I got rid of all the utilities that didn't need to be on there with some creative exclusions, so that cleaned up a lot.

Holy cow has it ever been a day, I don't know how y'all that do this for a living do it, just grateful that you do!

After tons of adding functions of various types I finally have it nailed down 99.99%. Had to add some Mate-specific exclusions along with others to get rid of the simple utilities that are self-explanatory, Openbox won't have those issues but I imagine if someone tried this with another DE that more exclusions would have to be added. Scraper script is pretty complex now, and takes quite a while to run, it's only a one-time run needed for this, honestly I could have just typed out the database in short order, but that's not the point of this exercise.

End goal is to integrate this with the release notes/manual I do in Vuu-do, and provide an all-in-one help app for folks brand new to linux to get oriented quickly.

Still needs a little work on text-formatting, i'm tempted to try and see if parallel-processing can speed up the scraper script, but that's low priority since it only needs to run once, just considering it for the experience and furthering my knowledge-base.

If anybody is interested let me know and i'll post up the two scripts, you'll have to compile the C yourself but that's super-easy and only takes a few seconds, just need GCC and libgtk3-dev.

I've got a Canon Pixma from about 8 years back, all I had to do was download a driverpack from canon, extract the PPD for my machine and put it in the right place. I think those drivers are now actually onboard one of the driver packages in the repo.

Thanks guys!

Yeah Yad + shellscript was my first instinct as it's my go-to for so many things, but just couldn't get it to look and act right. Also tried using webkit to make a little browser basically as i've had some luck on another app doing that and python for the rest, but still no luck. Finally used C and just plain ol gtk and that worked insanely well and fast for the GUI, took a fair amount of tries but i'm happy with it. The separate scraper script is done in bash.

Got to looking at yad while trying to work that out, fired up the yad-icon-browser which was super-close to what I wanted, and I always figured since it came packaged with yad that it was made with yad, lol, nope. Binary file written in C so I really don't understand why it's packaged with yad as there is almost no yad in it whatsoever. But....

The source code for it is very small, and it was just a matter of stripping out a lot of it that I didn't need, then re-writing it a bit to scrape a text file for content rather than the icons. I'm using that text file created by the scraper script instead of sqlite for a database. One of the goals here was to NOT have to install extra depends for this over and above what's typically on a basic system, keeping it simple, small, and fast and doing one job well.

Still need to fine-tune the scraper script, it's missing the description portion in about 10% of the apps, mainly ones with weird names for their .desktop files instead of straightforward ones, like Handbrake ought to be handbrake.desktop, but instead it's "fr.handbrake.ghb.desktop" and Hexchat is "io.github.hexchat.desktop", somehow that's defeating me, currently trying some new mods to the script.

Okay, if it were me, my first step would be to look at the apt history via synaptic in my case (also a copy in root's home usually), and note what packages were updated, then figure out which one did it. Specifically was there an update of UDisks?

Maybe a setting in the file manager too, most have some adjustable settings for what to do with external media.

/usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.UDisks2.policy  is where the permissions for devices are, this is most likely culprit in my experience.

ETA: Or a messed up stick that has the wrong permissions. Have had that before, but mostly with sd cards.

Amen.

I do love solving problems with small shell-scripts, they may be small but they are powerful as hell.

^^^ That's incredibly kind my friend, i'll have to think about that one.

Unfortunately I seem to have come down with the flu late last week, and it's still hammering me really hard, so all my projects are on hold for the moment as I barely have the energy to type.

Haven't been this sick since I had pneumonia 25 years ago.

I'm going by your first post in which you stated that you were able to go into BIOS and disable UEFI.

Regardless of efi, an MBR iso should still boot up as a livecd, and can be installed on an efi system by simply not installing grub when you install from the live system. You'll still need to update grub on whatever partition controls it.

It may be that you need additional firmware over and above what is provided in standard Devuan, that's always a possibility.

Please keep in mind that I am not a dev, just a user. So this is my best guesses. RRQ is probably who you need.

So at the link I sent you, there are also my own projects, Openbox and Mate, and those iso's contain a LOT of firmware, additional xorg packages, microcode and more, to help insure that they boot and work out of the box. Possibly one might help you, not trying to toot my own horn here, it's just that Devuan in fact is a "parent" distro from the get-go, and so there is a lot of software that it does not include by default that may be required for your machine. Devuan rightly assumes that anyone using them for a base will include such packages in their own distros and projects.

Why use anything but dd? I don't know, if you're confident with it then go for it, I base my advice on the idea that some folks may not be comfortable with such things, so I try to offer an easy to use GUI solution.

^^Oh that part I know already, I misspoke. What I meant to say was I wonder if it will be a software issue going forward if I used a non-uefi system to start with if the board will support it?

Handling multiple client requests might indeed be the logic behind the SSD rec, though I seriously don't expect a lot of traffic...i'm flexible though, if we do go with an HDD instead of an SSD for the OS and it's not up to the task we can swap it out.

The RAID idea for the OS drive is compelling, have to think about that one a bit, my first instinct (and what I do at home) is roll up a copy using Refracta Snapshot, then if anything craps out it's just a 10 minute install to get back up and running.

Yeah I haven't put together a website in years, not looking forward to that part, but that will be a few months from now anyway, first priority is getting it set up and serving. I do have some friends though in that field that might help me out when it's time. I really miss the old Yahoo SiteBuilder to be honest, it was actually a great quick WYSIWYG editor for throwing up sites fast.