The officially official Devuan Forum!

alphalpha

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-01-23

Posts: 146  

Forge OS

Forge  -  https://forge-os.sourceforge.io

• formerly known as 'Michaels-Devuan-Edition'
  based on experimental Refracta nodbus iso
  uses Devuan Chimaera repos

• Comes with 5 preconfigured window managers to choose from:
  JWM, i3, bspwm, spectrwm and exwm (the latter one is sort of a meme)

• Has a ton of software installed and configured:
  Multiple browsers, office applications, audio and video production software, image editing and much more

andyprough

Member

Registered: 2019-10-19

Posts: 327  

Re: Forge OS

Awesome! I'm going to download it now and take it for a spin.

LarryDC

Member

From: Pawtucket RI EE.UU.

Registered: 2018-12-01

Posts: 18  

Re: Forge OS

Michael,
I downloaded it last night as soon as it was visible on the site from here in USA. Nice touch having the sha256sum right there.
This morning I installed it and am using it right now. I went through all of the configuration steps just to see what was there.
The installation was unbelievably fast ... 10 minutes ... not counting my looking at things.
After boot up on a dedicated HD partition, the same quality software I've been used to was there again. I'm now tweaking the JWM keys and getting adding popups on the "panel [tray]" icons, a modified conkyrc across the bottom of the screen.
I'm going to try and stick to your zsh since you've got so much added to it.
Thanks again.
As an aside: Is there any way of getting a small donation to you? Or do I have to wait until you visit the Boston area And I can take you out to dinner?

---

Registered Linux User #305687 (Forge jwm, antiX Testing runit jwm, Voidlinux jwm, Sparky Testing jwm, & PCLinuxOS plasma)
i5 8GB RAM & 3 HD + Lenovo Thinkpad T61 w/ 4GB RAM

alphalpha

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-01-23

Posts: 146  

Re: Forge OS

Hey Larry i am glad that you like it

I'm going to try and stick to your zsh since you've got so much added to it.

If you would rather use bash, you could just try chsh to bash, i have not tested this very well but the files that get sourced by zsh, also get sourced by .bashrc
and all scripts use sh anyway, so it should be mostly the same in theory, i just prefer the zsh's tab-complete.

As an aside: Is there any way of getting a small donation to you? Or do I have to wait until you visit the Boston area And I can take you out to dinner?

Thanks, i dont take donations, but if you would throw a fiver or something to someone who really needs it, that would be awesome.
Sadly i dont think i will be around Boston in the near or later future, but i will message you in that case

Let me know if there are any issues.

I personally have encountered 2 problems, that we could discuss here
I guess since this is not mentioned elsewhere i throw it in here
1) Scanning for wifi networks with Ceni now takes ages, it used to be a few seconds
i dont have a solution for this, but i also added setnet to the iso
2) i have one machine where i needed to manually setup the graphics driver in xorg.conf because it would not use the correct one although it is installed
but that machine is a strange beast anyway, it works great on all my thinkpads and my desktop

PS: Thanks to the person behind JWM-Kit! i forked you wallpaper tool and i love it
PPS: And also thanks to fsmithred for refracta and also to the whole Devuan team!

Last edited by alphalpha (2021-10-18 23:46:47)

LarryDC

Member

From: Pawtucket RI EE.UU.

Registered: 2018-12-01

Posts: 18  

Re: Forge OS

Thanks, i dont take donations, but if you would throw a fiver or something to someone who really needs it, that would be awesome.
Sadly i dont think i will be around Boston in the near or later future, but i will message you in that case

Will do on the someone who needs it.

Too bad about Boston area.

You'll have a place to stay if you ever make it.

For my part I'm studying French not German (I'm only 1/8 German but 3/8 French). To do that I need to run google Chrome [Version 94.0.4606.71 (Official Build) unknown (64-bit)]. It is the only browser that duolingo.com will capture microphone input from. Now I have to find which of the 6 possible configurations for my microphone (Microsoft LifeCam Cinema) will work.
Update: The second one worked: It needed "all software conversions".

