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avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

And again there is a release of AVMultimedia. After "hard" almost two weeks of work there are the following innovations:

- Kernel 5.3.11
- ZSTD compression (ISO approx. 20% smaller)
- Start up approx. 20 percent faster (<10 seconds)
- New init process (only 100 lines of code)
- Super small initrd file (2.5 MByte)
- Squashfs4.4 (static in initrd)
- Entire file system in one file (avmulti.os)

AVMultimedia includes about 6 GB of software that is fully configured. On a slow atom tablet, the system now starts in 15 seconds (includes installation), about three times as fast as a few months ago. On faster computers, setup times (installation is not necessary) of less than 10 seconds are seen, virtualized times of 7 to 8 seconds could also be measured to set up the entire system.

The release includes the following part of software: Iridium, Firefox, Kodi, Gcompris, LibreOffice, Scratch (native on desktop), Gimp, Scribus, MyPaint, FontForge, Inkscape (incl. Sozi), Remmina, OBS, Flowblade, ASunder, VLC, MPV, Audacity, MuseScore2, Rosegarden, Kdenlive, QMapShack, Caja and much more tools... All this is ready after some seconds what you normally need hours to install. Just give it a tray!

Have a good time!

Download:
https://de.osdn.net/projects/avmultimedia/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/archivista/

P.S: If you understand German, there is a lecture from linuxday.at 2019:
https://peertube.luga.at/videos/watch/9 … 1fa269e819

Last edited by avbox (2019-11-15 23:20:56)

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Hi zephyr

I'm a bit wondering why you put it on a AVMultimedia thread? But anyway, I downloaded it and tested it:

star-kirk-2.1.0-xfce-amd64-live.iso
crowz_2.1.0_ascii-ob-amd64.iso

First of all, all live modes (menu entries) do not work, I had to install it. After several minutes, I get a very minimalistic desktop. The browser is epiphany 3.22.7, which is a small browser. Unforunately I was not able to watch videos. As default web search there is startpage.com activated. Startpage.com I did not know, and yes, I will think about to include it on AVMultimedia.

As stark-kirkcrowz is rather small (about 500 MB), there is not a lot of software available. Adding software is pritty difficult because under /etc/apt/sources.list ony the iso/cdrom is activated. This does mean that adding software for an average user is nearly impossible.

So I had a look at Office and did find a link to 'Google Docs'. Are you serious? The second link points to zathura, should be a simple office viewer.

My question to you is the following: What do you want to give us as an information. Is this a modern linux desktop in 2019? Can it be installed by a non experienced user? Why do you put it in this thread? Had you had a look at AVMultimedia?

Last edited by avbox (2019-11-15 23:20:21)

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,502  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Above all else, confusion reigns
And though I ask, no one explains
                    - Procol Harum

Zephyr - Would you please re-post in a new thread or one of your older ones?
Avbox - Your review of Star Kirk belongs in Ozi's Star Linux thread. Star is not Crowz.

Thanks.

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

I downloaded the iso from sourceforge.net, if I click right mouse, then the menu does appear with the name 'CROWZ'.

Sorry, wrong was indeed the name, I did not test star-kirk-2.1.0-xfce-amd64-live.iso (there the live mode works), the file I checked was/is:

crowz_2.1.0_ascii-ob-amd64.iso

Yes, discussion can/should be in a thread of Crowz, but as it was putted here, so I replied here. But for me, It can be moved, no problem.

Last edited by avbox (2019-11-15 23:39:51)

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Star and Crowz are minimalist distributions by design, we do not include the kitchen sink! Simply allow the user to decide! I'm ok with you not liking Crowz or Star, that is your prerogative. Have not tried your distro.cheers

It was/is not the question if I like it or not. I just did put out points I did see. It is up to you what you do with it. But, if you have to add repository manually, I don't think this is a wise decision.

I have nearly every week an eye to other distros, especially if they are Devuan based. What I would wish to the Devuan project in gerneral (not to your project in special) is, don't be so 'technically'.

It might be that "my" way is too far away from standard distros (AVMultimedia has no setup at all), but I really think things should be much easier for people tu use Linux.

Last edited by avbox (2019-11-16 20:51:24)

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

There is another new release of AVMultimedia, you now can change monitor resultion with Alt+Ctrl+F11 (lower) and Alt+Ctrl+F12 (higher).

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Fixing a bug that was introduced by sizing down perl part of installer /install1.pl. User setted password was not loaded after restart, now this does work.

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Another new relase is here. Installing on empty harddisk according booting with or without uefi (so you can start it from non uefi harddisk too). New status utility to show current network, harddisk and version info. Enjoy!

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

There is another new release. Switched to Kernel 5.3.16 and added support for running it in Hyper-V virtualization environment (yes, i know, it is Microsoft, but some of my customers use it).

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Another new release, especially for all friends of video editing because it includes kdenlive 19.12 which is much faster in rendering (than in earlier releases).

On my brand new AMD Ryzen 3950X, I can render 1 hour 4K material in about 70 minutes, which is quite amazing. But please consider that you have enough ram (otherwise KDEnlive does crash). And yes, you "only" can render with 16 threads (32 threads does not work [yet]).

If you don't have 64 GB RAM, I recommend to add a big swap file:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/lib/vz/avswap bs=1G count=64
mkswap /var/lib/vz/avswap

After it restart AVMultimedia and it does use the swap file, you can check it with 'swapon' on command line.

