last night i was in the middle of using the forum, and it suddenly stopped working.

about 12 hours later, it still isnt working.

i have installed additional software to enable me to post.

this is obviously NOT A BAN because: https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=9082#p9082

three of the forum admins have visited since this non-ban, and NONE have informed me directly-- i cant even be sure this is intentional.

most forum bans let you at least read the forums, or tell you that youre banned-- or log the ban so other admins are aware of it.

however, i am actually prevented from accessing the site-- no message about a "ban" (other than the vague error shown here) is displayed.

if i am banned, i would like to know for how long.

i will not try to circumvent a ban and post during the duration im informed the ban will last for,

but i will try to circumvent a network error in order to ask what happened.

thanks very much!

siva and i have talked about remixing distros a lot over the past couple days, i thought id talk about it for a minute.

this is one of the best things about devuan imo, they encourage remixes / derivs. i have one, it proves that im not just making things up-- it does what im talking about-- but i truly care more about the ideas of fig os than fig os itself.

some of us, not just me-- are doing software not just for the software itself but to showcase ideas and other software (and yes, devuan itself.) so if you say "but thats not devuan?" you know-- its pretty easy to prove if we merely agree exactly *what* devuan is.

i mean i actually made a simple tool that diffs iso contents and squashfs contents by md5-- i can really prove these things by percentage, if necessary.

i like the "make it your own" brand and i love refracta, and all this is devuan. all this is definitely devuan. but how do you remix it?

i know several ways, but you only need to choose the one right for you. fsr showed me some things related to how devuan "becomes refracta" and the INPUT looks wildly (wonderfully) simple. i never did it that way because its debian specific and i didnt "get it" in 2016, but the more he documents it the more he ensures that refracta doesnt depend on him.

im a huge fan so i care how refracta (the distro) is actually made. he can correct me-- refracta is made with debootstrap or devuans version of it or something like that.

much related is how any debian/devuan distro can be turned into another distro-- using refracta tools. as far as i know, many of the derivs around here are made with those. ive tried it, i still need more free space to make it work.

i believe my way requires less free space. not fud, happy to confer with him on whether this is a fair statement.

each method has its strengths. here is a simple comparison:

* debootstrap / (devbootstrap?):
official - powerful - some of the input stages are relatively simple

* refracta tools:
friendly - easy - popular - almost certainly more fun (subjectively)

* mkfigos
probably requires less disk space - scripts can be distributed instead of isos (isos can be distributed too, like "normal") - a great amount of control over details

depending on your goal, the biggest projects will more often lean towards the most official method.

by definition, the most popular methods are what most people will use. thats a friendly, traditional remastering tool like refracta tools. there are plenty of others, but refracta tools are good.

i thought mkfigos was a new idea, but the olpc project has a similar thing that converts ubuntu into a distro for the olpc project.

im very glad im not the only person using this idea. it means i can point to at least one other example.

i dont care which of these you use, or if you make your own its great. but because i like the ideas, here is how it works:

mkfigos is written in my own language-- if you have python 2, you can run it. refracta includes the tools you need. (xorriso, isolinux, last time i checked.)

xorriso helps produce a bootable iso.

isolinux (iirc) includes tools to make the iso hybrid so you can write to cd/dvd or usb instead of just the first two.

mkfigos does all this for you. so does refracta tools i believe, which is probably why refracta has all the stuff you need.

with mkfigos, which is just *one example* of doing things this way, you could ultimately create your own if you wanted-- you can either:

distribute a 60k (right, 61,440 bytes) script that downloads a source iso (refracta in this version) and autoremixes it to create your own iso--

or-- create and upload a new 600+mb (629,145,600 bytes) every time you tweak your deriv.

when i make fig os, i dont even upload iso files. i upload a 60k script, a wonderful guy in britain runs it on another distro (cross-compatibility beyond devuan is a feature of mkfigos too) and he doesnt know how it works. just like devuan trusts fsmithred to be in charge of live, i trust ally and he trusts me.

he is not an official "fig os team" member though if he wanted it, id have to give him that. my forum (offline) was called "unofficialdistros" and fig os is very unofficial. but i did perform some checks on his work! hes also a respected archivist in charge of putting hundreds of isos online, so he was a good choice.

again, with this "third method" of remixing, when you want to change a small thing you dont have to upload and ask people to download 600mb or more each time.

in fact, since its based on refracta and new versions of that only come out so often-- mkfigos saves you TWO excesses:

1. you dont have to upload the latest "product iso" ever. because people can make it "at home."

