proof
This is proof that systemd is achitecturally wrong. GUI frameworks being dependent on what some people insist on calling an "init system"?
648 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2007
I bought a pair of Pi 4 last year. One plays music through its jack socket to the hifi (so no upgrades to Pi 5 for that one) and displays on the 4k television. The other has no display and runs my cameras and alarm.
Being a systemd-hater, I installed Devuan on both, although there is no official distro release. (There are unofficial images.) It looks as though MX might have been a more supported option.
Is there really a "special" partition for EFI? I have a relatively recent NUC, and installed Devuan via the standard installer. The drive has a GPT partition table, with one small partition formatted to VFAT with the UEFI files in it. Why couldn't I modify it with the old gparted? [Not that I have any reason to.]
I don't know what you're doing wrong, but OpenBox works fine on my 4k screen. All I had to do was use Obconf to adjust font sizes. Oh, and install "big-cursor" to make the mouse pointer visible.
I've tried tint2 but prefer xfce4panel (which does come with a system menu). You don't need the full xfce4 suite, but can pick and choose.
I've been using Vivaldi as my main general-purpose browser for a while now, but it's looking as though I'm not the target audience. A previous "feature", stacks of tabs, came enabled after one update, and I had to search the internet to find out how to disable it. We'll see if this new, superfluous facility is "opt-in" or "opt-out".
At most, I might have 3 open tabs at once, and even then, I can only read one of them at a time.
There are still people who refer to systemd as an "init system". Why should an init system give a flying fig about the directory structure its OS is using? Actually, why should anything care about the underlying directory structure? A distro which perversely renamed or restructured the entire heirarchy would still be Linux.
(I have no strong opinions on /bin vs /usr/bin etc. My latest fresh Devuan install left them separate.)
I bought a 12th-gen one recently, to replace my ancient i5 laptop. I'm very happy with it. There is a fan, but it only kicks in occasionally and is quiet enough for me, even sitting on the desk 50cm from my ears. I had no problems installing Linux on it, and Intel even maintain (currently) a .deb archive for firmware and video drivers.
The Hebrides have tried rocket mail. In 1934, two solid-fuel rockets packed with letters exploded in the sky over Harris & Scarp.
I have a little netbook which I use if I don't want to get out of the armchair...
The power button toggles suspend-to-ram, which means that it "boots" in less than a second if I need it. Obviously, if I don't charge the battery for a week, or however long it takes, once recharged, pressing the power button will do a normal cold boot.
I do have a script that does a suspend-to-disk if the battery gets very low, but of course, that only works when the device is alive. Historically, I've always created swap partitions larger tham memory size, but I'm pretty sure that suspend-to-disk does compression anyway.
I wrote a script which polls the council's website and scrapes the bin collection dates. It then changes an icon on my home page to tell me which bin to put out. It must save me literally seconds every month.
Of course, it will break if they make even a tiny change to the format of their page.
A couple of years ago I found a stash of installation floppies and even a CD in the attic (I was moving house) and got OS/2 Warp working except that if I booted it a second time, it thought it was being installed from scratch again and asked for all the floppies in turn. I fiddled with it for a while but didn't get any further before I lost interest.
...why have I never been able to get it running in a Qemu/KVM virtual machine? To install ChromeOS Flex, you had to tell it what the hardware was, and only some specific machines would be accepted.
Or has that changed?
If it's open source, I suppose I could build a version from scratch.
I've just replaced 2 home "servers" -- security and media streaming -- with Raspberry Pis. Both were antique laptops. (I was spurred into action by the fan failing on the Thinkpad for the second time.)
My everyday computer is also a laptop, driving two screens, but also long in the tooth. I was thinking that a small, fanless unit would be a good upgrade, but I'd want more power than a Pi.
I wonder what this decision will do to prices.
These were my thoughts too. Why not spend the same effort testing, and if necessary, debugging a kernel release from Torvalds?
I've been compiling my own kernels from kernel.org for almost 20 years now and have never had one that crashed or wouldn't boot. (Except once when I forgot to include the new-fangled ATA drivers.) OK, so I'm a hobbyist, not an enterprise.
I remember that a version of iTunes would delete music files from local storage and use the "cloud" version instead. It worked from the song title and artist, and so it upset people who had an alternate or rare version of the music, and found that it had been deleted forever and replaced by a pointer to the mainstream version.
My own quirk is that I dislike bloat. I've used Debian, and then Devuan for about 20 years, and I constantly strip out stuff that isn't necessary. Things like Avahi, which is installed by default, and appears to be a piece of software that runs constantly, waiting for me to buy a new printer. Consolekit claims to "keep track of seats". I have one seat. And so on.
Recently, I installed Devuan from scratch on an old laptop from the official ISO, and then spent about 2 days removing packages.
This led me to my current little project, which is to create a bootable image which has busybox, dpkg and apt-get, so that I can install a system by adding, rather than subtracting, packages.
User scripts are installed by the user and live on his or her device. They aren't random bits of code that download and run.
On these web pages, I have one called "WiderReg", which I wrote to expand the content and remove useless white space on The Register.
In pre-GPS times, my first solo flight away from my home airport took me over the wide open, uninhabited areas of Georgia (USA). When I turned around to come home, the sun was lower and there was a haze and I couldn't see a fucking thing. The airport had an omnidirectional beacon at the end of the runway though, leading to happy landings.
But hasn't non-free software always been available in the Debian repos? I used Debian from pre-1.0 days until moving to Devuan to avoid systemd. If I count the packages now with "nonfree" or "non-free" in their one-line description, there are 27 hits.
$ apt-cache search ""|grep -c "nonfree\|non-free"