Other Distros

[Pete]

@Billtoo

Is one of those graphs your pulse rate whilst riding the roller coaster?
You look petrified.

[Billtoo]

@Billtoo

I have downloaded it (via torrent as mirrors in Australia haven't propagated yet) and will install soon.. but at the moment I am busily building the next slacko alpha based on 14.2 (64 for the moment).

Great news, looking forward to that.

[Billtoo]

@Billtoo

Is one of those graphs your pulse rate whilst riding the roller coaster?
You look petrified.

There's no way that I'd ever get on that ride!

[Sailor Enceladus]

@Billtoo

I have downloaded it (via torrent as mirrors in Australia haven't propagated yet) and will install soon.. but at the moment I am busily building the next slacko alpha based on 14.2 (64 for the moment).

Great news, looking forward to that.

Looking forward as well. Does slackware 14.2 still use gtk-2?

[Billtoo]

Looking forward as well. Does slackware 14.2 still use gtk-2?

Yes, there is a gtk2 and a gtk3 folder in /usr/lib64.
It compiled Gtktetris for me.

[01micko]

@Billtoo

I have downloaded it (via torrent as mirrors in Australia haven't propagated yet) and will install soon.. but at the moment I am busily building the next slacko alpha based on 14.2 (64 for the moment).

Great news, looking forward to that.

Booted to desktop on second go. Lots of older (slacko) packages don't work due to newer libraries so I'm busy recompiling them. Mtpaint is one so I couldn't scale the screenshot!

[gcmartin]

Latest Porteus for modern PCs (2005+), here. Fast, real fast.

Latest Slackware for modern PCs, download is here.

Earlier versions of Slackware for older PCs are still operational and supported. Still works great.

[Colonel Panic]

I've installed Mint 18 (Cinnamon) and Slackware 14.2. Mint looks OK so far but networking still doesn't work in Slackware (on my system anyway).

Oh well, too late in the evening to try and fix it now.

[rufwoof]

Assuming you frugal boot using something like grub4dos then ....

Grab a ISO via the Debian Live web site (I clicked on the i386 CD/DVD/USB link around two thirds of the way down that page and opted to grab the KDE version debian-live-8.5.0-i386-kde-desktop.iso )

Open that ISO with ROX or Thunar (or whatever filemanager) and copy the "live" folder over onto your hard disk, perhaps into a new directory called DEB (I created mine on the first HDD 4th partition (sda4) which is numbered hd0,3 in grub4dos terms

Edit your grub4dos menu.lst to include a entry that points to that - mine is shown below, and if you want persistence (changes saved across reboot) then set up a save partition for that (I believe there are ways to use a save folder or save file as alternatives (but I don't know how to do that myself- I'm just outlining the way I did it here).

Code: Select all

# menu.lst
color white/blue black/cyan white/black cyan/black
timeout 1
default 0

title DebianLive686 PERSISTENCE
#find --set-root /DEB/live/vmlinuz2
root (hd0,3) 
kernel /DEB/live/vmlinuz2 boot=live config persistence quickreboot noprompt showmounts live-media-path=/DEB/live/ config
initrd /DEB/live/initrd2.img

I created sda2 as a new ext3 formatted partition to act as the save (persistence) partition. You have to use gparted or whatever to give that partition a LABEL of "persistence". Create a file called persistence.conf in the root of that partition and edit it to contain just a single line of :

/ union

(there must be a new line after that)

Reboot and you're away. Booting into Debian Jessie KDE and where all changes will be preserved in that persistence partition.

After I'd updated and installed/changed things to how I liked it, I booted a puppy (well DebianDog Jessie actually) and created a sfs (squashfs) of the persistence partition and then merged that changes.squashfs as I called it with the main filesystem.squashfs ... to create a new filesystem.squashfs (that normally sits in the /DEB/live folder) to boot from - that contained all of the original filesystem along with the changes I'd made in a single SFS. Which meant that the persistence partition (like a save folder) could be emptied of everything except the persistence.conf file.

These are the notes I copied off the web to do that (filenames are different, but provides the basis of how to merge two sfs's into one single sfs).