I personally have encountered 2 problems, that we could discuss here
I guess since this is not mentioned elsewhere i throw it in here
1) Scanning for wifi networks with Ceni now takes ages, it used to be a few seconds
i dont have a solution for this, but i also added setnet to the iso
2) i have one machine where i needed to manually setup the graphics driver in xorg.conf because it would not use the correct one although it is installed
but that machine is a strange beast anyway, it works great on all my thinkpads and my desktop

I use 50 foot Category 6 Ethernet cable from my upstairs router; there is no wireless on this old rig.

On the graphics front I tried just booting my 4.19 kernel and initrd from Michael Deuvan 4 since it uses nvidia-legacy-340xx which gives me 75Hz.

Naturally it didn't work because the nvidia drivers aren't installed on Forge.  It uses the nouveau driver  at 60Hz.

Thanks again.

---

Registered Linux User #305687 (Forge jwm, antiX Testing runit jwm, Voidlinux jwm, Sparky Testing jwm, & PCLinuxOS plasma)
i5 8GB RAM & 3 HD + Lenovo Thinkpad T61 w/ 4GB RAM

tuxnoobfr

Member

Registered: 2021-03-12

Posts: 2  

Re: Forge OS

please can you clone goodlifelinux? it was so lightweight and it only had a few programs installed by default I was never able to get wifi or wired working with all the derivatives on here, I know you guys don't spoonfeed newbies but jessie has been archived for a while

alphalpha

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-01-23

Posts: 146  

Re: Forge OS

please can you clone goodlifelinux? it was so lightweight and it only had a few programs installed by default

Sorry i am not going to clone a distro that i never heard of, and lightweight in terms of disk usage is not my motto
you can easily make your own devuan iso with refractasnapshot

I was never able to get wifi or wired working with all the derivatives on here, I know you guys don't spoonfeed newbies but jessie has been archived for a while

if you post some more details about that on irc or in the forum, i am pretty sure someone will help you

LarryDC

Member

From: Pawtucket RI EE.UU.

Registered: 2018-12-01

Posts: 18  

Re: Forge OS

Some observations:
1 - The wallpaper.sh script seems to have an error:
line 2 :
LINK="$HOME/.local/wallpaper"

should be:
LINK="$HOME/.local/wallpaper.png"

2 - update_qutebrowser.sh no longer finds LATEST_VERSION
My kludge is to insert the following as line 22:
LATEST_VERSION="v2.4.0"

=====

If there are any nvidia-legacy-340 users out there it IS possible to get nvidia-340-108 to deliver 75HZ on Forge. per Matt Fletcher on the Devuan list:
Dng mailing list <Dng@lists.dyne.org> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/m … stinfo/dng:
"I  have it working on chimaera after patching the NVIDIA installer with
patches from arch:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nvidia-340xx/

Run The NVIDIA installer with --extract-only and apply the
000*-kernel-5.* patches, then run nvidia-installer from the extracted
directory."
=====

Still my main distro.  Thanks for all your work!

Larry

---

Registered Linux User #305687 (Forge jwm, antiX Testing runit jwm, Voidlinux jwm, Sparky Testing jwm, & PCLinuxOS plasma)
i5 8GB RAM & 3 HD + Lenovo Thinkpad T61 w/ 4GB RAM

alphalpha

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-01-23

Posts: 146  

Re: Forge OS

Some observations:
1 - The wallpaper.sh script seems to have an error:
line 2 :
LINK="$HOME/.local/wallpaper"

should be:
LINK="$HOME/.local/wallpaper.png"

2 - update_qutebrowser.sh no longer finds LATEST_VERSION
My kludge is to insert the following as line 22:
LATEST_VERSION="v2.4.0"

Hi Larry,
thanks for helping to improve this project.
The file extiension for the wallpaper was dropped on purpose, when i made the new gui wallpaper chooser ( themes > wallpaper > select wallpaper )
but i see that i forgot to change that in the "old" way.
This command should fix it for now:

sed -i 's:WP=".local/wallpaper.png":WP=".local/wallpaper":' ~/.config/jwm/dynamic/wallpaper.sh

You should try the gui wallpaper changer if you have not discovered it yet, its way more elegant

