Available for testing - alpha/experimental respin of antiX distro without non-free bits
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I've worked with the antiX lead dev recently to create an antiX respin without antiX's non-free packages installed by default. This version is amd64, has a Linux-libre kernel (5.4) and has abrowser as the default browser (version 84.0.2). If you would like to test it for me, you can grab the direct download or the torrent file here: https://archive.org/download/20210124-anti-x-19.3-libre-respin
antiX is a Debian Buster based distro that has some unique features, especially with respect to its Live USB tools that allow many different persistence options, frugal installs, loading to ram, installing with your changes intact, and making bootable ISO snapshots of your installation with your changes.
This respin is extremely experimental and of course has no warranty of any kind. Please do not trust it with your important data - use it as a vm or as a Live USB and see what you think. If you decide to install it, beware, the antiX installer does not give you a bunch of warning screens before it starts installing and overwriting the partition you pointed it at - it just kind of says "does this look like a good place to install?" and if you say "yes" it starts installing right away. Please make sure your data is backed up before trying this. Let me know your thoughts.
> if you say "yes" it starts installing right away
I like this. "Yes" should always mean "definitely" and never "maybe".
I also like the 699M of the iso. Torrent currently flowing.
>I also like the 699M of the iso.
The smaller ISO size and minimal resource usage are advantages of antiX. It's not tiny like Puppy Linux, but it is small for a distro that can do everything that Debian can and more. Another advantage is that they are committed to continuing to make i386 versions for the foreseeable future, unlike projects like Ubuntu. I'll need to do a libre i386 respin one of these days.
I would have thought only experienced contortionists could reach such level of flexibility, agility and lightness.
For now I am running it from a live usb and all is great.
Long life Metal Rat!
> I would have thought only experienced contortionists could reach such level of flexibility, agility and lightness.
A 100% cabbage diet will do that to a person.
> For now I am running it from a live usb and all is great.
Awesome!
I gave it a go last night installing it onto a spare SSD. So far I can say it isn't bad at all. I had to make some cosmetic changes out of the gate installing Mate. I like the fact it doesn't use Systemd simply because having a libre distro that doesn't is a nice option outside of Parabola which is harder to install. The install was easy and finding system settings was easy. I was surprised they went with just using a default user account instead of asking me to pick the name during install and to see such an old version of Mesa, 18.0.3 I believe. It's not the end of the world, just don't know why they would pick one so old. Maybe that has to do more with Debian than with AntiX. The user account was an easy name change as well. I can't say I encountered any issues so far other than it really wanted me to switch back to their window manager, I ended up having to disable the window that kept popping up to ask me to switch back.
Do they plan to continue having this libre spin on future editions or is this a one off ?
> So far I can say it isn't bad at all.
Awesome!! I'm so glad to hear it's working for you.
> I like the fact it doesn't use Systemd simply because having a libre distro that doesn't is a nice option outside of Parabola which is harder to install.
My thoughts exactly.
> to see such an old version of Mesa, 18.0.3 I believe. It's not the end of the world, just don't know why they would pick one so old. Maybe that has to do more with Debian than with AntiX.
Yeah, Debian Buster is still on Mesa version 18. Bullseye will be on Mesa version 20, so when that is released antiX will do a new release with those newer packages.
> Do they plan to continue having this libre spin on future editions or is this a one off ?
It should be easy for me to keep making "Libre" respins of the future antiX releases, so I think we can keep them going. The next major antiX release will be version 21, sometime after Debian Bullseye is released this summer. I'll try to get a "Libre" respin out right away. In the meantime, as long as you keep updating this one, you should get all the updated Debian and antiX packages for antiX 19.
> I was surprised they went with just using a default user account instead of asking me to pick the name during install ... The user account was an easy name change as well.
What was the default user account name - "demo"? Did you click all the "Next" buttons on the bottom of the installer window while it was copying files? If you keep clicking the 'Next' buttons, it should walk you through setting up your locale, username, and user and root passwords.