Code: Select all

Lets assume we have a directory on the hard drive where we’ve copied the casper/filesystem.squashfs file on the USB as fs.ro and the casper-rw file as fs.rw. First we mount the aufs by layering these:

mkdir -p tmp-ro tmp-rw tmp-aufs
sudo mount -o loop fs.ro tmp-ro/
sudo mount -o loop fs.rw tmp-rw/
sudo mount -t aufs -o br:tmp-rw:tmp-ro none tmp-aufs/

Now tmp-ro shows the squashfs, tmp-rw shows the changes stored in caster-rw and tmp-aufs shows the layered filesystem as the live OS would see it.

Next we can generate the new squashfs using mksquashfs (from squashfs-tools):

sudo mksquashfs tmp-aufs/ filesystem.squashfs

KDE is pretty heavy on the compositing/animation type effects, and also has a number of neat features that I've discovered so far, such as when you edit the panel you can resize it via dragging. You can drag icons from the likes of /usr/share/applications onto the desktop and then if you right click the desktop and select 'Unlock Widgets' you can then hover over a icon until a vertical bar pops up then grab/drag that bar to move the icon around, and there's even a drag to scale up or down the icon size (each icon can be sized independently of each other). Once finished moving things around right click the desktop and select the 'Lock Widgets' option.

A neat thing with Debian is you get security updates through quickly, and the repository is extensive, albeit stable versions that aren't the latest versions.

My 64 bit PC blew up some months back and whilst I have a new (to me) 64 bit PC gathering dust, I've been using a old single core Celeron 32 bit machine with 2GB of ram as a temporary measure. The above is all running fine on that older hardware ... KDE just isn't as resource heavy beast as it perhaps once was, at least not that I've noticed. Booting a liveCD type ISO boot, but with the files on HDD ... and it runs very well IMO. Took me a while to get to the above stage, so thought I'd share my experiences/observations here to make it easier for others. Don't blame me if you corrupt/crash your system (always remember to make backups first).

PS ... MasterPDFEditor and Skype aren't in the Debian respository, for Skype I just installed it as per how I posted here for DebianDog Jessie Skype For masterpdfeditor I just downloaded and installed from their web site directly. It did take a bit of fiddling around to get sound to work correctly for me. The trick was to install pavucontrol from the repository (via synaptic) and then reboot/run that and set the channels as being shared. Now I can hear both a youtube playing whilst talking on skype (other party doesn't however hear both, only your voice).

[rufwoof]

Provided the desktop is in focus you can type and up pops a search/list at the top centre of screen. For example galcu .... looking to run galculator and it will suggest that as one of the options available ..... a form of quick launch.

Lots of widgets in KDE. Bouncing ball (soon becomes annoying - and trying to catch it to get rid of it ... ), eyes that track the mouse around the screen (which goes way back in time), and widget resize/move also include a rotation option

[musher0]

rufwoof?

You're a genius!

I've been looking forever for the info in your last two posts!

Many, many thanks!

[rufwoof]

rufwoof?

You're a genius!

I've been looking forever for the info in your last two posts!

Many, many thanks!

The cube desktop rotation is a nice feature. Best to look up a how to on youtube however whilst relatively easy to setup its a lot easier to be shown than to textually describe.

[rufwoof]

To extend upon what I posted earlier, here's how you can set up a save file instead of having to use a partition for saves

In the earlier text as quoted below I created a folder called DEB on sda4 for the debian kde system to run in. For me the best place was to create a save file also on sda4 - the save file needs to have the filename "persistence" for debian to automatically pick that up and needs to be in the root folder of that partition. That save file can actually be on any partition, but must be in the root directory.

First create a save file of whatever size you prefer, I opted for 4GB i.e. a count of 4096 in the following dd command

cd /mnt/sda4
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/sda4/persistence bs=1M count=4096

then format that file as a filesystem

mkfs.ext3 /mnt/sda4/persistence

Now we have to attach that as a loop file to a free loop, first I tried

losetup /dev/loop0 persistence

.. but that failed (already used) so next I tried

losetup /dev/loop1 persistence

.. and that worked. i.e. loop1 was obviously free. You might have to keep going until you find a free loop (if so then the code below should be changed to reflect whichever loop number was actually used).

So now we can mount that filesystem, and then create the persistence.conf file within that that Debian needs :

mkdir -p t
mount -t ext3 /dev/loop1 t/
cd t
echo / union >persistence.conf
echo >>persistence.conf
cd ..
umount /dev/loop1

I got rid of the persistence partition that I was using in the earlier example (text below), rebooted and its all now using that 4GB save file.

