Other Distros

[belham2]

My computer needs a service at the moment and has difficulty booting, so I've gone for the conservative option; Slackware (14.1, 64-bit) with Fluxbox as the window manager and Gkrellm for system info. It looks as though it's 2005 again, but at least it all works (oh, and Quirky does too)!

Colonel,

Is the Aspire dying?? Or just the storage means/devices needing a good wiping?? Sorry to hear if it is the former. I'm always fighting trying to keep these circa 2000-2006 systems I have up and running, though to be fair, 2 of them are ~2008-2009. But the late 90s Pentium I have, and some old AMDS, man, talk about your tempermental ladies

[Colonel Panic]

My computer needs a service at the moment and has difficulty booting, so I've gone for the conservative option; Slackware (14.1, 64-bit) with Fluxbox as the window manager and Gkrellm for system info. It looks as though it's 2005 again, but at least it all works (oh, and Quirky does too)!

Colonel,

Is the Aspire dying?? Or just the storage means/devices needing a good wiping?? Sorry to hear if it is the former. I'm always fighting trying to keep these circa 2000-2006 systems I have up and running, though to be fair, 2 of them are ~2008-2009. But the late 90s Pentium I have, and some old AMDS, man, talk about your tempermental ladies

Thanks for asking. As far as I can tell it just needs a good wiping / de-dusting and a new CMOS battery, but I can't get the side panels off to clean it so it looks like a professional job.

I'd also like to bump the RAM up to 4GB; it's asymmetrical at the moment with a 1 GB and a 2 GB stick installed.

In other news; I've recently installed Slackel 6.0.8 (Openbox version). It works well except that the selection of software is lightweight for my taste; for example, the default browser is Midori and Claws Mail is used for the e-mail program, whereas I mostly tend to use the more fully-featured Mozilla programs such as Firefox and Thunderbird. (Actually, Claws is more than adequate for me but I find it harder to set up than Thunderbird).

I also finally got round to installing Salix 14.2 (32-bit). It's working well but Salix now comes with XFce by default, and I'm missing the attractive sheaf of blue wallpapers the Mate version of 14.1 came with. It also has no pdf viewer (evince, my first choice, kept segfaulting in my system so I installed xpdf instead).

[Billtoo]

I like Dpup Stretch so well I thought I give the 64 bit Debian a try:

System: Host: Aceri3 Kernel: 4.9.0-1-amd64 x86_64 (64 bit) Desktop: Xfce 4.12.3
Distro: Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)
Machine: Device: desktop Mobo: Acer model: Aspire X3950 BIOS: American Megatrends v: P01-A3 date: 05/05/2010
CPU: Dual core Intel Core i3 540 (-HT-MCP-) speed/max: 1200/3067 MHz
Graphics: Card: Intel Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller
Display Server: X.Org 1.19.1 drivers: modesetting (unloaded: fbdev,vesa)
Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz, 1920x1080@60.00hz
GLX Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel Ironlake Desktop GLX Version: 2.1 Mesa 13.0.4
Network: Card: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller driver: r8169
Drives: HDD Total Size: 508.1GB (2.1% used)
Weather: Conditions: 41 F (5 C) - Overcast Time: February 21, 12:49 PM EST
Info: Processes: 170 Uptime: 1:14 Memory: 522.3/5836.7MB Client: Shell (bash) inxi: 2.3.5

I like this one too, I installed Kodi-17.0 and a few other
applications.
No problems so far.

[Colonel Panic]

I'm posting from Alienbase's excellent live spin of Slackware 14.2 (64-bit edition). It's working well and some of the more difficult sites which still rely in Flash to show animations are displaying well too.

(Not to mention the fact that networking sets itself up automatically and works with no trouble, unlike the installed version of 14.2 where I can't get netconfig to work at all).

[Colonel Panic]

I've now installed the latest (February 2017) version of Zenwalk 8. It's working well (including networking, which didn't work on recent editions of Zenwalk) and has the very latest version of LibreOffice and the beta version of Firefox 52.

