IOHK statement: A Beta release for Daedalus on Linux

English News and Announcements
1

At Input Output HK we’ve heard your requests for Daedalus on Linux and are pleased to announce it’s ready for public beta testing. Given the variety of Linux distributions and customizations we want to gather feedback from the community before making a fully supported Linux release.

This beta test is aimed at Linux users who are comfortable running a script in a terminal.

Disclaimer

This is beta software we are releasing for testing If you test with Ada in this build we ask that you:

  1. Use small amounts
  2. Confirm the 12-word wallet recovery phrase restores your wallet in a supported Windows or macOS build
  3. As always, keep your wallet recovery phrase safe.

In supported Windows and macOS builds there is mechanism for fetching update versions from the blockchain. That feature is disabled in this Linux beta release. Consequently, when the production Linux release is available you won’t be prompted to update to the next version. Instead you will have to install the initial production release manually. Look for an FAQ entry on the Daedalus website after the production release.

Usage

These steps assume you are comfortable running scripts in a Linux terminal and are logged into a graphical desktop session as a user other than root.

  1. Download the installer: https://update-cardano-mainnet.iohk.io/Daedalus-mainnet-installer-1.1.0.960.bin

  2. Verify the sha256 hash: sha256sum ~/Downloads/Daedalus-mainnet-installer-1.1.0.960.bin

  • Expected: e3966a478fd8e66f39a5e5e5e09c85dae9b9fed21854f24c736790789eeaa963
  1. Run the installer: bash ~/Downloads/Daedalus-mainnet-installer-1.1.0.960.bin
  • On some Linux distributions this may initially fail and request you to run some commands to enable kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone. After doing that try running the installer again.
  1. Start Daedalus
  • Desktop menu (installer creates ~/.local/share/applications/Daedalus.desktop)
  • Run ~/bin/daedalus

Providing feedback

We want to hear about your experience, both good and otherwise. There are two recommended ways to submit feedback directly to us. Either way, please include the phrase Linux Beta in the submission form.

  1. Click on the bug icon in Daedalus.
  • This is the best option if you had problems because it allows you the option to submit your logs if you select this.
  1. Go to the Daedalus support page and click the email support button.

Thanks for taking part in this beta test, we appreciate your help in getting this software ready for general release.

14 Likes
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Alleluia. Thanks so much Maki!

1 Like
4

Great News!

1 Like
5

I must be dreaming! Thank you Maki!

1 Like
6

Wow, great news. Thank you Maki!

7

I can see at least one issue w/ the Linux wallet.

Daedalus stores individual blocks and undo records as files under DB-1.0/blocks/data (macOS) or DB/blocks/data (Linux)
Means millions of files (~1.7m at the moment) are used currently on my macOS by Daedalus, therefore, millions of inodes on a filesystem.

This is not an issue on macOS’s APFS (inodes) or NTFS (file IDs) as they can have quintillion inodes/id (signed 64bit means 2^63-1, to be precise).

But, Linux’s default ext4 FS is affected as in FS creation time, it calculates the number of inodes by the size of the underlying partition/volume etc…

Means, smaller filesystems (~20-50GB) will run out of free inodes very quickly, and it’s a fucked up situation as inodes cannot be adjusted dynamically, but require to create a new FS /w larger number of inodes (mkfs.ext4 -N …).

I created an ubuntu VM w/ 20GB root disk, and it was affected hard. Daedalus stuck on a certain percentage and did not go further and it turned out because the system ran out of free inodes.

root@nyx:~# df -i /
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/ubuntu–vg-root 1215840 0 1215840 100% /

root@nyx:~# dumpe2fs /dev/mapper/ubuntu–vg-root | egrep -w "^(Inode|Block)"
dumpe2fs 1.42.13 (17-May-2015)
Inode count: 1215840
Block count: 4854784
Block size: 4096
Inode blocks per group: 510
Inode size: 256

This can be a big pain in the arse for a lot of Linux users.

Secondly, these million files need to be read/write in a case of recovery, checks etc by scanning the directories and reading/writing files, that can cause very high I/O on all OSes.
For example, I have experienced on macOS, that just go through on these files using ls command, takes several minutes (more than 6m).
In Linux it’s better as all the free memory is reserved for different caches (dentry, inode, buffer etc.), basically, it means, when you access to a file more than once it will be significantly quicker.

