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#651 DIY » An idea for 32-bit system for old machines, input requested » 2025-04-09 17:02:18
- greenjeans
- Replies: 12
So don't laugh at the ignorance of this ol coot, but I have an idea, and likely not a new one as i'm sure somebody is probably already doing something similar.
Thinking of making a 32 bit iso for older machines, as it seems 32 is going away soon. But I don't want to use modern/current 32 bit kernels and software for the most part. The problem is the new stuff is very heavy, and requires a lot more ram than it used to.
It's not an issue to use older software if it works, the only problem area is in the browser, as older versions of browsers suffer in the area of functionality (and security). But appimages are a solution for that, I have one working right now on a 2005 machine, that's using software from the archive repo for Jessie, and an appimage of FF.
But there is a potential security issue in using software that old, so my thought on dealing with that is, to make a system that uses a conventional filesystem for everything below /home, and a single read-only squashfs file for everything above it. That way even if a user screwed up while online and downloaded something bad, it wouldn't be able to change any system files.
I guess simply encrypting the whole file system would accomplish basically the same thing, but encryption comes with it's own set of challenges.
The kernel and all the rest from jessie in my old 32 bit iso, idles at about 98 mb of ram, so much lighter than current stuff, this is the crux of the matter, making it work on machines with only 512 mb of installed ram.
I just really don't know what's the best way, or if I can even do what I described above on just one partition without making separate ones for /home and for /.
Any input very welcome!
#652 Re: Documentation » How to: Devuan 5 Daedalus an pipewire » 2025-04-09 14:39:42
Well i'm not a ninja at this stuff like the devs and many of the members here, i'm just an ol redneck with a keyboard.
But it seems to me, that if all the people who have issues with pipewire and pulse over the years, got together and said to hell with soundservers, let's just improve ALSA itself and give it nice native soundserving functions with a nice GUI to configure it....that might be a better solution?
FYI in excalibur, there are some new lines in the ALSA 90-alsa-restore-rules in /etc/udev/rules.d that I don't quite understand, and are doing nothing that I can see except throwing up error messages in boot. This may be an issue going forward. I can get rid of the errors and get it working normally by replacing or modding that file to use the daedalus version.
#653 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! *New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18*!! » 2025-04-09 01:10:50
Updated Vuu-do mate-mini uploaded.
Lots of updates once again, and a ton of upgrades/fixes/tweaks from the last two
weeks of work. Significant changes in some things, desktop icons are re-enabled,
conky updated and moved, wallpaper modded. It now has a desktop folder again and
functions as you'd expect Mate to do normally. Too many things to list! This is
very nice, but as always, work is ongoing and some of the fixes in this version
came on the fly, been a really productive couple of weeks. Give it a try, it's the lighter-weight Mate. 
#654 Re: Documentation » How to: Devuan 5 Daedalus an pipewire » 2025-04-08 14:08:02
Creating yet another respin 3 people might use just for this is a ridiculous misdirection of effort.
Dang Steve, you're a mite hard to understand, you've been arguing vehemently the importance of whatever it is you're arguing about, but then in the above sentence you freely admit it may be important to like 3 people.
C'mon, jump in there and fix some stuff, it will make you feel better, i've been doing it for days now, even fixing tiny things gives me a nice feeling of accomplishment.
Sorry you didn't like my browser experiment, but it IS in fact a browser as you can browse the web with it and 95% of everything works, even video. I'm working on that as a single-purpose frontend to some web-based things like Libera-chat's web interface.
#655 Re: Documentation » How to: Devuan 5 Daedalus an pipewire » 2025-04-08 00:34:11
wish the code to talk ratio was better tho...
Too much code is like too many cooks in the kitchen. Bottom line is Devuan doesn't require Pulse or Pipe or apulse or anything else for sound. Everything 99.99% of users want can be done with ALSA. Including bluetooth. I can stream video and audio just fine to my TV without a "sound server".
