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sickpig · #2881 Post by **sickpig** » Thu 24 Jan 2019, 04:36

what i did in my quest for a light weight, rock solid stable and lightning fast os is as follows:

got debian cd lxde around 600 mb
intel wifi driver

installed it
did not use lxde though

used openbox with xfce panel
not the entire xfce DE with its bloated WM
just installed xfce-panel and xfce-goodies, thats all u need to get a functional panel with good plugins for battery, volume, notes etc.

login to just openbox and add xfce-panel to autostart

base os ram under 200 mb = check
stable os = check
choice of packages = u cant beat sheer number of packages in debian apt-get = check
lightning fast = check
quick boot = check

and most important of all no video tearing in netflix - such a relief

sickpig · #2882 Post by **sickpig** » Thu 24 Jan 2019, 04:42

nitehawk wrote:
sickpig wrote:stumbled across q4os the other day
its most notable feature - plays tear free videos ootb on my system.
i have tried various distros but there is video tearing across all
But no such issue in q4os. it seems to be most suited for my hardware for playing netflix at the moment.
also with lxde it isn't resource hungry at all
Do you have any trouble getting wifi to work in Q40s? I put it on a little old laptop I put together (had a couple of HP Pavilion DV2000, and stuck a good screen on one with cracked screen but good motherboard, etc. etc.). Anyhow,...Trinity desktop did OK setting up wifi,...but can't get LXQT to work. The Trinity desktop is nice and quick on old laptops, though. I really prefer LXQT desktop,...but so far,...no wifi.

EDIT: oh nevermind,...seems that even in the Trinity desktop on Q4os,..wifi won't work for me on these old laptops. No problem at all connecting with a Puppy (Xenial 7.0.1).
I really like the idea of Q4os, though. Nice small Debian distro that works on older stuff (if I could only get the wifi going).
I'm going to go look for another small distro (besides Antix) to slap on and see what happens. The distro HAS to fit on a CD, though (this old laptop won't do DVDs or USB boots).

no mate, q4 detected my wifi adapter ootb

nitehawk · #2883 Post by **nitehawk** » Sat 26 Jan 2019, 21:50

sickpig wrote: no mate, q4 detected my wifi adapter ootb

Well,..Busenlabs seems to be the right fit for that particular laptop. Works like a charm. You're right about small Debian distros...light and fast with all that software! Openbox will take a learning curve for me (haven't used it in a long time, since CrunchBang).
I'm beginning to figure out how to edit the menu, though. Editing the Openbox menu seems to be the only thing I really need to do with Busenlabs,...everything else works just fine the way it is.

Colonel Panic · #2884 Post by **Colonel Panic** » Sun 27 Jan 2019, 09:16

nitehawk wrote:
sickpig wrote: no mate, q4 detected my wifi adapter ootb
Well,..Busenlabs seems to be the right fit for that particular laptop. Works like a charm. You're right about small Debian distros...light and fast with all that software! Openbox will take a learning curve for me (haven't used it in a long time, since CrunchBang).
I'm beginning to figure out how to edit the menu, though. Editing the Openbox menu seems to be the only thing I really need to do with Bunsenlabs,...everything else works just fine the way it is.

This might help, nitie;

http://obmenu.sourceforge.net/

When I'm in CrunchBang (which is a close relative of Bunsen), I tend to use DMenu for launching everything; I think it's accessed by Alt-F3. It's much easier than editing the menu file directly.

Same with using Openbox in straight *Debian; I keep just a handful of programs such as gkrellm, spacefm and tint2 on the Openbox menu file and access the rest through dmenu.

I also like Fluxbox, although it's not as advanced as Openbox, because the configuration files are text files and much easier to edit by hand than Openbox ones are.

*And Devuan too (which I'm using now).

nitehawk · #2885 Post by **nitehawk** » Sun 27 Jan 2019, 20:24

Colonel Panic wrote:
This might help, nitie;

http://obmenu.sourceforge.net/

When I'm in CrunchBang (which is a close relative of Bunsen), I tend to use DMenu for launching everything; I think it's accessed by Alt-F3. It's much easier than editing the menu file directly.