Enjoy and have a nice (holiday/chirstmas) time.

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Unfortunatelly there was a bug in the last version. Starting the iso without uefi resulted in writing the avmultimedia mbr to the hard disk. Reported and reproduced result of this was a booting error from installed os. This is now corrected. Sorry for all (potentially) troubles. Thanks Martin for reporting this bug which was fixed in about 10 hours.

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Happy new year to all! There is a new version. DDR4 comaptible version of memtest (only in legacy mode) and adding memtester for checking ram just inside of AVMultimedia. Using of memtester is not so easy as mentest in legacy mode. Therefore here an example:

cat /proc/meminfo

subtract about 700 MB from result and call:

memtester 7500M

==> example for 8 GB RAM

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Another new release.

- Now fully support of installation on empty harddisk in LEGACY and UEFI (tested with 14 TB disks)
- New debug mode (just add debug to the start screen) and you get a textual installation with all commands and 5 seconds break time (so you can read it) on every step. If you ad stop.x, you even can stop setup on a certain point
- In the old release we only did support first/second harddisks, now all harddisks are checked for valid booting device
- Added noatime flag, so it works again considerable faster

Enjoy!

P.S: If you wan't to see what is happening in pre-installation part, don't use stop.x, use stop1, stop2, stop3, stop4 and then have a look at the 106 line init sh script.

Last edited by avbox (2020-01-14 12:39:19)

Head_on_a_Stick

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From: London

Registered: 2019-03-24

Posts: 3,125  

Website

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

- Added noatime flag, so it works again considerable faster

Relatime is the default, the performance difference between that and noatime is very small indeed. And noatime breaks mutt, which might annoy some users.

---

Brianna Ghey — Rest In Power

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

- Added noatime flag, so it works again considerable faster

Relatime is the default, the performance difference between that and noatime is very small indeed. And noatime breaks mutt, which might annoy some users.

If really someone interested in AVMultimedia is using mutt, she/he will not have any problems to change it to relatime. Concerning speed I can add here the I got the impression it is faster. But it is not only this point, on a lot of small devices (tablets) you have emmc (very limited write capacity) and on AVMultimedia there are about 130'000 files (6 GB of software). So every case where no write is done is for me a benefit.

Dear avbox, if you are using AVMultimedia and if you having troubles, let me know, I will take care about it. Otherwise I don't think this point is important for those people who AVMultimedia is developped for (nearly all of them are using a web based mail client).

Last edited by avbox (2020-01-14 18:40:23)

Head_on_a_Stick

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From: London

Registered: 2019-03-24

Posts: 3,125  

Website

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

If really someone interested in AVMultimedia is using mutt, she/he will not have any problems to change it to relatime

That presumes everybody is aware that noatime is set and also that it breaks mutt (which you didn't know).

But whatever, it's your distribution. I just thought you might like to know. Sorry for the noise.

---

Brianna Ghey — Rest In Power

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

If really someone interested in AVMultimedia is using mutt, she/he will not have any problems to change it to relatime

That presumes everybody is aware that noatime is set and also that it breaks mutt (which you didn't know).

But whatever, it's your distribution. I just thought you might like to know. Sorry for the noise.

No problem at all, but about breaking things, in Debian Beowulf, installing k3b breaks a lot of stuff and same for falkon web browser. Nevertheless you can partially install it (just don't save this apps), you just can do a restart and all the broken stuff is gone away.. For both, k3b and falkon it is a pain because they are very good apps (just does not work actually in Beowulf so far I can see).

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Another new release. Scratch 3.6 (not avmultimini.iso) and bug fixing: If second partition in UEFI booting mode was empty, but not first one, then it did install it on hard disk. Now it does check (UEFI mode) that both partitions are empty. Only then it does install it.

Last edited by avbox (2020-01-20 20:40:59)

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Changed lpr with cups_bsd for printing over command line, better start of old amd machines (ati instead of amdgpu).

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

New release with Kernel 5.4.15 (and all benefits of it, i.e. more drivers for AMD graphic cards).

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Another new release brings support for BlueRay burning, including BDR-XL and M-Disc (100 GB optical discs). Just find the tool under Multimedia 'xfburn'. Enjoy!

P.S: If you are interested in all the basics about long-term archival, you find most about it in my blog: http://archivista.ch/cms/en/news/2020-i … sc-support (automaticially transleted from German original: http://archivista.ch/cms/de/aktuell-blo … c-support/

Last edited by avbox (2020-01-31 17:44:05)

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Another small update. Switch to kernel 5.4.18 and enable ACPI on boot (automated shutdown in virtualized environments). Have fun!

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Support for fast NVME disks (installation, throughput up to 4 GB / second), KDEenlive 19.12.2c with optimized rendering (about 50 percent faster). Extensively tested with Ryzen 3950X and Ryzen 3990X (256 GB RAM, 64 cores, 128 threads). Kernel 5.4.22.

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Kdenlive 19.12.3 with improved settings (especially complete German strings).

avbox

Member

Registered: 2019-09-03

Posts: 105  

Re: Fastest and newest AVMultimedia ever...

Support for V4L2 (usb webcams), switch from Iridium web browser to Falkon, and yes, finally flatpak repository for easier installation (including Gnome Software Center). Linux updated to 5.4.25.