If you keep using it there's a lot of good info, walk-through videos, a very good FAQ and wiki on antixlinux.com, along with a helpful support forum. Or drop any questions in this thread and I'll try to help guide you to an answer. antiX has some amazing tools that you won't find on any other distro. For example, it's well worth checking out its incredible variety of Live USB features. Some people use it as a Live USB for years at a time, due to all its persistence options, the easy ability to boot the entire OS to ram, the ability to upgrade a Live USB kernel, etc. If you set up your desktop the way you like it, it has a built-in ISO Snapshot tool that can turn your working desktop into an ISO that can then be be made into a Live USB with persistence using antiX's Live USB Maker. It's cool stuff.
> It should be easy for me to keep making "Libre" respins of the future antiX releases, so I think we can keep them going. The next major antiX release will be version 21, sometime after Debian Bullseye is released this summer. I'll try to get a "Libre" respin out right away. In the meantime, as long as you keep updating this one, you should get all the updated Debian and antiX packages for antiX 19.
Awesome ! I'll probably keep using it to compare with Trisquel and get used to it. Not to mention that there is the odd time that certain programs have issues with certain older libraries in Ubuntu 18.04 where they don't with an OS based off Debian such as AntiX or Pure OS so it helps for testing purposes.
> What was the default user account name - "demo"? Did you click all the "Next" buttons on the bottom of the installer window while it was copying files? If you keep clicking the 'Next' buttons, it should walk you through setting up your locale, username, and user and root passwords.
The default user name was "antix" with the password being the same as the name. I must have missed those buttons. I setup the full disk encryption but didn't notice ther rest.
> If you keep using it there's a lot of good info, walk-through videos, a very good FAQ and wiki on antixlinux.com, along with a helpful support forum. Or drop any questions in this thread and I'll try to help guide you to an answer. antiX has some amazing tools that you won't find on any other distro. For example, it's well worth checking out its incredible variety of Live USB features. Some people use it as a Live USB for years at a time, due to all its persistence options, the easy ability to boot the entire OS to ram, the ability to upgrade a Live USB kernel, etc. If you set up your desktop the way you like it, it has a built-in ISO Snapshot tool that can turn your working desktop into an ISO that can then be be made into a Live USB with persistence using antiX's Live USB Maker. It's cool stuff.
That built in ISO snapshot tool sounds like it will be usefull to me.
I remember that antiX allows the user to select which repository to use: stable, testing, or unstable. And because it is based on Debian, the user can subsequently install a full-blown desktop environment using # tasksel
Regrettably, I've no way to access archive.org from China.
Update: I've got the thread posted on antiX's forum. Regrettably again, I've no way to access Mega Drive from China, too.
Can you access this service: https://www.nomagic.uk/services/#TemporaryFileHosting ?
This one does not require an account: https://upload.disroot.org.
If you tell me a service you can access from China, I'll upload a copy for you.
Thank you very much for your kindness. However, I'm afraid that we don't have access to any web hosting (just like video streaming) service outside China. Even Microsoft OneDrive is censored.
Therefore, I'd like to learn to "purify" antiX by myself. When I visited Greece several years ago, I visited local antiX community as well. Some of the community members also want to share something about purifying antiX.
Where do you usually download Trisquel from?
FYI, there is a Chinese mirror for Trisquel: mirrors.ustc.edu.cn.
The procedure to request a mirror is detailed there: https://github.com/ustclug/mirrorrequest
> Therefore, I'd like to learn to "purify" antiX by myself.
That makes sense. The steps are a bit lengthy, so I'll write them up in a separate thread when I get a bit of time this week. This will be good, as I will put it all down in writing before I forget the steps.
> I remember that antiX allows the user to select which repository to use: stable, testing, or unstable. And because it is based on Debian, the user can subsequently install a full-blown desktop environment using # tasksel
That will be an option for me then. If I set it to testing then I should get Mesa 20.3.4 instead. I'm interested to see what difference newer Mesa versions make on games using Intel HD graphics and a GTX 780 ti on Nouveau.