Same with using Openbox in straight *Debian; I keep just a handful of programs such as gkrellm, spacefm and tint2 on the Openbox menu file and access the rest through dmenu.

I also like Fluxbox, although it's not as advanced as Openbox, because the configuration files are text files and much easier to edit by hand than Openbox ones are.

*And Devuan too (which I'm using now).

Yes, that is pretty helpful! I have been kind of floundering around trying to figure things out on my own. Having some info could sure help. Also,...I'll look into that DMenu.
Thanks

Colonel Panic · #2886 Post by **Colonel Panic** » Sun 27 Jan 2019, 20:45

nitehawk wrote:
Colonel Panic wrote:
This might help, nitie;

http://obmenu.sourceforge.net/

When I'm in CrunchBang (which is a close relative of Bunsen), I tend to use DMenu for launching everything; I think it's accessed by Alt-F3. It's much easier than editing the menu file directly.

Same with using Openbox in straight *Debian; I keep just a handful of programs such as gkrellm, spacefm and tint2 on the Openbox menu file and access the rest through dmenu.

I also like Fluxbox, although it's not as advanced as Openbox, because the configuration files are text files and much easier to edit by hand than Openbox ones are.

*And Devuan too (which I'm using now).
Yes, that is pretty helpful! I have been kind of floundering around trying to figure things out on my own. Having some info could sure help. Also,...I'll look into that DMenu.
Thanks

You're welcome! There's also a forum that might help;

https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/

I really wouldn't be without dmenu now, particularly with the type of lightweight distros I use these days; it will find programs from consecutive letters in the name even if the program's name doesn't start with those letters, which is invaluable if you're not quite sure what the program is called exactly.

Both Helium and CrunchBang++ come with it installed as standard so you won't need to install it yourself. It's listed as Alt Menu on the right, under "Shortcut Keys".

rufwoof · #2887 Post by **rufwoof** » Mon 28 Jan 2019, 01:17

A couple of recent security updates and a reliability update showing for OpenBSD https://www.openbsd.org/errata64.html ... I track current so updated ... 20 minute job to download the latest 10MB bsd.rd ramdisk ... boot and run through the cli update process, reboot and pkg_add -u to update all packages. Seemed quicker after a 12 hour WoofE (EasyOS) build that I ran through today (Ubuntu Beaver).

nitehawk · #2888 Post by **nitehawk** » Wed 30 Jan 2019, 21:38

Does anyone have experience with Connochaetos Linux?
It's based on 14.2 Slackware & Salix (that's all I know). I put BusenLabs Linux on my
HP Pavilion dv2000 laptop (and it is doing very well).
Now,...I have become the proud owner of a REAL OLDIE ...an
HP Pavilion ze4300. Think it has about 1gb ram, and 50gb hard drive,..running
Windows XP. I wanted Slackware,...but am fresh out of DVDs, and even Salix
is too big now for a CD. Laptop won't boot off of USB (I think).
Anyhow,...came across Connochaetos Linux, but don't have any experience
with it. Going to give it a try and see.

EDIT: OK,...so far I have it installed. Installer was almost exactly like Slackware. Looks very nice and clean when booted (uses Icewm). But it won't find my wifi. Otherwise,...it's just a nice, clean Slackware distro. If I can get the wifi going, I'll keep in on that old laptop. Otherwise, it's back to the drawing board (Antix might do well on this one).

Colonel Panic · #2889 Post by **Colonel Panic** » Thu 31 Jan 2019, 04:49

nitehawk wrote:Does anyone have experience with Connochaetos Linux?
It's based on 14.2 Slackware & Salix (that's all I know). I put BusenLabs Linux on my
HP Pavilion dv2000 laptop (and it is doing very well).
Now,...I have become the proud owner of a REAL OLDIE ...an
HP Pavilion ze4300. Think it has about 1gb ram, and 50gb hard drive,..running
Windows XP. I wanted Slackware,...but am fresh out of DVDs, and even Salix
is too big now for a CD. Laptop won't boot off of USB (I think).
Anyhow,...came across Connochaetos Linux, but don't have any experience
with it. Going to give it a try and see.