Assuming you frugal boot using something like grub4dos then ....

Grab a ISO via the Debian Live web site (I clicked on the i386 CD/DVD/USB link around two thirds of the way down that page and opted to grab the KDE version debian-live-8.5.0-i386-kde-desktop.iso )

Open that ISO with ROX or Thunar (or whatever filemanager) and copy the "live" folder over onto your hard disk, perhaps into a new directory called DEB (I created mine on the first HDD 4th partition (sda4) which is numbered hd0,3 in grub4dos terms

Edit your grub4dos menu.lst to include a entry that points to that - mine is shown below, and if you want persistence (changes saved across reboot) then set up a save partition for that (I believe there are ways to use a save folder or save file as alternatives (but I don't know how to do that myself- I'm just outlining the way I did it here).

Code: Select all

# menu.lst
color white/blue black/cyan white/black cyan/black
timeout 1
default 0

title DebianLive686 PERSISTENCE
#find --set-root /DEB/live/vmlinuz2
root (hd0,3) 
kernel /DEB/live/vmlinuz2 boot=live config persistence quickreboot noprompt showmounts live-media-path=/DEB/live/ config
initrd /DEB/live/initrd2.img

I created sda2 as a new ext3 formatted partition to act as the save (persistence) partition. You have to use gparted or whatever to give that partition a LABEL of "persistence". Create a file called persistence.conf in the root of that partition and edit it to contain just a single line of :

/ union

(there must be a new line after that)

Reboot and you're away. Booting into Debian Jessie KDE and where all changes will be preserved in that persistence partition.

After I'd updated and installed/changed things to how I liked it, I booted a puppy (well DebianDog Jessie actually) and created a sfs (squashfs) of the persistence partition and then merged that changes.squashfs as I called it with the main filesystem.squashfs ... to create a new filesystem.squashfs (that normally sits in the /DEB/live folder) to boot from - that contained all of the original filesystem along with the changes I'd made in a single SFS. Which meant that the persistence partition (like a save folder) could be emptied of everything except the persistence.conf file.

These are the notes I copied off the web to do that (filenames are different, but provides the basis of how to merge two sfs's into one single sfs).

Code: Select all

Lets assume we have a directory on the hard drive where we’ve copied the casper/filesystem.squashfs file on the USB as fs.ro and the casper-rw file as fs.rw. First we mount the aufs by layering these:

mkdir -p tmp-ro tmp-rw tmp-aufs
sudo mount -o loop fs.ro tmp-ro/
sudo mount -o loop fs.rw tmp-rw/
sudo mount -t aufs -o br:tmp-rw:tmp-ro none tmp-aufs/

Now tmp-ro shows the squashfs, tmp-rw shows the changes stored in caster-rw and tmp-aufs shows the layered filesystem as the live OS would see it.

Next we can generate the new squashfs using mksquashfs (from squashfs-tools):

sudo mksquashfs tmp-aufs/ filesystem.squashfs

KDE is pretty heavy on the compositing/animation type effects, and also has a number of neat features that I've discovered so far, such as when you edit the panel you can resize it via dragging. You can drag icons from the likes of /usr/share/applications onto the desktop and then if you right click the desktop and select 'Unlock Widgets' you can then hover over a icon until a vertical bar pops up then grab/drag that bar to move the icon around, and there's even a drag to scale up or down the icon size (each icon can be sized independently of each other). Once finished moving things around right click the desktop and select the 'Lock Widgets' option.

A neat thing with Debian is you get security updates through quickly, and the repository is extensive, albeit stable versions that aren't the latest versions.

My 64 bit PC blew up some months back and whilst I have a new (to me) 64 bit PC gathering dust, I've been using a old single core Celeron 32 bit machine with 2GB of ram as a temporary measure. The above is all running fine on that older hardware ... KDE just isn't as resource heavy beast as it perhaps once was, at least not that I've noticed. Booting a liveCD type ISO boot, but with the files on HDD ... and it runs very well IMO. Took me a while to get to the above stage, so thought I'd share my experiences/observations here to make it easier for others. Don't blame me if you corrupt/crash your system (always remember to make backups first).