But here's some code just for ***** and giggles:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import gi
gi.require_version("Gtk", "3.0")
gi.require_version("WebKit2", "4.1")
from gi.repository import Gtk, WebKit2
class MiniBrowser:
def __init__(self, homepage):
# Store the homepage
self.homepage = homepage
# Set up the main window
self.window = Gtk.Window()
self.window.set_default_size(800, 600)
self.window.connect("destroy", Gtk.main_quit)
# Create a WebView (the browser engine)
self.webview = WebKit2.WebView()
self.webview.load_uri(self.homepage)
# Handle link clicks (just let Webkit do its thing)
self.webview.connect("decide-policy", self.on_policy)
# Create navigation buttons
self.back_button = Gtk.Button(label="Back")
self.forward_button = Gtk.Button(label="Forward")
self.home_button = Gtk.Button(label="Home")
# Connect buttons to their functions
self.back_button.connect("clicked", self.go_back)
self.forward_button.connect("clicked", self.go_forward)
self.home_button.connect("clicked", self.go_home)
# Create a horizontal box for the navigation bar
nav_bar = Gtk.Box(orientation=Gtk.Orientation.HORIZONTAL, spacing=5)
nav_bar.pack_start(self.back_button, False, False, 0)
nav_bar.pack_start(self.forward_button, False, False, 0)
nav_bar.pack_start(self.home_button, False, False, 0)
# Create a vertical box to hold nav bar and webview
main_box = Gtk.Box(orientation=Gtk.Orientation.VERTICAL, spacing=5)
main_box.pack_start(nav_bar, False, False, 0)
main_box.pack_start(self.webview, True, True, 0)
# Add the main box to the window and show
self.window.add(main_box)
self.window.show_all()
def on_policy(self, webview, decision, decision_type):
# Allow navigation (link clicks)
return False # False means "proceed"
def go_back(self, button):
if self.webview.can_go_back():
self.webview.go_back()
def go_forward(self, button):
if self.webview.can_go_forward():
self.webview.go_forward()
def go_home(self, button):
self.webview.load_uri(self.homepage)
if __name__ == "__main__":
homepage = "https://dev1galaxy.org"
browser = MiniBrowser(homepage)
Gtk.main()
# In addition to the libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0 and libjavascriptcoregtk-4.1-0
# packages that come when you install Mate, you will further need these:
# gir1.2-javascriptcoregtk-4.1 (2.48.0-1~deb12u1)
# gir1.2-soup-3.0 (3.2.2-2)
# gir1.2-webkit2-4.1 (2.48.0-1~deb12u1)That's a working browser that will allow you to browse, login, and post to this forum.
#656 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! *New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18*!! » 2025-04-07 23:17:26
New versions of the Openbox max and mini uploaded, been a crazy weekend of bug-hunting and
tweaking everything to work better, I hate doing band-aids and I had to do one briefly,
but now all that is sorted and everything is working even more smoothly than before.
Lots of tiny fixes that you'd probably never notice, and some that you would.
Now that I have the OB versions in a much better place, it's time to work on the
mate-mini which i've neglected for a couple of weeks while I worked on everything
else. Going to apply all the updates and improvements of this last couple weeks,
but i'm also making some very noticeable changes, mainly re-enabling of desktop
icons and moving conky display to the right side. I myself don't use desktop shortcuts,
but I understand that some folks do, and may choose Mate in the first place for those
kinds of convenience. So i'm going to depart from policy and make the changes.
#657 Re: Documentation » How to: Devuan 5 Daedalus an pipewire » 2025-04-06 16:04:22
@debdog, you're right of course, signal-to-noise ratio is starting to deteriorate. I have more I could say, but am standing down now.
#658 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » [SOLVED] Today's upgrade update-alternatives warning » 2025-04-06 16:01:50
Did that update yesterday, but I used Synaptic so didn't see all the output. But it worked fine and nothing is broken in /etc/alternatives.
Could it be because you updated the lzma package(s) for two different arches? That might cause some confusion.
#659 Re: Documentation » How to: Devuan 5 Daedalus an pipewire » 2025-04-05 16:03:18
And not for nothing, but by the time wayland actually starts working properly out-of-the-box there will likely also be an audio solution that does so as well...maybe...Pulse still sucks after all these years, and wayland fails whereas X11 is still chugging along, mature and robust and working even on 20 year old hardware.
#660 Re: Documentation » How to: Devuan 5 Daedalus an pipewire » 2025-04-05 15:47:04
I'm with Ralph on this one. Really not Devuan's job as it is meant to be a source for distributions, not one in of itself though it does provide working systems.
