The officially official Devuan Forum!

oui

Member

Registered: 2017-09-02

Posts: 305  

build Devuan as Devuan Derivatives Distribution

I did look at the title of that subdivision of the forum trying to find experimentation to make some Devuan a bit different from Debian concept and more some kind of

- build per (fully documented) compilationś way from Scratch
and
- as kind "Devuan live"
- to start completely hosted in the RAM and
- using a files management adequate to add on fly parts of system eventually stored at an other place (usb drives and memories or images from harddisk(s) an CDRW / DVD) and used directly there (or at demand after copying also into the RAM) using for ex. aufs.

This work exists partially.

The first part could be some kind of http://www.buildyourownlinux.com/#title0 (at this project made on the base of LFS and later probably from BLFS! But a (now very) old alternative proposal exists also at SliTaz, old software at http://download.tuxfamily.org/slitaz/iso/1.0/ and old book of  the build from scratch at https://www.slitaz.org/en/doc/scratchbook/).

The three terms of the second part is some kind about the Debian live as it continues to be realized as Debian-Dog offered and supported at the Puppy Linux forum https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewforum.php?f=22 (but the ISO management using "caspers" is the better as the one using "live" as it is more flexible: you can install more parallel systems!).

Why?

Different reasons:

- you does not need different partitions for different systems and block so without profit a lot of HD capacity in each partition
- starting out the RAM makes old hardware a lot faster. The corona crisis did show how urgent the need of hardware is not only in poor countries of the planet but also in divers groups of the population of rich countries! it is scandalous to make millions or perhaps billion of existing PC obsolete only for economical optimisation of profit!
- saving sessions is very nice, really. But it is also the reason of intrusion and indiscretion! RAM only powered systems are absolutely discrete and can be comfortable: you burn variables into your ~/  directory including some ~/.mozilla etc. and can use a lot of preset parameters and values including url's of bookmarks etc.

I hate now those usual OS's saving all values the user are not aware about!

over the base proposed at http://www.buildyourownlinux.com/#title0, it would be important to also define some kind of «justX_&_minimal tools and utility» consequent without ballast. my view on it would be:

such (Just-)Essential app's are in my eyes:

    all development tools including for the use of mouse (point and cupy/cut/erase functions) and internet wired / wireless connections incl. minimal but enough securities, and, of course grub with explanation what is the minimal configuration of it as first grub installation but permitting later to add more exigent (concerning grub) other distributions

    X

    ratpoison can be enough (or jwm for those not willing to accept that!)

    sound

    xterm, xli, xcalc, xedit but also nano (it was long years along the uniformed text editor at SliTaz and can be used for text block processing as the stuff of external text files can easily be used at editing time), ranger (eventuell with files "preview"), wordgrinder would be a good add as it can convert text files in pdf, latex file etc.

    links2

or

    seamonkey as browser, email client, irc client, wysiwyg html editor, and address book

    magicpoint as presentations tool

    Xine or analog basic app for video (depending of the graphic base used)

    xsane

    mtpaint as minimal base to shot printscreens and modifiy then

    osmo

with that equipment, you can begin to use daily a linux in graphic mode yet without printing.

    (already named) seamonkey would be with hunspell, cups, tesseract-ocr, gimagereader as well as small fonts (loadable on demand! why to install fonts for the all world!!!), as well as pulseaudio as well as a music editing app (for children! I am astonish don't to find it in some linux installing directly about 10 GO immediately!) a next step just over just-essential!

you now have a presentation of my intention.