Just downed that last Miyo release and tried it, nice, I don't know how he does it but there's some magic in whatever he does.

Now i'm thinking about a new Miyo-based Vuu-do, maybe upped to excalibur.

Well for some reason the forum is not allowing me to edit my original post in this thread??

But following up, loaded up a new run of Vuu-do Maximal last night to Sourceforge, it's what I described in my thread about the library and my previous post in this thread. From the revised release notes:

*News* November 2024: Some bugs fixed, some Appimages added for a modern browser and also the database program Symphytum (for my local public library's old machines). Making the appimages native so as to access easily through menu, located at /usr/local/bin so as to be in the PATH, and .desktops in /usr/share/applications with the others. Being appimages they are essentially sandboxed from the rest of the system to an extent, they contain all their own dependencies.

Firefox 128 Extended Support Release. The files it makes are in /home/[username]/.mozilla
Symphytum database is in /home/[username]/.local/share/giowisys/Symphytum

Note they are in users home but are hidden normally, you will need to enable hidden files in the file manager view menu whenever you want to see files that start with a dot.

So this is version 1.08, essentially 1.07 with the changes noted above. The repo is now archived and there will be no updates as such. There are quite a few minor updates still available in the archive repo, but they are just that, minor version upgrades. I have changed sources.list to the archive so you can apply the updates if you like, but I have not done so myself and have not tested any of them, so breakage might occur and other unforeseen issues.

You can of course update the browser with a newer appimage, but Firefox 128 is long-term support. Do NOT try to update Symphytum, there is no newer version that works with this system.

Everything still works wonderfully in Vuu-do, and a modern browser was really all that HAD to be updated to work properly. This system was built on and for hardware made around 2010-2012 and is amazingly quick on such and even faster on newer machines. It would probably work on hardware going all the way back to 2005 or so as long as it was a 64-bit CPU.

One thing: to view webp images you have stored locally you'll need to open them in the browser, as the old image viewing program onboard does not have that capability.

~greenjeans

Thank you Chris!

In the long term I think something like that would be optimum.

For now though, just getting the place organized and some kind of database is the short term target, it's a tiny library and we may be overly ambitious for it.

Found a program last night, doesn't look like it's maintained in some 4 years, but downloaded an appimage and tested and it seems to be a good interim solution. It's called Symphytum, and it's a very simple database/GUI you customize yourself.

We'll have to set all the params for it, and enter everything manually, about 2500 titles or so, but after it's done we'll have a nice easily searchable database.

I'm going to try and piece together a second working computer from the several older ones they have, so we can have one for the patrons to use to search the database as well, just need a tiny simple system as that will be the only use for that machine, haven't checked yet but i'm guessing the older machines are 32 bit.

Burning a custom version of Vuu-do for it tonight that includes appimages for the browser and the database prog, the newer machine they have is almost the same exact specs as my laptop, so it should run fine even with just 2 gigs of RAM.

Thanks for the help guys, if anybody has some experience with Symphytum please let me know how it worked for you.

Well a lot of the stuff I got away with on Vuu-do is no longer possible, that was 7 years ago, and the whole thing is devoid of sooooo much stuff that is mandatory now.

But the thing is, if you just want to manage grub and do some text editing, it won't matter one bit. Everything on it works regardless of it's age. In fact I still run the full version on a couple machines, I just use an imageapp for the browser as it's the only thing that absolutely requires a newer version.

The mini is 347 mb, about 1.1 gigs installed, and after install you can trim it down even more, I put basically every piece of firmware in the repo on it to insure functionality of all hardware, so after install you can delete whatever you aren't using, it's also got some other programs you might not use, so you can easily get it down to less than a gig.

869 packages in it, I could post the list here if the mods don't think it would take up too much space, or e-mail it or I don't know if stuff like pastebin is still around but could do that.

I even updated the OS-prober on it to properly recognize and name Vuu-do and Devuan installs which it didn't do previously, also got rid of old entries that are no longer around.

But as far as building something like it today from the Daedalus repo, not happening, it would be waaaaay bigger. Vuu-do was built entirely on the last gen of Linux in general, pure GTK2, Python2, ALSA, 3.16 kernel, etc.

You should try it OP, it's a liveCD so you can take it for a spin easily enough, and it uses the refracta installer so install is all of about 5 minutes.

/var/lib/apt/lists = description of all available packages

/var/lib/dpkg/status  = description of all the packages currently installed

/var/cache/apt/ = has two binary files, pkgcache.bin and srcpkgcache.bin, if you delete these it will restore synaptic to a state where it's only showing installed packages instead of all available when next you open it.

When you update and/or install something new, some of these files will change.

/var/lib/dpkg/status is handy as you can (carefully) alter some things. I deleted a dependency in a program that demanded I install the Gnome icon set even though it truly didn't need them.

Ahh the beauty of Linux, still allowing me to flip the middle finger at Gnome after all these years.

^^The above reply is how I do mine, never had an issue, but all i'm using it for are browsers. Perhaps it's program-specific? Have you tried other appimages?

Just downloaded a nightly and an esr version of Firefox yesterday, and both work fine.

*slaps forehead*

Thanks guys, and especially stargate, I can't remember what search terms I was using that day but they were dumb, your much better search and the results got me a whole lotta great info!

Building a base system now for 'em and should be squashing it by tomorrow to go load, in contact with the state system now working on what's compatible with their system, and working on some grants for future improvements. And working on a basic site for 'em too.

So very soon we should have things up and running much better, community really needed this, so thanks again to ya'll. The new website will most definitely have a note that the Carthage city library is powered by Devuan. ;-)

0==||=======>

^^Vorpal sword.

Well now you've piqued my interest Ralph, what would you consider an Interesting topic of discussion?

Shoes, ships, sealing wax? Cabbages and kings?

That's cool, that's something I can do easily enough.

But that's for being a mirror for distro releases yes? I was talking about being a mirror for the repo, which I imagine is a whole larger kettle of fish.

Well, big question here if anybody can answer, what does it take to become a mirror? Like how much storage do you need, bandwidth/speed, is it within the realm of somebody doing it from a home-based server? I have no data caps on my home service, it runs 300 mbps up and down (though i'm only using 100 as all my machines and router are old with 10/100 NICs). Probably over my pay grade and not enough speed, but i'd give it a go at least.

Alternately I was thinking, it might be a cool thing my ISP could do, they have been amazing and they already do a good bit of community service projects, i'd be happy to approach them and ask about it, seems like something they could do without much effort, and i'd be happy to volunteer to help them with it if I could.