Examples:
macOS, nearly the same in both runs.
ilap$ time (ls -Rtl blocks | wc -l )
1695732

real 6m12.673s
user 0m22.483s
sys 2m7.617s

ilap$ time (ls -Rtl blocks | wc -l )
1695792

real 6m7.630s
user 0m22.452s
sys 2m7.236s

While on Linux it’s less than a second after the second try (only 220K files).
ilap@nyx:~/.local/share/Daedalus/mainnet/DB$ time (ls -Rtl | wc -l )
229788

real 0m6.229s
user 0m0.954s
sys 0m2.165s
ilap@nyx:~/.local/share/Daedalus/mainnet/DB$ time (ls -Rtl | wc -l )
229788

real 0m1.786s
user 0m0.921s
sys 0m0.931s
ilap@nyx:~/.local/share/Daedalus/mainnet/DB$

I think the “Connecting to Network” issue has several causes (I have identified three), but in my opinion, at least one can be related to the very slow recovery of the blocks, what I have already experienced when I was playing w/ Daedalus.

8 Likes
9

Followed build instructions as per IOHK statement: A Beta release for Daedalus on Linux.

Installation was perfect on Ubuntu 16.04. Had my server hang up due to some other processes after syncing and generating a new wallet. Rebooted and connected without issue.

Daedalus seems much more solid on my Ubuntu system vs my Win 10 laptop, which constantly hangs on connecting to network. The only solution I have found to this issue in Windows is to delete the db1.0 directory and start from scratch, but this solution always works without fail.

10

@_ilap that’s a nice report, have you posted it via the feedback form as well?

1 Like
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It worked in Ubuntu Mate 17.10. However when launching it doesn’t give the option where to save the blockchain data and I saw a quick decrease of 10 GB’s on my SSD within a few mins. So, I tried to remove and delete this install and all folders related to the Daedalus wallet I could find, but I’m still with less 10GB on my SSD, can you please advise me where other files related to this Wallet are to be found so I can delete them and recover 10GB?

Best, Linda

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Linda, you can find the blockchain data at ~/.local/share/Daedalus/mainnet/DB/

13

I did that already. But I still have the 10GB’s of data somewhere. I deleted this folder in the file explorer CAJA. Maybe no clean delete? Could it be that Daedalus stores some data in /usr ? and /lib ?

14

Then it should be in the Rubbish Bin instead, so empty the bin then, but I am not familiar w/ these fancy explorers/filemanagers like Mate/Caja.

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I already did that as well. Could it be that Daedalus stores some data in /usr ? and /lib ?

16

Not really, might be the binaries under ~/.daedalus folder, but that’s just abt 400MB.
I would say, just restart your Linux, as the opened file descriptors usually are not closed
in a case when some process was still doing some IOs on these files (read/writes). For example, when you deleted them, some syncing process was still running in the background.
As a result, the df (disk free) won’t come back w/ the proper numbers, or try to run “sync; sync; sync” to flush the caches.
run du -sk ~/{.[a-z],}* | sort -n after reboot, if your FS is still occupied.

3 Likes
17

Thanks _ilap! I tried this command line but to no avail, even after rebooting, the 8GB is still occupying the disk somewhere…

18

Programs such as Treesize are good for finding filespace hogs on Windows, surely there are equivalents for Linux?

19

Linda, what does df -i say? It could very well be the inode exhaustion issue…

20

It says the following for df -i

udev 1004477 521 1003956 1% /dev
tmpfs 1012207 820 1011387 1% /run
/dev/sda2 14123008 1568130 12554878 12% /
tmpfs 1012207 112 1012095 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 1012207 6 1012201 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 1012207 18 1012189 1% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1 0 0 0 - /boot/efi
tmpfs 1012207 31 1012176 1% /run/user/1000
/home/username/.Private 14123008 1568130 12554878 12% /home/username
/dev/dm-1 61054976 18646 61036330 1% /media/username/username

21

? du is a basic command from coreutils package, therefore it should/must exist in your system.
Just, try to run it in this simpler form, of course, in a terminal: cd ; du -sk * .[^.]* | sort -n