IMO it's the derivatives and their devs who should be doing that sort of customization based upon what their vision is for use-case-scenario for their distro.
Like how default Devuan only provides basic free firmware as-shipped, leaving it up to users and devs to decide what they want to add.
Please feel free to roll up your own distro with fixes for the issues you mentioned Steve, i'll be the first one to download, test, and congratulate you (and also steal any tasty bits of code you come up with, lol).
#661 Re: Other Issues » Preliminary excalibur desktop-live isos need testing » 2025-04-05 14:43:54
Off-topic= man if I had a dollar for every time in the last 15 years that old-schoolers suggested I add mc to my iso's, I could buy a motorcycle at least, lol.
Yeah that desktop-base package has it's hooks in deep, I just finally got rid of the last of it yesterday by going scorched earth.
XFCE seems to be very complex in it's theme requirements.
Downloading the new iso now for testing.
I gotta be honest here, I think using Mate as the default DE would be better and easier by far than XFCE.
#662 Re: Documentation » How to: Devuan 5 Daedalus an pipewire » 2025-04-05 03:59:41
Greenjeans<<using nothing but ALSA and eating popcorn watching people fret over PW and PA while I listen to music.
#663 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! *New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18*!! » 2025-04-05 03:54:41
New Openbox 5.03 versions uploaded, mini and max.
A couple dozen updates including a base-files update. Many improvements and bug-fixes
including some long-standing issues, fixed errors and updated some programs with
some nice cosmetic fixes, way too many things to list.
I did some nice work on these, we're getting better with each iso and these are especially
nice as i'm narrowing down the little things and getting them in order. Lots of changes that
you wouldn't notice normally, but would if I didn't fix them, and got rid of a lot of terminal errors
that didn't affect function but added to error files.
#664 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Devuan 6 (excalibur) mate testing iso uploaded » 2025-04-03 17:09:13
As much as I hate bloat, and I think everybody understands the lengths I go to to be rid of it, it's actually pretty understandable when you think about it.
Take for instance the kernel itself, it now has to support 20+ years of widely varied and increasingly complex hardware, it's pretty amazing that it can even do so. And so many other programs have to do some of that too.
But yeah, whole lotta superfluous code out there, for myself I keep looking for ways to slim it down, a small script that ties a couple things together instead of installing one or more additional packages to do it, things like that, trying to solve issues using what I already have onboard as opposed to immediately looking to apt to solve it for me.
#665 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Devuan 6 (excalibur) mate testing iso uploaded » 2025-04-02 16:15:31
Oh they've gotten a LOT better over the years, these days most SVG's are simple and just a few K in size, 10 years ago though there were a lot of them multiple MB's in size. Now there's just a few. And I imagine in a modern machine with 4 or more CPU's, nice graphics cards and tons of fast ram that it's not an issue. But on older machines like mine (2012 model and low-spec even for that time) the difference is very noticeable.
#666 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Devuan 6 (excalibur) mate testing iso uploaded » 2025-04-01 15:33:55
Glad you like it my friend! But no credit to me on this one, that's all Devuan right there. But yeah, for one thing the mini's are always faster from the get go, and that one is not the whole Mate metapackage, just the core and some extra utilities.
I have noticed in testing, that the Excalibur-based stuff seems very snappy and quick compared to current, really looking forward to seeing how it all performs once declared stable. I think Mate itself has made some improvements too.
One quick tip: The Mate menu is usually the first thing to feel sluggish, Mate does cache icon images, but for some reason still tries to re-size SVG's every time you open the menu, so if you have any large ones being used for menu icons for certain programs, it gets glitchy.
Worst offender is still Handbrake with a 3 mb SVG, really messes up that menu, I make PNG's in proper sizes for it on my own systems and get rid of the SVG.
Most SVG's these days though have gotten a lot better and by that I mean much smaller.
#667 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do linux version 1.09 available now! » 2025-03-28 15:31:35
Just re-habbed a 20 year old laptop with the 1.09 ob-max iso. 2005 model HP dv9000 series, Turion 64 chip, 1 gig of ram. I didn't even have to use proprietary drivers for the Nvidia graphics chip, the nouveau driver works fine. And it runs the appimage of Firefox ESR just fine though you can't have too many tabs open, modern browsers really eat up the ram.
