We are definitely on (almost) the same page quickfur.

I am a GUI guy, but from the get-go at least in Vuu-do, my goal has been to eliminate ginormous amounts of code.

One instance: So there's a nice calendar program in the repo that goes in your tray for the tint2 panel, about 80kb.

The thing is, there is already a calendar built into GTK, the program actually just uses that and another few Kb's of code for not much that I can tell.

I duplicated the almost the same dang thing with one tiny line of code in the clock section of tint2.rc, not even kidding:

yad --calendar --undecorated --button=gtk-close:0 --skip-taskbar --borders=5 --posx=-1 --posy=-1 --width=300 --on-top

Does the same thing for the most part, works great, it's just a calendar.

I see a thousand instances of stuff like that all the time, it's like people don't even care anymore, what with terabyte HD's and a gazillion gigs of ram....

I don't use compositors either. The old LXterminal didn't need one to run faux-transparency which is why it was awesome.

If I remember correctly from the documentation, they had to dump it because GTK3, which is typical, GTK3 hates anything useful and fun like Gnome does, and they ruin it, but yet they continue to implement retardery like skinny disappearing scrollbars and other stupid crap that's ugly and reduces functionality making everything harder.

Boot Up Manager that I used back in the jessie days, was really good, you could do all this, and you could view all system services but it would not allow you to modify critical ones.

Sadly you can't even find the source code anymore online, at least I couldn't find it. Need to boot up Vuu-do 1.09 as it has it, can't remember if the executable was binary or a script, if a script may be able to cobble some code out of there.

Just an update: We have re-arranged the place, are cataloging all the books into the basic database. City council is so happy they've given us carte` blanche to do whatever we see fit including buying some new shelves and computers if need be. For right now we're just working with what we have to get a starting point for the future. But there's money in our budget now and we intend to resurrect this old library into something the community can be proud of.

They offered to let me take over the city website too, and do a sub-domain for the library, I accepted and it's badly needed, lol. So everything from here on out is going to be Linux and Devuan.

It's kinda bizarre actually, my whole life i've been an outlaw more or less, old-school GenX hardass. And suddenly I find myself a pillar of the community. I literally have a key to City Hall.

I really want to resurrect some of the old machines, but if not pickup some good newer used ones, and use them for a system to search the library database, but also for some learning and informational programs, I REALLY want to use one or more, as a teaching tool for people to learn Linux.

We're already getting more traffic, people are excited about what we're doing. It's awesome!

I've been down that rabbit hole for a couple hours now, what i've found is a whole lot of wrong information about the grub splash, and horror stories of people in the last few years of people trying ever thing in the world, and dedicated programs like Grub Customizer trying to change their grub background, when it's literally as simple as making sure there's no grub background info in the grub config files, and dropping a new "splash.png" into /boot/grub, you don't even have to run update-grub.

What I cannot find a word about, is about the live grub menu background. I'll keep trying I guess, but I figured golinux would know or fsmithred.

Seriously Ralph, you have no idea how much better i've tried to be in the last week about looking up solutions myself, I have countless hours reading man pages and documentation, I have had a LOT of issues this last week, and 99% of them I have solved myself. And learned a lot of new things along the way. But there's a lot of new stuff i've had to learn to do this in 2024 as opposed to 2017.

I'm trying awfully hard to search more and post less man, if you only knew the amount of data i've absorbed just in the last week I feel like you'd be appreciative of my efforts.

I though that would likely work, but I always try for brevity of code, even in small lines, was hoping one update-rc.d command would work.

@nixer, gave that a try and also rcconf, and both seem a little fraught with peril for a new user to mess with, it's the kind of thing that 15-20 years ago I would have said "WHOA cool! I can turn all this stuff off and my computer will run really fast now!" Yikes!

The problem with the way I have done it by disabling in rc.d, is that now in session I can't start them with

service foobar start

.

I'm thinking a better way is to use update-rc.d to remove them instead, which should do what I want which is to not start during the boot process, then writing a little script/gui that uses the "service" command to start them up.

Of course that would mean the user would have to manually start them every session which might annoy folks, so thinking of adding to the script an option to re-enable them to autostart every boot if so desired.

Couldn't you get them to autostart this way by moving their scripts into /etc/xdg/autostart ? Seems less of a hassle than using the script to update-rc.d and move them back into rc.d.

They still wouldn't be a part of the main boot process a la rc.d, but instead get loaded when the other /etc/xdg/autostart stuff does after openbox gets loaded. Am I wrong about that?

Thanks for your help y'all, just fine-tuning new iso and trying to make it all an enjoyable easy and seamless process.

Forgive me, i've been so neck-deep in so many things the last two weeks that I don't even remember every detail of what i've done, but at some point somebody posted a link somewhere to an interactive map of Devuan repositories, you could zoom in on your area and it would show you the closest one.

For what it's worth, this is what i've been using for the last 3 weeks or so, it's been lightning-quick for me, a real joy to use, download speeds are superb.

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 

Upload done. Well that only took 15 hours, woo-hoo! I'm going to bed now.

So been on it for about 10 hours now, lol, just got done squashing a new one to test, i've defaulted it to EFI with regular BIOS available on install in a similar fashion to the Devuan desktop-live iso. Hopefully it works, but I have no way to test the EFI install as my machines aren't. Been a crazy day, 10 minutes ago a water pipe burst in my laundry room and started spewing water everywhere...had to make a mad dash to fix that but fortunately there was a dedicated shutoff to the laundry area, so it's not leaking and we still have water...sheesh...some days you're the windshield, some days you're the bug.

Sweet, good ol man pages, I should really learn to read them thoroughly before posting my novice issues.

Solution to the Synaptic auto-remove is found in apt-mark, mark 'em manual and should fix it (hopefully!).

Even easier than I thought, just had to delete /var/lib/apt/extended_states

Did that and and it's all good now!