I've got it down to 2.39 gigs on disk, which should be close to 2.1-2.2 actual...really trying to hit that under-700mb mark. Which is crazy to me, the old mini's I did were half that size, linux sure has....umm...grown since I last made myself a system with it.

But i'm happy, it's still wonderfully faster than my Mate installs, not as fast as the old ones, but nice. I think if Dan is still lurking around here he'll be like "Nice work Grasshopper" lol!

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!

Sad that they apparently got rid of the equalizer function in ALSA, but I guess most music players that would get installed have one onboard anyway. So it was likely redundant anyway.

Now if I can just get rid of the "auto-removeable" nonsense that Synaptic is doing....

That and those weird visual artifacts I mentioned, if I can fix those two things i'll be in high cotton.

Thanks, but it is your thread ie: started by you.

... is the reason I made reference to thread-jacking.

But I see no need to change anything.

My piggybacked question was posted on the answer fsmithred posted for you.
Still your thread.

Best,

A.

Since you mentioned hibernation requires it knowing the UUID of the swap partition it's easy enough for me to do on my own machine, but is there a way to do that generic-ly during install?

Trust me, I know about the dependency upon dependency thing, i've borked a thousand installs over the last 15 years trying to figure it out, lol. Nowadays I pretty much know what I can get away with, but of course things change over time....thes days I usually run through list of dependants, then if there's a question I go on the web and do some research.

When I pulled MATE, the system demanded I uninstall Pulse and install Pipewire, I was so giddy at the thought of getting rid of Pulse completely that I just said okay. Shoot, even the old Vuu-do is not free of Pulse completely, something dragged in libpulse0 and I couldn't get rid of it, so I basically dummied it out for a (hacky) solution. So maybe I can dump Pipewire too? Was wondering if it was any good....

I know I should have started from the ground up, but I tried that earlier this year and got so frustrated trying to work with the CLI and apt that I just stopped. Sorry, i'm a GUI guy. Part of that was I had limited time, I actually have all winter now, and I debated for a while about which way to do it, decided to try and see if this way worked first, and now i've got so much work in it I am loathe to start over, day before yesterday I got up at 7 a.m. and worked on it all day until 2:30 a.m. the next morning, slept for about 3-4 hours and got up and went back at it all day.

@Altoid no worried from me about thread-jacking, all this is very informative. But forum decorum being what it is perhaps I should change the title and maybe get Golinux to wave her magic wand and put it in DIY? Mods do what you think is best.

So question number 5:
5. Given that my system was working completely fine for user without polkit running, just needed to use terminal for root things, Would it be at all feasible to write some sort of script that only started polkit up when a request is made for superuser access and then have it shut down once you were done? It eats up a lot of ram running all the time.

This post caught my eye.

Don't want to hijack the thread but seems relevant.
So just one question, if I may.
Please let me know if it warrants a separate thread.

That is exactly what my box has and the UUID is the swap file.
But it happens that I do not keep my system on all day, just shut down and reboot.
ie: there is no hibernation image present, never set it up to hibernate.

At some point my dmesg printout reads:

--- snip ---
[   24.068315] PM: Image not found (code -22)
--- snip ---

Q:
Does the system look for a hibernation image at boot time because the line in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume is not set to =none and there is a valid (swap file) UUID present?

If I edit /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume and set RESUME=none, on updating I get this:

# update-initramfs -u
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-6.1.0-28-amd64
/usr/sbin/mkinitramfs: 5: /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume: none: not found
I: The initramfs will attempt to resume from /dev/sdb3
I: (UUID=f0187ff0-be52-4bbc-9461-40f744554b85)
I: Set the RESUME variable to override this.
live-boot: core filesystems dm-verity devices utils udev blockdev dns.
# 

The system looks for a swap file and not finding one with a UUID of none, finds one and uses it.
What to do?

Best,

A.

RESUME=none

in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume and then run

update-initramfs -u

If you want to hibernate to disk, replace "none" with the uuid of your swap partition.

4. When you install task-*-desktop, your dependencies have dependencies. It's easier to remove stuff if you start minimal and add only what you need. This might solve the pipewire problem - you can have alsa without the "p".

Synaptic: if you modded /etc/default/su you can just get a root terminal and run

synaptic

#linuxatemyram

Another way to revert su to the old behavior is to put the following in /etc/default/su (which you will probably have to create).

Yep, that's the method I mentioned at the link Rolfie posted, works great!

In addition, despite that, synaptic and other admin stuff would still not start from menu, turns out the policy kit was not starting up at boot, even though there's an entry for it in /etc/xdg/autostart, I had to add a line to start it in /home/vuudo/.config/openbox/autostart, after that everything started working fine, almost....

But my extensions for root edit/access would still not work using pkexec instead of gksu.

So I found a little code online, modded it some, and made a little script I called gksu.sh and dropped it in the $PATH, all it does when you call it is convert the gksu.sh command to a full pkexec command and then executes pkexec and the action you asked for. Keeps me from having to add a bunch of code into the .desktop exec command lines.

Working soooo smooth now, and so much faster and lighter weight than MATE, I am literally almost done building Vuu-do 2, really the only issues I have left are these:

1. Getting a bunch of video artifacts on startup, logout, and shutdown, weird stuff, the Devuan-mate-mini does it too.  My original install of Daedalus a year ago did it too at first, then for some reason it stopped doing it all on it's own, wonder what that's about?

2. Totally personal to my machine i'm sure, but whenever I boot any version of Daedalus, it hangs up right at first when you boot for a minute or two, then puts out a message "Gave up on waiting for a suspend/resume device". Not sure what it's looking for, any way to bypass that behavior on my machine?

3. Alsa doesn't seem to want to start at all, so volumeicon isn't working properly and cannot fire up alsamixer or equalizer. I pulled Pulse out (YAY!) and it installed pipewire instead, pretty stoked about dumping pulse, but have no experience with Pipewire so don't know what to expect.

4. I started this from a clean install of Devuan-mate-mini, loaded openbox stuff and got a good working environment, logged into openbox session, uninstalled all the MATE stuff in Synaptic, but now Synaptic thinks that a whole lotta important stuff is now "auto removable". We're talking stuff that would destroy the whole system if I auto-removed it, the entirety of Xorg, most prgrams and system libraries, all of gstreamer, it's bizarre, like 60-70 of the most important packages in the system. What the heck?

So, it was Beowulf... my bad.

Glad you got it sorted. And, you're obviously not an idiot, greenjeans.

PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:$HOME/.local/bin"

this way i always get the sbin programs on my path, they will still require sudo to run.