PS ... MasterPDFEditor and Skype aren't in the Debian respository, for Skype I just installed it as per how I posted here for DebianDog Jessie Skype For masterpdfeditor I just downloaded and installed from their web site directly. It did take a bit of fiddling around to get sound to work correctly for me. The trick was to install pavucontrol from the repository (via synaptic) and then reboot/run that and set the channels as being shared. Now I can hear both a youtube playing whilst talking on skype (other party doesn't however hear both, only your voice).

[wyzguy]

rufwoof,

To find a free loop device, try the following:
fgrep "" /sys/class/block/loop*/size | grep "size:0$"
cat /proc/partitions | grep loop ------ shows the used loop devices.

wyzguy

[rufwoof]

rufwoof,

To find a free loop device, try the following:
fgrep "" /sys/class/block/loop*/size | grep "size:0$"
cat /proc/partitions | grep loop ------ shows the used loop devices.

wyzguy

Thanks

#!/bin/bash
FL=`losetup -f`
echo $FL

also works well

[Colonel Panic]

SolydX is a decent distro; it's based on Debian and uses the XFce window manager. It has quite a small set of software as standard but what it does have works well.

I didn't get on with Zenwalk 8 at all (I couldn't even log in as a normal user, and Firefox didn't work). Maybe I could have spent an hour or so trying to get to the bottom of it but frankly life's too short.

[Robert123]

Yeah Solydx is prettry nice when I tried it. Yes Zenwalk when I tried 32bit ones and it wasn't a pleasant experience pretty much what you said. Vector was far superior.

[nitehawk]

SolydX is a decent distro; it's based on Diebian and uses the XFce window manager. It has quite a small set of software as standard but what it does have well

You know,...when it comes to Debian based distros, I just go with plain Debian or Devuan now. Then "customize" to make it tiny or full (what-ever I need). Right now I'm using my 10" RCA Viking Pro Android tablet (that You can use like a very small computer).
But I (personaly) find Android to be a big PITA!!! Wish you could get linux on these things.

[Colonel Panic]

SolydX is a decent distro; it's based on Diebian and uses the XFce window manager. It has quite a small set of software as standard but what it does have well

You know,...when it comes to Debian based distros, I just go with plain Debian or Devuan now. Then "customize" to make it tiny or full (what-ever I need). Right now I'm using my 10" RCA Viking Pro Android tablet (that You can use like a very small computer).
But I (personaly) find Android to be a big PITA!!! Wish you could get linux on these things.

Can't help I'm afraid because I've never used Android (except on my Mum's tabloid once, and that was only briefly).

I might try Devuan sometime, but as for Debian; I know there are advantages in installing Debian from scratch in that you start from a clean sheet; you can set it up exactly the way you want it and not have anything on there that you don't want or need.

However, the devs of BunsenLabs Hydrogen, which I'm posting from now, have *done a lot of work to make Debian more user-friendly; for example, Hydrogen has customised hotkeys to make some of the most used functions easier to access. It's basically a fork of CrunchBang;

https://www.bunsenlabs.org/

It would take me quite a long time to replicate all that, or even anything similar, which is why I haven't so far attempted to do it. It's also why I prefer Stella to plain CentOS; the Stella developers have done the hard work to set it up to be usable from the get-go, so that I don't have to.

Horses for courses I guess.

*The same is true of AntiX, which is a mature distro now with no serious faults that I can see and a lot to recommend it, especially for people with old computers.

[nitehawk]

However, the devs of distros of AntiX and BunsenLabs Hydrogen, which I'm posting from now, have done a lot of work to make Debian more user-friendly. For example, Hydrogen has customised hotkeys to make some of the most used functions easier to access. It's basically a fork of CrunchBang;

https://www.bunsenlabs.org/

It would take me quite a long time to replicate all that, or even anything similar, which is why I haven't so far attempted to do it. It's also why I prefer Stella to plain CentOS; the Stella developers have done the hard work to set it up to be usable from the get-go, so that I don't have to.
Horses for courses I guess.

Oh yes,...
I'm a very big fan of Antix and MX!!!! I have both of those on a couple of computers right now (I use Antix on one of my main computers,...and MX on a large tower computer...dual-booted with Stella).
This little old laptop runs just Devuan right now. But Antix and MX rule IMO.
Guess I should try bunsenlaps version of Crunchbang though,...might really be nice on this old lappy.