Many thanks to the Devuan devs for keeping the archive repo alive, it's pretty amazing that it can support hardware that's 10 years older than Devuan itself. Kudos!
#668 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! *New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18*!! » 2025-03-28 15:21:44
Just uploaded newly updated versions of all the 5.03's.
Lots of updates got pushed the last few days including some security related. I
have now gotten the theme i've been working on all along looking nice enough that
i've named it and pushed out some of the old stuff. Ice-Breaker, for Mate and
Openbox. Added some more mods and tweaked some colors and also did some work with
the icon set so it's looking better too. I also made some small changes in the OB
rotate and re-size scripts and the .desktop files to add support for webp, heic,
and avif image formats. So those will all work with the various right-click options
for images now. Also some more small cosmetic changes in a couple of programs.
#669 Re: Off-topic » curated pico-distributions (aka curated workflows) » 2025-03-27 14:05:25
(ps: bunsen laptop seem cool).
The BunsenLabs crew are great folks, they've helped me out several times lately, they're doing some cool innovative things over there.
#670 Re: Installation » Google search for "after devuan migration no inittab or inittab.d"??? » 2025-03-27 13:59:19
I have no inittab.d either. I'm fine with that.
I have found that the less stuff I have on my machine that ends with a "d", the better it runs, go figure.
#671 Re: Other Issues » Preliminary excalibur desktop-live isos need testing » 2025-03-25 17:16:39
One way is to add "1" (no quotes) to the cmdline (boot menu). Enter root password "toor" then you can run nano. That done, enter "init 2" to continue normal boot.
Appreciate that dzz, adding that to my cheatsheet (i'm getting old so I gotta write things down these days, lol).
#672 Re: Other Issues » Preliminary excalibur desktop-live isos need testing » 2025-03-24 19:24:12
Just noticed in the file I mentioned above /etc/xdg/xfce4/panel/default.xml-devuan-sapphire, that at the top part of the file it gives out plugin-ids from 1-22,
and in the bottom section it defines those plugin-ids but there is no definition for 7 it just skips from 6 to 8, and that's right about where it hangs up in the process, number 7 would be in the middle of the top panel somewhere and that's where it stops loading for me and gives the error message.
So maybe it tries to load a 7, can't find it and doesn't know what to call it but "(null)", and just knows it doesn't work so halts the process?
EDIT: so in the user session I edited that file, and took out the plugin-id line at the top for number 7 and saved, then logged out and logged in as root for the first time in this session, and there was no error.
EDIT2: repeated that procedure above and again no error. Need a way to edit that file before it loads user to be able to test on user account, not sure how to do that during live-boot-up. the deepsea xml in that folder also has the same issue.
Can you get into a tty from the live-session grub screen and edit with nano?
#673 Re: Other Issues » Preliminary excalibur desktop-live isos need testing » 2025-03-24 17:36:39
In live session now of the March version, got the same error screen. Hitting "quit" turns off the top panel and I get no panels. Hitting "remove" gets me both panels.
Poking around now.
In /etc/xdg/xfce4/panel/default.xml-devuan-sapphire between line 104 and 105 does it need another </property> to close 103-104, i'm not skilled at xml, but looks like the closing tag at 105 is actually the closing tag for line 49 and 103-104 doesn't have one.
Bunch of panel errors in .xsession-errors, also some errors about the monitor and various _NET_CURRENT_DESKTOP errors.
Noted that it's only on first log-in to root or user account that I get the error, after that it's smooth sailing logging back on to either account.
#674 Re: Other Issues » Preliminary excalibur desktop-live isos need testing » 2025-03-24 16:33:17
Downloading now.
#675 Re: Off-topic » curated pico-distributions (aka curated workflows) » 2025-03-24 15:40:30
@EDX-0 I think as you mentioned there might be some issues with a "studio" meta-package like you describe, it might be even better to put out a "community" collaborated iso with these things already installed and configured to work with the system smoothly.
Thought several times about doing one myself, but a lot of the stuff like video-editing and hardcore sound things are not an area i'm familiar with, would really need someone who's very experienced using such to lay out a basic framework of what works well and choose the packages accordingly. And some of that stuff is very heavy on system resources, probably need to be able to define some minimum computer specs that would be able to handle the load.
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