It does though have a smoky dark blue/black theme in XFce by default, with transparent terminals, which mightn't be to everyone's taste. Credit to the Zenwalk devs for trying something bold and different though. Also, as I've found before in Zenwalk the spellchecker in LibreOffice doesn't work; I'm sure there's a fix for it, but many first time users simply wouldn't bother trying to find one.

[Colonel Panic]

Further update; I've taken a hint from a thread in LQ (Linux Questions) and, by using the command 'dhclient eth0', somehow managed to get networking operating in Slackware 14.2 (at least for the time being).

Trying to set up and configure networking manually in Slackware is seriously hard work though (apart from needing in-depth knowledge about how networking works in Linux that I don't have), and I'm glad that for the time being I've managed to avoid having to do it.

[nubc]

Has anybody tried the new (Sept 2016) Raspbian PIXEL OS for PC s and MAC? It can be run as a live DVD. The image is free for download.. Some commenters have pointed out the likelihood of a trademark dispute with Google over the use of the name PIXEL. In the latest version the old Epiphany browser has been replaced by Chromium, custom-built for Raspberry Pi.

PIXEL FOR PC AND MAC
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pixel-pc-mac/

[peebee]

Has anybody tried the new (Sept 2016) Raspbian PIXEL OS

see http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=109326

[nubc]

LXDE, ugh. Why wouldn't Raspberry devs use a light OS like Puppy instead of a huge Ubuntu-based OS as a base?

[jcoles]

I use VirtualBox to try out different distros. My host system is Linux Mint MATE.

I also like the other flavors of MINT. Ubuntu is generally good, except for Unity, which leaves me feeling boxed-in with no idea about the applications available to me (Menus are indispensable as an inventory of the available functionality.)

Distrowatch alerts me to new distros to try. Most don't last more than a day or two on my system. Some aren't even installable. There's a lot of awful stuff out there. It makes me appreciate well-designed distros that much more.

I have used Puppy releases on USB drives for recovery/rescue type purposes. Now, I'm taking another look at them because I notice the more responsive performance they provide. Too many distros, including Mint, slow the system down with eye-candy that I don't care about. When I have to wait for a menu to drop down, I lose patience. UI response should be blink-of-the-eye quick.

Playing with Slackopup today, I'm having some second thoughts due to the sheer awkwardness of its UI. I wanted to add Firefox to the auto-hide tray they provide at the left screen edge. Haven't figured it out yet. (Can anyone make sense of that Tray Configuration tool?) In MATE, this is trivially easy: right-click, Add to Panel.

[Colonel Panic]

I've just downloaded the latest version of Refracta (which is based on Devuan) and it's rapidly becoming one of my favourite distros. It's lightweight and runs from a CD and yet does pretty much everything the bigger and more demanding distros do.

[Colonel Panic]

I'm upgrading the 64-bit version of AntiX 16 to 16.1. For others here who use the same distro and are doing the same thing, there's some information you need to be aware of;

antix.freeforums.org/post50618.html

BTW, if anticapitalista's reading this; sorry but I reserve the right to install non-free software on his distro, especially if (as in the case of Softmaker Office 2016) I've actually paid for it. I daresay the free software's debate's been done elsewhere on here but that's my view anyway.

[mcewanw]

dCore-xenial. HowTo with screenshot of build:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=109859

[Moat]

Having a play with Exton Defender Fedora 25 - Cinnamon;

http://defender.exton.net/

Runs (surprisingly) really well from an 8 GB micro-SD card/USB adapter (w/persistence). Big .iso @ ~2.2 GB, fairly complete with the LibreOffice suite, Thunderbird, Firefox & Chrome. Yum Extender package manager works quite well (reminds me of Synaptic) and successfully installed a bunch of stuff (including GIMP and extra plugins).

