows us to customize the background colors, we should
colorize warnings and error messages to provide a user with an
additional subtle cue that there might be a problem. I have added two
additional configuration options:
CONFIG_WARNING_BG_COLOR
CONFIG_ERROR_BG_COLOR
and in the librem13v2.config file you can see an example for how to set
them to be yellow and red gradients, respectively. I've also updated the
main two scripts that use whiptail to include those background colors.
If you decide to use regular whiptail, just don't set these config
options and it should behave as expected.
Part of the Heads workflow involves handling legitimate changes to /boot
as part of the package manager. This is a challenging workflow to handle
as package managers on many systems work in a completely unattended way
(and some even reboot first, apply updates, and then reboot again).
We need to be able to detect changes that are potentially caused by a
package manager so to do that I've set up a trigger within the OS
(currently just for Debian) that runs both before and after package
updates. It verifies the signatures in /boot and if they fail before
package updates it creates a log file in
/boot/kexec_package_trigger_pre.txt. If they fail after package updates
run /boot/kexec_package_trigger_post.txt is created. These files contain
the following fields:
CHANGED_FILES: A list of files in /boot that failed the sha256sum check
UPDATE_INITRAMFS_PACKAGE: An (optional) list of packages known to
trigger initramfs changes
Following those fields is a list of log output from the last package
manager run which contains its own formatted fields (I'm pulling from
/var/lib/dpkg/info).
When a user selects a boot option, gui-init first verifies the
checksums just to catch errors before calling kexec-select-boot. If
there are any errors it looks for these package logs and if they exist,
it displays appropriate warnings. If the files are absent it displays a
more generic warning. The user is also given an opportunity to re-sign
the /boot hashes.
The number of options we want in the menu is starting to get large
enough that it's worth slimming things down in the main menu and move
options to nested menus. Along with this nested menu change is the
option to re-sign and re-hash files in /boot directly from the menu.
One of the other core functions a user needs when bootstrapping is
taking over the TPM. I've added a new option in the menu for this and it
revealed that some of the menus needed more space so I've widened all
the menus and also made the main menu longer so the options don't
scroll.
The point of this change is to provide a failsafe (failunsafe?) mode for
less technically-savvy users who will ultimately be using Heads by
default on Librem laptops.
There are some scenarios where an end user might forget to update hashes
in /boot after an initrd change or might have some other hash mismatch.
Currently that user would then be stuck in a recovery console in Heads
not knowing what to do within that limited shell environment to fix the
situation.
This change adds a 'force' mode to kexec-select-boot that goes straight
into a boot menu and bypasses the hash checks so the user could more
easily get back into their system to attempt to repair it. It adds
appropriate warnings about why this is a risky option and moves it down
toward the bottom of the menu. The goal would be to just have this be an
emergency option our support could guide a user to if they ended up in
this situation.
In particular I added a GUI menu to instruct the user if there is no
TOTP code registered (as is the case upon first flash) and also added
better handling of the case the user selects 'default boot' when there
is no default boot set yet. Apart from that where there were text-only
menus left in gui-init I've replaced them with GUI menus.
When selecting the boot menu option (m) in the gui-init you call out to
kexec-select-boot. To better maintain the graphical menu experience,
I've added a -g option to kexec-select-boot that, when set, will use a
graphical whiptail menu for the most common menu selection modes.
This is a modified version of the generic-init script that uses whiptail
to generate a graphical menu. I changed two of the options so that the
user can refresh the menu to get an updated TOTP code if needed.