2. THEY only have to download the latest "source iso" once, only when you switch to the latest source iso (the latest refracta version.)

so to recap:

1. if you make 10 updates to your derivative, thats only 0.6 megabytes (less than 1mb) of uploading you have to do. for 10 versions of your distro. that could work out to less than 1mb PER YEAR of uploading.

2. if refracta only updates its iso twice that year, then thats EIGHT times that you and your users dont have to download a big iso. unless you delete it.

3. it still produces an iso, so if you want to be traditional about it-- you can still distribute a big iso if you prefer / as an extra option.

but also, everybody that runs your script gets two things:

1. a full, fairly-easy to grep receipt of EVERY modification made to the source iso. are you curious what i did to refracta? NOTHING happens that you cant find in the script. nothings hidden, its all right there.

it even downloads copies of the files it integrates, so you can look at those afterwards or chuck them in the garbage. most of them however, are very plainly downloaded from the debian and refracta repos. (the way amprolla works, i havent checked if you can simply wget devuan packages. the community is free to school me on that.)

2. the whole thing is made FROM the "receipt," so this "receipt" you get actually predates the product itself. you can change the receipt and say: "well i like refractas window manager. can i get it to stop removing xfce?"

yes! you can figure that out yourself, and if this is a community thing, then i am happy to help *when i can.*

when you use a snapshot tool, youre creating a distro from a running system. did you look up something in the browser? that history might now be in your snapshot.

did you change something that you forgot about? it goes in the snapshot. im not saying this is awful, im just saying that my way avoids this-- all modifications are to a pristine source iso. every time-- um, assuming you delete the folder cache (even the perfect isnt perfect, right?)

so debootstrap i think "builds" an iso from instructions-- ive never used it--

refracta tools builds an iso from a running system-- very friendly, easy

and mkfigos rebuilds an iso directly from the iso. but it leaves the source iso alone so you can reuse it.

a nice side effect (or cost) of mkfigos is that if you want to modify it, you need to do a trivial amount of coding.

a trivial amount. go and get woof-ce and try it-- it asks you a lot of questions! mkfigos asks zero. you only have to run it.

but for example, you find the part that installs leafpad. you dont like leafpad? ok, the "coding" is to find the line and remove it. do it right, you get no leafpad.

like with any other technical task, you may have to ask on a forum. thats ok.

but you have all the power when you run mkfigos, because its not an iso-- its a very specific list of instructions for modifying a distro you know WAY better than fig os.

and yes, it could be used to modify devuan. or puppy linux. or artix. or...

i didnt mention, that i made it to modify TWO distros. at the same time. into a single iso.

i dont use it for that anymore, but thats what it was designed to do-- mix two distros together.

even if you never use this, i think there are some ideas here that maybe you can use depending on what you want to do.

happy remastering, happy "devuaning"

theres probably always a better way to do this-- the freedesktop way is to take all the ways available, invent an ever "better one," deprecate the others, and then make the new way depend on whatever they want to saddle the user with.

but that doesnt mean there arent truly better, even traditional ways to do this-- i think of steve litt and udevil and how mounting volumes works in spacefm though not pcmanfm (i used to use pcmanfm for that. in debian 7, when it worked.)

specifically with regards to shutdown and suspend, you probably dont want any user to be able to do that except the one using the desktop, and the root user.

but if you had a simple daemon running as root, it could look for a flag to be created in a user writeable folder-- like /home/user/.powerdaemon for example, and if a file called reboot was created via a username included in a file like /etc/powerdaemon/allowedusers:

/usr/bin/ureboot 
#!/bin/sh
touch /home/$USER/.powerdaemon/reboot

and the name "user" was also a line in /etc/powerdaemon/allowedusers

then /sbin/powerdaemon (the daemon itself) would call /sbin/reboot and no amount of policykit or freedesktop or debian or gnome would be able to do a thing about it.

since this is probably not the most professional method (i would ask what it is, since every "professional" tool keeps getting deliberately broken by its maintainers these days...) i would NOT recommend this for devuan so much as possibly for derivatives.

i would ask "why not just use sudoers?" but since that is never suggested as a response to any questions like this, i just assume that sudoers isnt the thing we want here.

once again: if theres a better way to do this "diy" im just as curious what that would be.