Posts by greenjeans

greenjeans · Off-topic

It's important for the project as whole to be able to
move forward and rely on modern tools and technologies
and not be held back by trying to shoehorn modern software
on retro computing devices.

Translation: "OMG WTF is this 'end-of-10' bullshit? You peasants need to buy new computers and throw that old shit away, we know what's best for you and what's best for you is to spend 1000's of dollars you can't afford every couple years to buy new shit as is the will of your overlords!".

greenjeans · Off-topic

So i'm working on new versions of stuff, and what I want to do is some work on sources.list, currently i'm using gnlug for mine as that's the fastest in the continental US that i've used.

This next version what I want to do is have the default Devuan round-robin entries at the top, with entries below them (commented out by default of course) for the best/fastest repo for each continent. I'll be using gnlug for the North American entry unless there's something better that someone knows about.

But for the other continents I have no way to test, so if any of y'all who live in those places could take a second and let me know what works best for you it would be extremely helpful.

Just trying to make it easier for folks, in my projects I have some documentation explaining repo stuff and of course links to Devuan's online mirror list and such. But I though it would be helpful to give some choices for a starting point if deb.devuan.org isn't working out for them. People could switch right in Synaptic or with a quick edit to sources.list.

Thanks!

greenjeans · News & Announcements

Nice work y'all!!!:D

greenjeans · Devuan Derivatives

Finally I noticed that I forgot to edit .asoundrc to connect to the correct sound card. That's easy fix, though.

Yeah it can be a little confusing when you try an alsa-only system, but looks like you got it handled!

For reference there's a readme for AlsaTune in /usr/share/mxeq/readme.txt that both explains Alsatune and also has some info on dealing with .asoundrc and .asound.conf in single and multiple sound card systems.

greenjeans · Desktop and Multimedia

Y'all need to check out the link(s) I posted, that guy has his version of nocsd-gtk4 working pretty well, I haven't downloaded it or tried to package it yet, there's a package for arch but no .deb packages yet.

greenjeans · Off-topic

^^ I keep telling you there is ALWAYS hope.

greenjeans · ARM Builds

^^ Necro-posting on Halloween, I love it!

greenjeans · Installation

There is also : https://github.com/keithbowes/obmenu

Not sure what Miyo meant by downloading a .deb from an install unless the package(s) were saved in the cache. But you could try using dpkg-repack on the #!++ install to re-create a .deb package.

greenjeans · DIY

So just a quick note, still working on this, got everything working perfectly and have done tons of testing, just taking a break before the next phases i'm going to explore and possibly implement. Currently there's no provision to right-click a music file in your file-manager and have it open in VSMP (though I added a one-shot player in the latest Vuu-do for that purpose), and also it's not set up to play music CD's running in your optical drive. Once I get those things sorted it should be ready for the tedious packaging stuff, all the license info crap that I really don't want to shove in every script's comments.

greenjeans · Devuan Derivatives

@yohno, perhaps something is lost in the translation here as i'm having a hard time understanding the issue.

I downloaded the latest copy of Dan's my-crappy-radio-player, followed his install instructions and it plays fine. I did have to install the package dialog as that isn't included in Vuu-do by default.

You need to make sure permissions are correct for the files after moving them, and make the main script executable.

EDIT: Regarding the radio player:

1. Stations #48 and #49 do not work nor will they, any of the urls that have a "session-id" will not work past the first 24 hours when they were first accessed and put on the list. There's a lot of these kinds of stations out there, they basically issue 24 hour leases of a sort, and after 24 hours that url will no longer work.

2. If you add "-hide_banner" to the ffplay command at the top of the script, it will eliminate all that extra info it spits out in terminal when you start playing something, looks much cleaner!

If it was okay with Dan i'd offer to make a couple of changes and actually package it. Packaging would eliminate any issues with a manual install, i'd also make a wrapper script to start it up if it were up to me, easy way to run the xresources commands when you fire it up rather than having to do it manually or add to autostart.

greenjeans · Hardware & System Configuration

The last couple of times i've needed usb sticks I have purchased 3-packs of Emtec 32 gb drives, found them on sale in a wally-world kiosk a few years back for 10 bucks, cheap enough to be worth trying, and they've been flawless, bought another pack a few months ago off ebay I think for 12 bucks or so. Sometimes cheap stuff works.

greenjeans · Off-topic

For those following they know what's going on, but for others the short story is my wife took over librarian duties at our tiny city library, a place full of many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, and we are re-building it into something nice.