Changes to use Debian testing repos can be made by modifying the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.list, or with a gui called repo-manager that you can access from Main Menu-Applications-System-Repo Manager, and then go to the 'Debian repos' tab. That will give you access to Mesa 20.3.4.
You'd probably (maybe?) also want to change to the antiX testing repo at the same time to make sure you didn't get version mismatches. The antiX repo can be changed from /etc/apt/sources.list.d/antix.list, or in the Repo Manager using the 'Individual Sources' tab. I think antiX would need to be changed to testing at the same time as Debian, but I'm not totally certain. I've used antiX stable and antiX Sid, but have not used antiX testing.
Forgot to tell everyone - the Passwords for the Live USB are user antix psswd antix, and user root psswd antix
Short How-to - creating a full featured antiX Live USB
Anyone downloading the antiX Libre respin to Trisquel or to some non-antiX system and creating a Live USB from there will not be getting a full-featured antiX Live USB, and won't be getting the options for persistence or frugal installs. (Quick definitions - persistence = saving your changes to the Live USB; frugal install = booting your Live USB to a small partition on your system to increase speed and save changes.)
This How-to is to give you the steps for creating a full-featured antiX Libre respin Live USB when downloading to a non-antiX distro:
1. Download the ISO image from https://archive.org/download/20210124-anti-x-19.3-libre-respin
2. Do your regular steps of creating the Live USB with the 'dd' command or whichever tool you normally use
3. Boot the machine with the Live USB inserted
4. [BIOS machines] At the boot menu, press F4 and select the "toram" option, which will load the entire system into ram, then hit 'Enter' to start
[UEFI machines] At the boot menu, select "antiX Customize Boot (text menus)", hit 'Enter'. Select your language, console column size, timezone options from the ncurses menu (you can just hit 'Enter' at each prompt for the default, which should be fine unless you need a non-English language). At the next prompt, select #4 for the 'toram' option to load the system into ram. Continue to choose the rest of your options as the ncurses menus finish, but you will probably be best to hit 'Enter' for the 'Default' option for each
5. Watch it copy to ram, and your icewm desktop should start up
6. Start the Main Menu - antiX - Live USB Maker. Enter your password (default psswd is 'antix'), and the Live USB Maker should start up
7. Live USB Maker should recognize your USB device that you booted from as the "Target USB Device"
8. Select "Full-featured mode" and "Clone an existing live system". You will be asked to "Select Source Directory". Navigate to /live/to-ram and hit 'Choose', and it will be ready to start creating a new 'Full Featured' Live USB on your existing USB stick
9. Click 'Next'. Live USB Maker will carry out the process of copying the new files to the USB stick.
10. Once it says 'LiveUSB creation successful!', you can close down all the windows and reboot by starting the Main Menu - Logout - Reboot
11. Now you should restart into a full-featured Live USB. You can select persistence or frugal install options with the F5 key. I'd recommend watching a video walkthrough on setting those features up by one of the lead antiX devs here:
Live USB persistence walkthrough - https://invidiou.site/watch?v=kGi9jd1qW8g
Frugal install walkthrough - https://invidiou.site/watch?v=6ZGTBUW3bnA
Some other walkthrough videos worth watching:
Remaster your Live USB - https://invidiou.site/watch?v=RkRjpAzejGE
Creating a custom Snapshot ISO - https://invidiou.site/watch?v=H_L5loC9dd4
Update your kernel on your Live USB - https://invidiou.site/watch?v=y-pktzFFiSc
I could make a bug report that I had serious DPI issues. Everything was tiny. Still, I used this on my ryzen desktop. Usually requires a 5.0+ kernel. No other libre distro I tried will boot on it. I'd say it is the closest to thing to a possibility of a libre distro I have going right now. I run MX as a daily driver. This would be great if it became a regular respin as its what I am use to, but actually freedomware. I used only 238mb of ram. With hyper-threading disabled, and 4 of 6 cores disabled it ran like a champ. UI is a little bloated, but so is MX.
> I could make a bug report that I had serious DPI issues. Everything was tiny.
