I'm with @Carolina In My Mind on this one, my current old dog is a 2012 Compaq, still going strong, of course the battery finally gave up the ghost last year and I have to plug it in to use, one of the hinges is slightly broken, and occasionally I have to put wood-working clamp on the monitor as it has some mild de-lamination issues of some sort, lol.

But I love it, it has served me very well for 10 years. I don't use the touchpad though, never could stand those things, I just use a USB mouse.

1. No speed advantage that i'm aware of, I don't even know how you'd measure that.
2. Depends on what you mean by "reconfigure" I guess. As long as i've been with linux that's just always the way it's been done, i've always assumed there were good reasons for that, perhaps somebody more knowledgeable can say why.

I agree every firmly with Kapqa's post (#50), on older machines burning to a CD or DVD is pretty much bullet-proof and works for me every time, plus after burning I now have a hard copy of the .iso that will last forever unless it gets scratched up too bad or set on fire.

I have old distros and projects of mine on CD going back to 2009, every now and then I boot one up just for fun and look at what I did back then.

All that being said, running a distro off a stick is fun, and frequently in my experience runs faster usually than really old hard drives, I have run old machines for months on either a stick or a CD (Puppy Linux back when it was actually small).

Mintstick works really well if you just want a pure liveUSB and nothing else, it's in the repo. For all other chores i'm sticking with Refracta2usb, it seem complex at first, but after you've used it a few times you really begin to appreciate it's versatility.

Yikes I necro-posted to an old thread, sorry. But since I did, I took another look at OP's original question as i'm messing with USB stuff today. And I think what he was asking mainly for, is if he could take a CLI-only system (no X), roll it up into a hybrid-iso, put that on a stick, and use it to do a no-X install from the live session.

I'm guessing yes. Refracta-Snapshot and Installer both can work from the command line without a GUI.

And rather than use Refracta2usb, if you just want a regular liveUSB that you can install from and don't need multi-boot or persistence or all that, if Mintstick will run from the command line without needing the GUI, then it should do the trick of formatting and writing for you without a lot of configuring to do.

Just a guess though. I don't have any CLI-only systems that I could use to test.

He's complimenting you, he's saying you're not old or a geezer.  I agree.

Only config i've ever had to do with ALSA, is add an .asoundrc in some cases, on machines that have more than one sound device (i.e. HDMI) and on the newest version to use the built-in equalizer:

ctl.equal {
	type equal;
}

pcm.plugequal {
    type equal;
	slave.pcm "plughw:0,0";
}

pcm.equal{
    type plug;
    slave.pcm plugequal;

New command to invoke it, I used it in a menu entry:

'lxterminal --geometry=100x30 -e alsamixer -D equal'

New maximal uploaded 12-14-2024! Hope folks like it.

Thanks my friend! It's been good for me, learned a LOT of new stuff along the way so it was worth the effort for that alone.

Updated and cleaned up the Sourceforge pages a fair bit, still have some more to do though. Am taking a small break right now, but about to begin work on the maximal version, but that should be fairly easy, the real work is in grinding out all the configs in the minimal.

Weird calling it a minimal when it's actually larger then the maximal of Vuu-do 1, the times they are a-changin'.......

This may be one of the DNS errors some folks are experiencing.

I'm having the same DNS problem, so my current sources.list that works is:

deb http://gnlug.org/pub/devuan/merged daedalus main contrib non-free non-free-firmware 

deb http://gnlug.org/pub/devuan/merged daedalus-updates main 

deb http://gnlug.org/pub/devuan/merged daedalus-security main 

I used this to download/install the very AMD firmware you mentioned.

Hope this helps!

IT IS ALIVE! Back from the grave like a good zombie after a 7 year hiatus.

@fsmithred yep that's what i've been doing. But just had to try a larger one, also tried an svg , it just ignored 'em and threw a pure black background.

So I bit the bullet and opened Inkscape and made one, just graphical as any kind of image or text doesn't scale right. A dark charcoal background with a secondary box drawn inside it with a little lighter gray. Basically using same colors I use for other artwork on the iso, should look decent and be a cut above just a pure black background.

I'm really all done now with Vuu-do 5 except for the script to change runlevels.

Nice, i'm going to take look a look thanks! I didn't mess with symlinks, just used update-rc.d to disable those 3 services and have done nothing else, I timed the bootup and it did make it a bit quicker. Booting super-fast off a liveUSB.

Seems like you could take the password in yad, but I usually just make a .desktop for the whole thing, and used to use gksu in the exec line so it the system authorization dialog. Then I can use it in /usr/share/applications, and the obmenu-generator picks it up automatically and gives me a menu entry to activate, or in the .local files for context menu stuff, or both.

Well cool, they're off now already in runlevel 2, I just need to run update-rc.d and give a specific instruction about enabling it in 3.

Man that's even better, I don't even have to really make a script, just a .desktop that pxexec's the "init 3 "command. That's as simple as it gets right there, again, really appreciate the help!

Wow, perfect, short and sweet, and as per your usual answers to me I just have to know why it works and I just went nuts on reading documentation about init and run levels that I really should have done long ago.

So no issues at all in just switching to run level 3?

libgtk2-perl is a dependency, not in repo, guess I need to find that too to see if it can work.