So I was there the other day, and some of the city fathers/mothers were there, and they know i've donated many hours of my time to the project, the wife gets paid a little for her efforts but all my time has been volunteered, so they asked me if they could pay me, and I declined, but then they said "Isn't there anything you want for your time?"...and I replied that yes, I want THAT (pointing to a tiny 6"x4" old book), they were somewhat incredulous, "That's it? That little thing is all you want?" I said yes and they said it's all yours and thank you.

THAT:

Published in 1900 it's 125 years old, first printing was in 1898.

Thank you Iron Maiden for turning me on to poetry some 40+ years ago.

greenjeans · DIY

Hi @onephaedrus and welcome to the forum and thank you so much for the kind words!! I was just logging back on to answer your question but looks like you figured it out, that's the simplest way right there, I did take a few minutes to fully test (with gpicview) and works great here.

I used to do screenshots that way with gpicview as it's the default in Vuu-do, but when I made scrotshot I wanted to make it widely useable and agnostic, so instead of adding a lot of code to test for various pic viewers I just used yad's image function. It actually looks nicer using a specific viewer as yad's image viewer looks a little blurry to me.

I should probably add to the manual/wiki some info on how to do this.

greenjeans · Off-topic

FWIW . . . I said NO WAY to a cell phone too!

Me too! I did have one for a while, moved out to the sticks and couldn't get any reception, so I threw it away, been without one for 2 years now and don't miss it.

greenjeans · Other Issues

RE: the Synaptic bug with not displaying the new format in the settings>repositories window is a known issue, one of the devs even offered a bounty to fix it: https://github.com/mvo5/synaptic/issues/149

Someone subsequently took on the job and tried many times to fix it, but no joy so far, and the guy kinda quit trying looks like about 3 months ago, so I don't know if it's still being worked on: https://github.com/mvo5/synaptic/pull/150

greenjeans · Off-topic

I just like coined words, and that's a good one!

greenjeans · Devuan Derivatives

Hi @yohno, thanks for that link! That looks like a new record for age-of-machine (2003), I have a 2005 laptop in my garage running Vuu-do, it only has 1 gb of ram so I haven't messed around with YT videos or anything too heavy, just playing music and looking up car parts on the interwebz.

The only other distros that could play 1080p video without stutter is Void Linux, Chimera Linux and Vuu-do Linux. I have tried about 103 distributions so far, and only these four could play YouTube videos in 1080p. Void and Vuu-do went a notch higher and could play the same video in 1440p. The video I used to test is "In Da Club" by 50 Cent. The reason I chose this video for testing is that it has bit rates from 144p all the way up to 2160p. Vuu-do is the only one that could play at 2160p, but with massive stutter, other Linux distros just had a static image at 2160p.

Vuu-do is on the Distrowatch waiting list as of August, I haven't submitted it because I don't think it's quite ready, but apparently they got a number of searches for Vuu-do in the last year, so they added it themselves with a link to my Sourceforge files so folks could find it, and also so people would know that it's on the list and doesn't need to be re-submitted.

greenjeans · Other Issues

Had the same issue myself when I was testing xlibre, Synaptic works with the new deb822 and you'll get the packages, but if you use the menu at the top and select the repositories option to inspect/change/add it won't show the repos that are in the new format in the list.

greenjeans · DIY

I'm fond of right-click context menus, makes for an easy way to add some nice
functionality to file-managers. These are intended for PcmanFM but most FM's have
some mechanism for adding entries. For reference new .desktop entries for this
purpose go into ~/.local/share/file-manager/actions in PcmanFM. Both extensions
require ffmpeg, and the music one requires yad as well. Hopefully somebody might
find these useful, I like 'em a lot.