Fedora + Cinnamon 3.2.8 is a nice combo... might keep this on the SD card as a second OS for this old dual-core Pentium E5400 desktop...

Bob

[Colonel Panic]

^^ That looks good (I like the desktop clock).

I've just installed SolydX (201701) and it's working well. It has an option to install both Flash and CSS on completing installation to your hard drive, an option I wish more distros had.

[Moat]

(I like the desktop clock).

Hi Colonel - that's cairo-clock (w/Radium clock face), installed from the Yum Extender package manager. Actually, all of the apps in the pic were in the default repos - MtPaint, Galculator, Gcolor2 - and TeeJee's Conky Manager was there as well (providing the conky in the lower right).

Bob

[Puppyt]

Windows 7 Professional >gak<

So I was recently given a Motion Computing CL900 slate /tablet: 2GB RAM, 1.5GHz Z670 Atom CPU, bluetooth keyboard, GPS - all very nice, and I'm really grateful. My usual plan is to debride the M$ OS of all but the essential software (ala Tiny7 etc), clean up and defrag muchly to provide a decent area on the hard drive to enable a dual boot with Puppy, or in this case a Tablet-focused Linux distro of some description. Somehow I couldn't get into the BIOS to check for boot ordering etc, to simplify distro testing on a SD card etc before squeezing it onto the 52GB HDD. Pressing the F2 key or touching the splash screen on startup doesn't do the deal for me. Still working on it - has been innumerous opportunities during restarts at abortive attempts to automatically "update" the "system". Perhaps there's an incantation I should be using...

Everything *was* working really nicely until I relented to the harping pop-ups that I needed updating for like, 2 years of protection for All That Is Good in the M$ Universe / Income Stream. I have been largely sheltered from M$ since jumping to Puppy before Vista became a "thing", but from my recent experience I simply cannot fathom that billions of M$ users (??) tolerate (and will until 2020) this level of service from their hard-earned. So many dead ends to get around the automatic "update" issues (finally found this instructional and working through it https://www.howtogeek.com/255435/how-to ... ce-rollup/). I haven't been using this OS - frankly, I feel that whatever is left of my sanity or intelligence has been used, and abused. I'm not currently writing from the CL900 - it says it has another 45 minutes to complete updates (read: another 3 wasted days). It is sitting over in the corner, glowering at me like a Monster Book of Monsters, teasing me with an infinite loop of "Searching for updates on this computer..." So I'm writing from my Trusty TahrPup 32 desktop, and feeling the stress slowly ebb away from my attempts at mastering the Dark Arts of M$.

Rant over

[Colonel Panic]

(I like the desktop clock).

Hi Colonel - that's cairo-clock (w/Radium clock face), installed from the Yum Extender package manager. Actually, all of the apps in the pic were in the default repos - MtPaint, Galculator, Gcolor2 - and TeeJee's Conky Manager was there as well (providing the conky in the lower right).

Bob

Thanks.

I've just installed Neptune 4.5.2 and upgraded it to the latest release (4.5.3), and as usual it's a good Debian-based distro, albeit one with systemd (so not for people who want to avoid the latter).

[Retro1989]

My main distro is actually Linux mint 18 mate and i have been using mint since version 11, usually prefering to stick on the LTS editions.
I use puppy on my media centre box as its only low end with 1 700mhz P3 CPU and 512mb RAM

[nitehawk]

Still using MX-15 (with constant upgrades). Works perfectly. Not a problem in months and months, and MONTHS. Recently installed Refracta Linux (sharing the same hard drive on main computer). Put Refracta on other, older computer. Very good results! MX is totally great for a higher-powered computer,..(really flies)....and Refracta works so well on older (low-powered) computers. Both are just really great (non-System-d) Debian based OS for any computer. Used to love Vector Linux, (Slackware-based)...but they seem to have gone by the wayside lately. So impressed by Refracta, though,....(and MX has no equal, in my book).