EDIT: OK,...so far I have it installed. Installer was almost exactly like Slackware. Looks very nice and clean when booted (uses Icewm). But it won't find my wifi. Otherwise,...it's just a nice, clean Slackware distro. If I can get the wifi going, I'll keep in on that old laptop. Otherwise, it's back to the drawing board (Antix might do well on this one).

Hi again nitie,

I used it a while back, but found I had to launch any application I wanted to use by typing its name in a terminal; you may be luckier. It did work though, after a fashion. It's part of the Free Software Foundation (FOSS) so they frown on your using closed source software like Opera (as I found from experience on their forum), although Opera 12 does work well on it.

Another thing I found (again, this is just my experience) was that I couldn't boot it from GRUB; it either booted from its own boot manager (LILO) or not at all.

P.S. As far as I know it's no longer being developed because not enough people were donating.

P.P.S. I've just followed your example and installed Bunsen Helium! It's working well but I'm still not keen on the rather sombre grey - blue- black default theme; maybe I'll change it later.

[EDIT: I've not only changed it but I switched to fluxbox as the window manager and added a few themes from AntiX;

musher0 · #2890 Post by **musher0** » Thu 31 Jan 2019, 07:00

Hi, all.

Has anybody tried MIYO, a Devuan derivative?

TIA.

Colonel Panic · #2891 Post by **Colonel Panic** » Thu 31 Jan 2019, 10:48

musher0 wrote:Hi, all.

Has anybody tried MIYO, a Devuan derivative?

TIA.

Hi musher,

Yes, briefly about a year ago. It looked good but I wasn't able to set up internet access on it, so I didn't stick with it for long.

norgo · #2892 Post by **norgo** » Mon 18 Feb 2019, 23:16

ArchLinux (AArch64) and LXQt 0.14.0 on Raspberry Pi3

I have to say a hard fight

but I like LXQt

Colonel Panic · #2893 Post by **Colonel Panic** » Fri 22 Feb 2019, 07:44

I've just installed OpenSUSE 15.1 Beta. It's working well except that I've so far been unable to play "on-page" videos on sites like WTA and Twitter.

rufwoof · #2894 Post by **rufwoof** » Thu 28 Feb 2019, 20:01

OpenBSD 6.5

Colonel Panic · #2895 Post by **Colonel Panic** » Mon 04 Mar 2019, 23:07

I've just upgraded Pardus to the new version (17.5), and it's working well;

wiak · #2896 Post by **wiak** » Thu 14 Mar 2019, 23:49

https://voidlinux.org/

I'm preparing to install this one for test run. I like the idea of it being an independent build with it's own repo but with easy to create new package recipes.

musher0 · #2897 Post by **musher0** » Fri 15 Mar 2019, 00:25

Colonel Panic wrote:
musher0 wrote:Hi, all.

Has anybody tried MIYO, a Devuan derivative?

TIA.
Hi musher,

Yes, briefly about a year ago. It looked good but I wasn't able to set up internet access on it, so I didn't stick with it for long.

No go, then.

Thanks, Col. Panic.

darry19662018 · #2898 Post by **darry19662018** » Fri 15 Mar 2019, 02:06

musher0 wrote:Hi, all.

Has anybody tried MIYO, a Devuan derivative?

TIA.

Yes I have Musher and it is a great distro with openbox and awesome desktops available for 32bit machines and there maybe 64 bit editions.

Devuan community is a rather nice https://dev1galaxy.org/

You will probably have to install .deb for your wireless otherwise a great building block. I have ASCII Awesome version installed on a hard drive which I use with my Dell D620.

wiak · #2899 Post by **wiak** » Sun 17 Mar 2019, 06:21

Finally...