Play/Preview song: This one needs a script in addition to a .desktop in order to
provide the tiny gui which just gives the name of the file being played and an
exit button to stop.

playsong.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Action
Name=Play audio file
Comment=Play entire audio file
Icon=audio-speakers
Profiles=fullsong;

[X-Action-Profile fullsong]
Exec=playsong %f
MimeTypes=audio/aac;audio/ac3;audio/mp2;audio/mp3;audio/mp4;audio/mpeg;audio/ogg;audio/flac;audio/wav;audio/vorbis;audio/3gpp;audio/x-ape;audio/x-musepack;audio/x-wavpack;

The playsong script, make it executable and put it in your $PATH:

#!/bin/bash

# Script to play a single song using ffplay.
# copyleft (c) greenjeans 2025
# Depends: yad, ffmpeg

# Check if file is provided
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 <audio_file>"
    exit 1
fi

file="$1"
filename=$(basename "$file")

# Run ffplay in background
ffplay -nodisp -autoexit -loglevel quiet "$file" &
ffplay_pid=$!

# If ffplay fails to start, show error and exit
if ! kill -0 $ffplay_pid 2>/dev/null; then
    yad --title="Error" --text="Failed to start playback for $filename." \
        --window-icon=error --borders=10 --fixed --width=300 --height=100
    exit 1
fi

# Run yad dialog in background
yad --title="Now Playing" --text="Playing: $filename" --window-icon=audio-speakers --borders=10 --text-align=center --width=350 --button="Exit:20" --center &
yad_pid=$!

# Trap to ensure cleanup on script exit
trap 'kill $ffplay_pid 2>/dev/null; kill $yad_pid 2>/dev/null; killall yad 2>/dev/null; exit 0' EXIT

# Monitor ffplay process
while kill -0 $ffplay_pid 2>/dev/null; do
    # Check if yad is still running
    if ! kill -0 $yad_pid 2>/dev/null; then
        # Yad closed (e.g., X button), kill ffplay and exit
        kill $ffplay_pid 2>/dev/null
        exit 0
    fi
    sleep 0.5
done

# Ensure yad is closed when ffplay exits
kill $yad_pid 2>/dev/null
killall yad 2>/dev/null
exit 0

For the video player all we need is a .desktop, the video will open and start
playing automatically. It will have standard min/max/close buttons in the titlebar,
but ffplay also has a number of hotkeys to control the video, esc or q to stop,
p for pause/play etc. Check the ffplay man page for a full list.

playvid.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Action
Name=Play video file
Comment=Play entire video file
Icon=emblem-multimedia
Profiles=fullvid;

[X-Action-Profile fullvid]
Exec=ffplay -autoexit -loglevel quiet %f
MimeTypes=video/mp4;video/mpeg;video/ogg;video/quicktime;video/webm;video/x-matroska;video/x-msvideo;video/3gpp

greenjeans · Devuan Derivatives

10-25-2025

Some updates to Fatstick and some updated packages, a LOT of work on the Oxy2-ZEN
icons and the theme, some bug-fixes and syntax corrections. Also added some
right-click extensions for the file-manager to play audio and video files.
And upgraded/updated the Vuu-do manual app for more info and click-able links.

In the max version i've also un-installed cups-browsed due to questionable behavior,
and i've moved the printer-queue-applet from /etc/xdg/autostart as it isn't really
necessary for single-user everyday use. If you need that functionality it's in
/etc/xdg, just move it (as root) back into /etc/xdg/autostart. And if you have an
issue discovering network printers you can try re-installing cups-browsed.

greenjeans · Off-topic

PCLinuxOS devs make the point quite well: https://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201205/page11.html

Nice. I know Old-P from back in the day, brilliant and ornery, lol, he and Bill were like a one-two punch of cantankerous, but I reckon all Linux folk are to some level. Good sense of humor though the both of them, I learned a lot from those guys. And i'm still in agreement about sudo after all these years.

greenjeans · Devuan Derivatives

@yohno that's awesome news! I figured a determined enough user could get it done.