I noticed the qutebrowser update problem too (and the one for shotcut), on monday i did upload a new iso where this is fixed
but no need to reinstall the whole thing, i uploaded all relevant scripts on gitlab just now.
Actually i did update more of the scripts so the best thing would be to just copy the .local/Script directory and overwrite everthing that has changed

git clone https://gitlab.com/_alphalpha_/forge-dotfiles.git
cp -R forge-dotfiles/.local/Scripts/* .local/Scripts

In the beowulf release this would be done automatically with 'update_all' but i decided to drop that feature.
From now on you will be able to see new gitlab commits in newsbeuter (super + , )
the rss feed should already be there, you can refresh the list with 'r'

Edit: also to get the calendar working, create .config/kalendar directory

Last edited by alphalpha (2021-11-05 19:26:32)

LarryDC

Member

From: Pawtucket RI EE.UU.

Registered: 2018-12-01

Posts: 18  

Re: Forge OS

Forge-2022_01_B install:
All went well. I'm happy you've included keepassxc which I have happily used for years. If you use an Android phone be sure to install Lonely Cat's X-plore on it. That way you can easily copy your password file back and forth without having to trust the cloud. Just have both phone & computer on the same network and click on WiFi file sharing in X-plore.

I did prefer my compiled [to /usr/local/bin/] claws_mail 4.0 to the 3.17 that devuan still uses. It runs flawlessly and all I needed to add to get it working on Forge were:
libcompface1 and libetpan20
Again my old NVIDIA GT218 card to run at 75HZ instead of nouveau's 60HZ was to run the nvidia-installer in the correct extracted and patched directory as I wrote previously.
Hopefully the kernel stays put. Otherwise I'll have to re-install the nvidia 340-108 driver.
It's still my main distro. And yes the new xwallpaper app is very nice.

Now to get Remind set up so my extended family birthdays and anniversaries repeat each year. Then to update the entries in Gramps.

Thanks again, Michael, for all your work.

---

Registered Linux User #305687 (Forge jwm, antiX Testing runit jwm, Voidlinux jwm, Sparky Testing jwm, & PCLinuxOS plasma)
i5 8GB RAM & 3 HD + Lenovo Thinkpad T61 w/ 4GB RAM

alphalpha

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-01-23

Posts: 146  

Re: Forge OS

@devujuanaluvver
Sorry i cannot reply to your emails

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

The mail system

The old isos are no longer available,
Forge is basically the same, but upgraded to chimaera and with improvements on the installer and other scripts
if you are looking for a specific script or config file, you can find them here on gitlab

devujuanaluvver

Member

Registered: 2022-02-24

Posts: 1  

Re: Forge OS

Sorry, I just updated my email. That's why you couldn't send the email. I really wish you still had the old color scheme or a way to get the old color scheme from your original Michael Devuan Derivative version. Perhaps you can have a theming option to return that color and font scheme?

alphalpha

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-01-23

Posts: 146  

Re: Forge OS

if you are using jwm, there is a theme option in the right-click menu
if you do mean the darkpurple/orange theme, that is still there
or do you mean the terminal theme?
i am not really shure which theme yoou want
i did change the qt theme from yaru to adapta, because yaru looked different in chimaera
the gtk theme has always been snowblind-sunset
if you can tell me exactly what you are looking for or have a screenshot, i will see what i can do

alphalpha

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-01-23

Posts: 146  

Re: Forge OS

I just uploaded version 22-04

There is no complete list of changes, but here are the highlights:

• alacritty replaced urxvt

• lossless-cut replaced vidcutter

• antimicrox replaced qjoypad

• yt-dlp replaced youtube-dl

• magnifiqus replaced xzoom

• qps is the default task manager again

• new emulators: visualboyadvance-m, bsnes and bsnes-plus

• and rom patchers flips and lazy_ips

• Cardinal as new virtual modular synthesizer lv2-plugin

• there was a bug in the installer that got fixed

• /usr/local/bin/datetime.sh now has a '--auto' option, to automatically set the system time

• some scripts in the jwm menu got fixed and i added new ones (set date format, change conky color and toggle to maximize all windows)

