New Mate-mini Vuu-do uploaded!

Now maybe I can take a break, happy holidays everybody!

Yad is your friend. The learning curve is very small, once you figure it out it's pretty fun messing with it.

Yad+shellscript and you can make a machine do anything, i'm having a blast with it last few days, mocked up a script+gui last night to adjust xset settings in lieu of using a dedicated screensaver/power manager.

I just can't help myself, it's like a 7 year itch, once I start it's hard to stop.

Yesterday I built a Vuu-do Mate mini and rolled up the iso late last night, testing it today. It wasn't bad at all as i'd already laid the groundwork, I built it off the openbox mini so it already had all the hardest stuff done. And best of all I just barely made it to CD size, 699.5 mb!

Just installed core Mate packages plus useful caja right-click options, was already using Pluma and Engrampa anyway, but I didn't throw the whole Mate kitchen sink at it, for good reason, actually used some different options for some things.

The EOM mate picture viewer, task-manager/system monitor, calculator, and screenshot additions together are over 100 mb of stuff, just to do simple tasks.

Gpicview, LXtask, Galculator and Scrot do all the same stuff basically, and together are less than 10 mb and work much faster. Even got all my regular choice of keybinds working great.

It's dang fast for Mate, not quite as quick as Openbox, but very nice. Not sure i'm going to do a maximal version though. Maybe.

Right now the menu is super-quick, but in a full version the svg icons slow it down and make it glitch (at least on my low power machine), svg icons i'm seeing these days are much smaller and better than they used to be, but still for major programs i'd need to make png copies in several sizes and use those instead to stop the menu issues on older machines like mine.

Still pondering the idea of a fully translatable version of the openbox max. But man, that's probably an extra 600 mb of stuff when all is said and done, and I have never tried to change languages on a machine, don't even know how and wouldn't be able to test properly if I did, I speak a little Spanish but not enough.

^^ Yep.

In practice the only few times swap has ever been used on my machines, was because something went very wrong with some particular program and it went wild chewing up all the ram. Usually this was my fault, messing about trying experimental stuff and not having a plethora of ram to start with.

Welcome to Devuan and the forum!

Your comments about Windows are spot-on, I stopped using it altogether years ago.

This community has always been kind and helpful to me for the 8 years i've been a part of it, and this forum, small as it is, is still an easily searchable resource with a wealth of information. I hope it works out for you as well!

@mtbvfr:
1. 30 gigs should be sufficient unless the user wants to put 40 gigs of video on that partition.
2. In practice I haven't had to use swap in years, but in general it doesn't need to be any bigger than the size of RAM installed. 4 gigs is plenty.
3. I usually use the last partition (sda4) for swap.
4. I use legacy BIOS (grub-pc) non-efi on my machines, and currently I don't need to add the boot flag for any of the partitions. For making a liveUSB it required it, but for a regular installed system using MBR/legacy BIOS/Grub-pc I haven't had to add the boot flag to the main partition in forever. Not using it now on the very system i'm posting from (Devuan 5 daedalus).

Refracta2usb kicks a**, spaghetti code or not, it does not make any decisions for me, it does exactly what I want.

Mintstick is cool for what it's intended, utterly simple fast way to make a LiveUSB. But that's it, that's all it will do, no persistence and it uses the entirety of the USB stick and nothing else can go on there.

I'm posting right now, from a USB stick I did this morning with Refracta2usb, It has 3 partitions, fat32 boot - ext2 persistence - fat32 data

I can boot a simple live session and do a clean install of the system with it, boot live with persistence (/home is what I am using, not full persistence), and have a 3rd partition that's readable to any computer to store data, specifically with intent to temporarily store any data saved if i'm rescuing data for someone and you don't even have to boot the liveUSB to view that data. Or if I have some data files myself I need to move to like the library computer, I can just throw them on there.

@fsmtihred if I can be at all helpful in refining the spaghetti, let me know, i'd enjoy messing with it, but need some direction from you on what you'd like to see happen.

Am I the only old geezer who runs pure ALSA and nothing else?

I seem to do the same thing, but can't bring myself to chunk 'em, I have a "crap" folder I throw into. Wife asked me one day why I keep that stuff at all, and I told her it's for the same reason I have two full totes of old wire, cabling and cords in the garage, lol. You just never know when it _might_ become useful.

Marking this as solved.

@EDX-0 still checking out what you're doing, good stuff!

Cool, thanks for the link! One of these days i'm going to try and compile my own kernel for a specific machine and chop the heck outta everything to see how small I can get it all. Fun project for a minimalist like me who likes to mess with things.

I'm even more motivated these days since current kernel on my machine is 408 mb, wow, I remember when they were much smaller....

Tried yesterday both. Can get to the link using my browser, but pinging brought no results. Also tested it in Synaptic (changed sources.list back to default) and it wouldn't work there either.

No biggie for me, just reporting results for the database.  My ISP is Alliance Communications here in the US (fiber).