A lot of distros have that problem with high DPI monitors. I have one monitor that every distro I've tried has that problem initially. Being an MX user you probably figured out to use the 'arandr' command to open up a display manager and reset the resolution?
> This would be great if it became a regular respin as its what I am use to, but actually freedomware.
I do intend to do another antiX Libre respin when the next major version of antiX is released later this summer. Until then, you should be able to just apt update and apt upgrade to stay current.
I really like MX a lot too. I'd like to set up an MX Libre respin, but it would require a lot more of my time than antiX. Maybe someday. I'll probably do a Devuan Libre respin first. Devuan is much easier than antiX or MX to free up, but antiX and MX have much better tools to create the respin with.
I managed to change the DPI via CL. Not my strength, but It was not a huge issue. I usually install gnome(without full systemd) which loves high DPI anyway. It would be nice to have an MX libre spin, but I'd be happy with antiX and would volunteer to be a test dummy. I'm no developer and could provide a laymen testing experience.
Devuan is a little too vanilla I agree. In my own opinion at least a well done antiX respin could cover the needs all 3 communities well enough while allowing you to maximize resources.
> I'd be happy with antiX and would volunteer to be a test dummy.
OK great, well please come back to this thread and list any problems, or better yet just reply to my thread in the antiX respins forum: https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/antix-libre-respin/
Anything we can learn from this next few months will help to make a better respin for the next version of antiX later this summer.
I've now created an i386 version of the antiX Libre respin. ISO torrent and download are available from here: https://archive.org/details/antiX19.3LibreRespin386-20210317
The torrent downloads best (and fast!) using qbittorent. I've had problems with Internet Archive torrents using Transmission.
ISO size is 694mb, small enough to fit on a CD. Like the x64 version, this respin utilizes the Linux Libre kernel from jxself's repo and the abrowser web browser from the Trisquel repo. The kernel version is 4.9.261, the latest in the 4.9 series, which should work better with most older 386 hardware. If you need a newer version of the kernel, just use any of the installation commands on jxself's page: https://jxself.org/linux-libre/
For example, 'sudo apt install linux-libre-4.19' will put you on the 4.19 kernel series, and 'sudo apt install linux-libre-4.19-nonpae' will do the same for non-pae machines.
I've traded out the xfburn CD burning software on this respin for brasero, which works much better in my testing. This respin also has the Synaptic package manager under the Preferences menu.
Usernames and passwords are antix/antix and root/antix for the Live USB. To change the user name and passwords after installation, just use the antiX User Manager in the Control Centre, Maintenance tab.
As before, antiX has extremely advanced Live USB features including loading to ram, various persistance options, frugal installs, Live USB Kernel upgrades, and more. Watch videos on these features and more here: https://yewtu.be/channel/UCFWlej2CSKlXW5uE9opXukQ
I'll repeat my warnings from the x64 respin here: This respin is extremely experimental and of course has no warranty of any kind. Please do not trust it with your important data - use it as a vm or as a Live USB and see what you think. If you decide to install it, beware, the antiX installer does not give you a bunch of warning screens before it starts installing and overwriting the partition you pointed it at - it just kind of says "does this look like a good place to install?" and if you say "yes" it starts installing right away. Please make sure your data is backed up before trying this. Let me know your thoughts.
Unwittingly left my guinea pig eeepc nearby the carpenter ant nest when we decided to flee the place temporarily, as a diversion tactic of course. Will fully install antiX on it if it has not been transformed into silicon Gruyere before I manage to get back there.
Are there any known incompatibilities between antiX and ants?
antiX is actually the favorite distro of all ant colonies.
On the other hand, Ubuntu 17.10 is their enemy to the death.
But of course. The aardvark from Hell to deal with the giant carpenter ants from Hell, and antiX as the perfect bait to lure the whole colony into moving in.
Surely the BBC would want to serialize this sequel of your novel.
Hello,
I am writing this post from an antiX live USB and it is nice.
Awesome!Are you trying the new antiX Libre 386 respin?
Yes I'm trying antiX Libre.
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