• syslinux bootloader now looks for the symlink /boot/vmlinuz, it will update automatically when a new kernel is installed (/etc/kernel/postinst.d/yy-bootlink)

• OBS will now start, if your pc does not support GLSL >3.3

• other new applications are zbarcam-qt to scan qr-codes and crazydiskinfo to check s.m.a.r.t parameters

• qutebrowser will delete .local/share/qutebrowser/webengine before it starts, this prevents a rare case where it will always freeze

• conky will now only show battery and wifi info, if those are present on your system

more changes can be seen here https://gitlab.com/_alphalpha_/forge-do … cd98499bd1

Last edited by alphalpha (2022-04-14 15:25:32)

alphalpha

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-01-23

Posts: 146  

Re: Forge OS

wow this took waaay longer than i planned
but it is finally here: Forge v2023-11

this may very well be the final version
i definetly need a break from this project
and i dont know when or if i will return

with that out of the way, here are the news:
boot time reduced by 10%
improved user friendliness
files on the desktop (jwm)
more from the good things
less bad things
all new and shiny
overall smoothness increased by 200%
hotness also increased by a factor of 10
the price stayed the same

since dbus is now dependency-chained to xorg, i had to pin seatd to chimaera

as always this is experimental software, i am not a porfessional, use at you own risk
but i think it works pretty well on 10 year old hardware

LarryDC

Member

From: Pawtucket RI EE.UU.

Registered: 2018-12-01

Posts: 18  

Re: Forge OS

While I downloaded the first day it was available, I use it with my already modified jwm profile so it took me a while to be sure that I wasn't out of sync with the this 2023_11 install. As has been the case with each upgrade, it works great.  It is my "daily driver". 
With just booting to my old home folder all worked fine except having to start up the network each time and I foolishly changed /etc/timezone instead of /etc/localtime. It seems that the set_time script doesn't like my date format either. Since the hardware clock will be set from the system on log out it doesn't matter.
Michael has done a great job with all those apps available in the menu and the many scripts he wrote.

Very happy user here.
Thanks a lot!!

---

Registered Linux User #305687 (Forge jwm, antiX Testing runit jwm, Voidlinux jwm, Sparky Testing jwm, & PCLinuxOS plasma)
i5 8GB RAM & 3 HD + Lenovo Thinkpad T61 w/ 4GB RAM

oui

Member

Registered: 2017-09-02

Posts: 305  

Re: Forge OS

With just booting to my old home folder all worked fine except having to start up the network each time and I foolishly changed /etc/timezone instead of /etc/localtime. It seems that the set_time script doesn't like my date format either. Since the hardware clock will be set from the system on log out it doesn't matter.

the time management in ALL PC's is absolutely ridiculous... We have today (personal) Computers a lot better of those of the army minister of the time before PC's did exist but those machine with Artificial Intelligence are fully incompetent to adapt itself to the real hour although they contain all an exceptional clock in itself!

it is to laugh...

alphalpha

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-01-23

Posts: 146  

Re: Forge OS

The last version was pretty rough,
there was a typo in grub
the script to set the time and date broke
network would not connect automatically
and some other stuff

i think i fixed it all this time
this is the final version.

alphalpha

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-01-23

Posts: 146  

Re: Forge OS

in case someone just wants the scripts:
https://gitlab.com/_alphalpha_/forge-dotfiles
some of them are actually somewhat good

maybe the devuan team is interested in this one that shows all the licenses
there is also a yad script to modify the mirrorlist but that one would need at least some finetuning

i also have this function called awk-menu.sh that i used to make some advanced cli menus
mount_menu.sh is one of the better ones, but the mainstream is not ready for it yet
(this menu is more powerfull than dialog or all the other stuff because it can assing custom keybindings for every menu,
but it is a little tricky and could need some improvements)

Tcofran

Member

Registered: 2024-05-21

Posts: 6  

Re: Forge OS

I have an old 32bit laptop that is running Devuan ( i am a noob linux user). is Forge 32 bit ?

alphalpha

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-01-23

Posts: 146  

Re: Forge OS

nope, the iso is only available for x86-64