Just some more info: I haven't tried it but there's an extra perl module for obmenu-generator that supports locales, that might get you the menu as well, but you would likely need to re-install most of the apps to get back the translations in their .desktop files in /usr/share/applications for it to work right.

greenjeans · Devuan Derivatives

@yohno sorry my friend, just today found your e-mail from a couple of weeks ago along with another forum e-mail in my spam folder, don't know why the spam filter started catching 'em, it worked fine previously.

Yeah it's going to be difficult to convert Vuu-do to another language, not impossible though but it would be quite a bit of work. Best to build one from the ground up in the target language, been hoping for a long time that someone might do something like that.

Trying to do it on a running system would probably take re-installing LOT of packages to get back all the translations and a lot of config work after that. I've cut out things in places where people mostly don't even know they have places, lol.

I don't try it simply because i'm not bi-lingual, I only know a few words in a few languages, so there's no way for me to test or support as I don't even know the process to do so and couldn't read whatever results I got. I'm just a one-man-show my friend, only so much I can do.

But if someone wanted to make the effort to make a re-spin of the project in a different language, i'd sure be willing to help in any way I could. But someone who speaks the language would need to do the deployment and configs and roll up the result.

greenjeans · Devuan Derivatives

10-18-2025 New Fatstick version and also updated the Oxy2-ZEN icons

Figures the day after I upload new isos that i'd find some things to improve, that's just Murphy's law.
So with Fatstick there wasn't any bugs, just a bit of leftover code from earlier experiments that was
useless and not doing anything. Bye!

The Oxy2-ZEN icons have gotten a lot of changes since the last ones I uploaded in March, including
some way overdue attention to the music icons which were old and blurry for some reason, so I made
new ones that are nice and sharp and in the grayscale to keep with the theme. Also fixed an issue a
while back with the icons for Synaptic using the wrong size. And I added an icon-theme-cache.

greenjeans · DIY

New version of Fatstick uploaded today! Just cleaned up some useless code, no biggie.

The officially official Devuan Forum!

#201 Re: Off-topic » Hard Rust requirements for APT from may next year » 2025-11-03 01:23:03

#202 Off-topic » Question: Best/fastest repos in general for each continent? » 2025-11-02 19:38:50

#203 Re: News & Announcements » Announcing Devuan 6.0 Excalibur! » 2025-11-02 16:40:14

#204 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18!! » 2025-11-01 18:54:29

#205 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » noCSD for GTK4 » 2025-11-01 14:45:20

#206 Re: Off-topic » The “Ensh*ttification” of the Internet » 2025-10-31 19:50:03

#207 Re: ARM Builds » Mini/Net install for RPi3 » 2025-10-31 19:49:01

#208 Re: Installation » Obmenu » 2025-10-31 15:47:02

#209 Re: DIY » New Project, a simple music player. And now a video player!! » 2025-10-30 20:15:16

#210 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18!! » 2025-10-30 20:01:41

#211 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Flash drive weirdness » 2025-10-30 15:40:16

#212 Off-topic » So they asked me what I wanted for helping with the library... » 2025-10-30 01:31:49

#213 Re: DIY » ScrotShot, simple GUI frontend for scrot » 2025-10-29 20:23:15

#214 Re: Off-topic » The “Ensh*ttification” of the Internet » 2025-10-29 18:56:32

#215 Re: Other Issues » Apt .sources changes » 2025-10-29 17:16:59

#216 Re: Off-topic » The “Ensh*ttification” of the Internet » 2025-10-28 15:46:17

#217 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18!! » 2025-10-28 15:29:38

#218 Re: Other Issues » Apt .sources changes » 2025-10-27 16:05:50

#219 DIY » Right-click extensions for file-managers to play music/video » 2025-10-26 18:26:50

#220 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18!! » 2025-10-25 18:51:26

#221 Re: Off-topic » Critical security flaw in sudo » 2025-10-22 17:06:50

#222 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18!! » 2025-10-21 21:55:31

#223 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18!! » 2025-10-19 18:10:45

#224 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18!! » 2025-10-18 18:42:26

#225 Re: DIY » Does anyone here use Mintstick for making livUSB's? Need testers. » 2025-10-18 18:40:42

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