I installed void linux to a 8GB usb stick using their lxde iso (using on my 2008 core-2 duo HP Elitebook 2530P 2GB RAM machine):

https://a-hel-fi.m.voidlinux.org/live/c ... 1-lxde.iso

After downloading above, wrote it (as root user) to my usb stick (which was being recognised as device /dev/sdb) via command. IMPORTANT to note well if you do this that you use the correct /dev/sdx location of your own usb stick...:

Code: Select all

dd bs=4M if=void-live-x86_64-20170220-lxde.iso  of=/dev/sdb  && sync

That included code to boot the usb stick onto usb stick itself (will work on grub4dos via my hard-disk menu.lst later). So I then booted that live version of void linux from my usb.

Next problem was that I use wifi from my laptop to internet (no ethernet cable), so had to work out how to connect the running live voidlinux to my wifi... Anyway, no user-friendly network manager by default (though choice of three such network managers becomes available for download once properly installed), but dhcpcd and wpa_supplicant programs are available for commandline use. So initial connection of wifi (when using as live distro) not so easy for those not familiar with commandline (and more), but proved okay once I read up on required commands.

Voidlinux does not use systemd nor standard sysvinit, but instead uses 'runit', but that was interesting... Basically, I just followed the many instructions/commands required for setting wifi connection up as given on voidlinux Wiki page here:

https://wiki.voidlinux.org/Network_Conf ... .28DHCP.29

for dhcpcd stuff for my wifi interface (named wls1), followed by wpa_supplicant stuff, here:

https://wiki.voidlinux.org/Network_Conf ... default.29

for the case of my wifi connection which uses WPA-PSK:

https://wiki.voidlinux.org/Network_Conf ... ersonal.29

Just to increase the chance I understood what I was doing, I also read up on runit here (but didn't really need to do that):

https://wiki.voidlinux.org/Runit

So, yeah, at this stage, getting it working directly from the usb live install was not for the faint of heart...

But here I am posting from Void Linux LXDE x86_64 live iso, via wifi connection, following the above... and I have to say that is extremely interesting/impressive distribution with an equally impressive/interesting package manager (XBPS) that I'm planning to learn more about now (though not a lot of apps pre-installed - Firefox, pcmanfm, lxterminal and more are though; iso size is medium big, but that seems to me to be cos lots of firmware included and iso contents maybe could be squashed more vigorously for download purposes - no big deal there):

https://wiki.voidlinux.org/XBPS
https://wiki.voidlinux.org/Rosetta_stone
@sc0ttman: I imagine you might be interested in taking a look at the above too (because of its pkgmanager) if you haven't already done so.

I could see me adopting Void Linux, for my own future linux dev plaything/interest distro (whilst keeping Pups and Dogs for the rest of my family distributions).

By the way, I installed scrot from void package repositories for making attached screenshot. The commands I used were (first one to sync the repository database to local machine I think...). I found that the scrot dependencies (e.g. giblib1) were automatically fetched... yeah...:

Code: Select all

sudo xbps-install -S
sudo xbps-install scrot

I also installed mtpaint to quickly scale the screenshot.

Code: Select all

sudo xbps-install mtpaint

Whist still using this as a frugal usb install, I intend installing by void instructions to own partition - I guess that is a full install. I have no idea at this stage how to get persistence of changes for frugal live installs anyway, which doesn't imply it couldn't be done - I just don't know enough.

Anyway, been using this all day. Solid as a rock; more solid than anything else I've been using recently actually, so I'm going to work with this one a lot more now. My advice is not to be put off by initial difficulties or not being your usual frugal install experience - Void Linux has a lot going for it above all that - especially, I feel, that XBPS package manager and its amazing flexibility.

wiak

EDIT: See my post below for continuation to full hard drive install:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 26#1023126

Colonel Panic · #2900 Post by **Colonel Panic** » Sun 17 Mar 2019, 18:19

I've just installed the latest version of ELive, a Debian-based distro which uses Enlightenment 17 as its window manager. I was disappointed to find that it didn't load Enlightenment properly when I booted it up, but I installed Openbox and it's working fine now with that instead.

The software is quite old (Firefox 52 and LibreOffice 4.3.3.2), but I like Terminator, Enlightenment's terminal with its neon flashing cursor, and the distro seems quite economical on resources. It also uses zsh as its shell, which is a refreshing change from the near-ubiquitous bash.

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