MX Linux Forum

Here's the low-down on what I have been playing with. btw. there may be a bug on the spaceFM setting to manage the desktop wallpaper & menu. On 'some' logins I have noticed the setting revert to "unset" from "set".

Here's my other post: viewtopic.php?f=40&t=50011

Using dd to create a bootable USB flash drive, appears to work pefectly. Booting that to really humble hardware -- AMD Athlon(tm) 7850 Dual-Core 4 Gig RAM . No issue with playing sounds locking up the terminal as happened with booting the ISO into a VirtualBox VM. I get a flashing item on the panel that reads "Conky (antix1)" that disappears when I click on it. (This same thing happend booting the ISO into VirtualBox. I have also booted this "toram" (F4 option). Finally, created live usb with 19-a1 live-usb-maker.

Now, booting the full live-usb, noticed new options for persistence, p_static_root and f_static_root but no idea what they do. Same artifact on the panel that reads "Conky (antix1)" that disappears when I click on it. Default conky works as it's supposed to work. The gui upon shutdown when saving the dyamic persistence file is nice.

I set up a 2.5 G rootfs. Is -l shows it to be 2,684,354,560 bytes at /live/boot-dev/antiX, however, my 8 G flash drive still shows 6.4 G free from a total of 7.7 G on the ext4 partition. That doesn't compute. I didn't' realize it, but I conclude that the actual space consumption of rootfs may allocated to the file system on an as-filled-up basis. Can I be confident that the file system is really keeping track of available space, or is something wrong here? Upon shutdown, the GUI for saving the persistence file shows 7.4 G total, and 3.82 G free. That computes. :-)

apt update shows two debian.org repos not valid yet for another 1 hr 40 min. I did apt dist-upgrade for the three updates that were available and that went fine.

@firueroa, using the usb you can reconfigure things on your live system. For instance, you can take conky out of Sessions and Startup by unchecking the box for conky. It will not startup the next time you boot up live.

male wrote: ↑Tue Apr 30, 2019 6:03 am The double login to Slim already exists in 17.4
and must m.M. be caused by an update of antiX packages between March 12th and 24th...

...FI: Here I have 2 locales languages (first priority: french, second us), the first login is always only with the us keybord and language, the second one is in french (after user logout, login).

beardedragon wrote: ↑Tue Apr 30, 2019 12:52 pm @firueroa, using the usb you can reconfigure things on your live system. For instance, you can take conky out of Sessions and Startup by unchecking the box for conky. It will not startup the next time you boot up live.

That's not my intent. I do want conky and it works fine on this alpha antiX. The issue is a residual flashing conky task on the panel which goes away if clicked. I believe this is what is mentioned in the release notes.

figueroa wrote: ↑Tue Apr 30, 2019 5:09 pm [...]
That's not my intent. I do want conky and it works fine on this alpha antiX. The issue is a residual flashing conky task on the panel which goes away if clicked. I believe this is what is mentioned in the release notes.

I see the flashing conky 'warning' in iceWM as well. Kind of weird...

I'm a bit late to this thread, but I just now tested antiX 19 alpha 1, via Live USB
My opinion?
Very, very fast and stable. It's the first time I ever recall testing a Alpha version of any distro! It uses a tiny bit more ram on idle.
Finally, it comes with a newer version of LibreOffice ! :-) It no longer has the tray quickstarter but I tested it and Writer opens in 2 seconds, in a 10 y.o. pc, running in a USB 2 thumbdrive! What magic is this, Anticapitalista?
I tinkered a bit with antiX looks on previous versions. I do understand that antiX is meant to be fast and use the least resources possible, but it got a big face lift with the new theme (it looks almost perfect, some small bugs like the down arrow icon on the File manager not looking ok).
Looks matter, some users probably take a look at antiX and run away, thinking it's a kind of Windows XP clone from the 90's. Now it's a bit more newbie friendly- for example- Round icons are now common in modern Android phones, people are used to that. The new desktop images are some of the best I've ever seen!
Small things like Volume Icon having the "blue bar" available to display the volume in a more precise way is very handy (and I never noticed that feature before).
I do admit that in the menus, most new icons are hard to understand, I have to read the descriptions to really get their meaning... Most try to convey complex functions so... that's to be expected.
But antiX now has a more modern and unique "feel" to it, more uniform across all icons.
I can suggest adding a icon on the desktop so new users know how to quickly add a internet connection icon to their bar, I read a negative review about that, the user didn't even took the time to look for how to connect to his wireless connection in the OS options...
Bigger (by a bit- RAM wise), faster and more modern than ever.
I can't wait for the final version!

For me only one thing would make this version even greater- if, by some miracle, it included skidoo's Fluxbox version, I use (it adds a real start menu and quick start "icons" to Fluxbox bar)- I have to install that manually, so I can run my costumized antiX UI :-(

best antiX ever!
P.

figueroa wrote: ↑Tue Apr 30, 2019 12:45 pmI set up a 2.5 G rootfs. Is -l shows it to be 2,684,354,560 bytes at /live/boot-dev/antiX, however, my 8 G flash drive still shows 6.4 G free from a total of 7.7 G on the ext4 partition. That doesn't compute. I didn't' realize it, but I conclude that the actual space consumption of rootfs may allocated to the file system on an as-filled-up basis. Can I be confident that the file system is really keeping track of available space, or is something wrong here? Upon shutdown, the GUI for saving the persistence file shows 7.4 G total, and 3.82 G free. That computes. :-)

You're right. The discrepancy is caused by us using "sparse" files for rootfs and homefs which is massively more efficient. We use the fallocate program to create sparse files but you can also use: Many programs still report the free space in sparse files as free space for any file to use. The du program was recently fixed. In the past we had to use the --apparent-size option in order for it get the sizes of rootfs and homefs right. Now it works correctly even without that option. We tried hard to not use the overoptimistic free sizes when estimating the space available for creating new files so all the allocated space in rootfs and homefs would be available.

One of the reasons we like to use ext4 for the live-usb is because it supports sparse files. For a large $size compare the time of the "dd" command above with the same command when "count=0 seek=$size" is replaced with "count=$size".

IMO sending bug reports to the projects that haven't fixed their programs yet would be most welcome.

apt update shows two debian.org repos not valid yet for another 1 hr 40 min.

I bumped into this too.

BitJam wrote: ↑Thu May 09, 2019 3:21 pm You're right. The discrepancy is caused by us using "sparse" files for rootfs and homefs which is massively more efficient. We use the fallocate program to create sparse files but you can also use:

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/zero of=$file bs=1M count=0 seek=$size

Amazing. A user (like me) could be easily mislead by df to think they had more Live-usb-storage space because of what is reported, and du in the alpha release still requires the use of the --apparent-size option. I hadn't given it a moments thought before this test drive. Thanks for those details.

Added: BTW, if I use: That would be a new record in usb flash memory size. So much for these everyday tools I've learned to love and trust.