coyotito wrote:Refracta still has the wifi issue, on this eeepc 1000H I had to install ralink driver manually.

I believe this is by design, as they don't want to install anything that is not totally free - but they do at least supply firmware for the user to install. __{{emoticon}}__

Right, so one should add the Debian non-free repo or something?

You'll find them in your home/firmware folder, just use (sudo) dpkg -i to set up the one you want, which can be found from the output of dmesg, reboot & configure your wifi.

Yes, it took me a couple minutes to fix after installing. I used lspci.

Just wondered if they have purged nonfree stuff from their repos. Edit: they have their own nonfree/contrib repos.

A very good distro that is not so well known now, combination of Debian Stable or testing and KDE (plus a LXDE edition): Kanotix.

I used this a couple years on my desktop. 1 man distro, name from lead developer *Kano' ..

It does not have a lot of graphical tools other than what comes with KDE as the developer thinks it best to set up and maintain
one's system using the command line, actually claims gui tools can mess up system files.

It uses systemd as it has a gaming system as one of the goals: emphasis on newest graphics and other drivers, Steam and other gaming stuff in latest version etc.

One of the best on hardware recognition, with an up to date ubuntu kernel recompiled the debian and Kano way..

these days they do not make public releases but the nightly builds are stable and up to date.

To try this distro download the current nightly build.

A specialty of this distro is the automatic detection (through grub) and installation of latest proprietary driver for
high end/gaming graphic cards.

Refracta is now very good, have it running perfectly on Eee pc 1000H. very fast, have LXDE, Windowmaker and the default Xfce4.
tried antiX (15 i think but bluetooth audio was not cooperative), Bunsenlabs (no sound), Salix (sound probs)
but this is the solution.

btw it was said here that it anf antiX are built the same way. Last time I tried antiX some packages were uninstallable because of systemd deps. This seems not to be the case in Refracta/devuan. Maybe it changed in antiX too?

coyotito wrote:A very good distro that is not so well known now, combination of Debian Stable or testing and KDE (plus a LXDE edition): Kanotix.

I used this a couple years on my desktop. 1 man distro, name from lead developer *Kano' ..

It does not have a lot of graphical tools other than what comes with KDE as the developer thinks it best to set up and maintain
one's system using the command line, actually claims gui tools can mess up system files.

It uses systemd as it has a gaming system as one of the goals: emphasis on newest graphics and other drivers, Steam and other gaming stuff in latest version etc.

One of the best on hardware recognition, with an up to date ubuntu kernel recompiled the debian and Kano way..

these days they do not make public releases but the nightly builds are stable and up to date.

To try this distro download the current nightly build.

A specialty of this distro is the automatic detection (through grub) and installation of latest proprietary driver for
high end/gaming graphic cards.

A bit of history here. Back around the time that Ubuntu came out,"Kano" came out with Kanotix. It was one of the most creative, fast, usable systems at the time. After a couple of years there were some differences of opinion and most of the people working on Kanotix went off and formed another really good distribution called"sidux", based on Debian Sid.

It was one of the very best Debian based system at the time, fast, useful like Kanotix, but based on Sid instead of Debian Stable. With it's"German engineering" it was excellent, but unfortunately, some good things have disadvantages too. There were a few"hot heads" that got into controversies and sidux changed to aptosid, and then another variation, siduction. All of them are or were fast and effective, but I got tired of having to watch every word I said if I wrote anything to anyone on their teams, so I ceased active testing, used mostly either Debian Sid directly or I'd"re-purpose" an antiX or MEPIS or MX system, retrofitting it with Sid instead of Stable or Testing repos and I could make all of them dance to the beat that I laid down (to use a musical metaphor).

I didn't even know that Kanotix was still active; if it is, perhaps it's worth a look. All of them were always fast, efficient, and well made; I just got tired of the nasty forum discussions on a few of them, and I've never had that problem here, so I can run fast stuff, modify it, and suit my interests great here with antiX, especially if I use antiX Core -"you build what you want" with antiX Core.

I agree Kanotix was a good distro of its time, but it did seem to disappear.

Then I got into 'lightweight' distros, #! (crunchbang) was a good one, & when that was to be no longer, I switched to AntiX, & been here ever since, with just a few deviations, to keep my hand in with OpenBSD, & now looking at Devuan based distros. __{{emoticon}}__

fatmac wrote:I agree Kanotix was a good distro of its time, but it did seem to disappear.

Then I got into 'lightweight' distros, #! (crunchbang) was a good one, & when that was to be no longer, I switched to AntiX, & been here ever since, with just a few deviations, to keep my hand in with OpenBSD, & now looking at Devuan based distros. __{{emoticon}}__

My experiences are somewhat similar. When I first tried Kanotix, I believe that I still had a Dell Dimension 4100 desktop system - back in the nineties. It could run most distributions that were available during its useful lifetime, but as it aged, it loaded the larger, resource consuming distributions slower than others. Kanotix was a bit more"nimble" than most of the other KDE-based distributions during that era, though Slackware was probably the neatest in dealing with whatever desktop environment or other software was present, because the Slackware packages never added anything to the software, so it was clean and neat.

When sidux was created by former Kanotix developers, it had a nice run as a fast, efficient, cutting edge system.

When it comes to"lighter" software from a resource usage perspective, I agree, distributions like Crunchbang, DSL, FeatherLinux from days past were among the light resource consumers. Believe it or not, the early (May 2003) release of MEPIS, which I believe used IceWM for about a year until"SimplyMEPIS" came out in 2004 with KDE. Both were modest consumers of resources for that period of time. But you're right; when antiX came out, the early versions were very gentle on system resources, and even today, you can configure antiX to conserve system resources very effectively, and in fact, if you use antiX Core, you start with only a core system, with a Linux kernel and just enough utilities to build a custom system, and you can turn it into whatever you want. I've built antiX Core systems with a wide variety of different configurations, ranging from full-featured desktop systems with KDE and more to the opposite extreme, where I'd put a graphics display server and the lightest graphical display software I could find. My favorite project though was creating my own custom Xfce desktop system, not that different from the current MX Linux software - but it was my own custom implementation of antiX Core.

There certainly are numerous different ways to construct systems these days, and though some people complain about the number of distributions available, I enjoy the diversity, and I simply pick a few of the ones that most closely fit whatever kind of activity I'm doing - and that changes from time to time. AntiX, because it's so flexible, has fit well into my personal style because I've always been able to customize it to suit my interests and needs.

Note that sidux has now morphed into Aptosid which later became known as Siduction now. Siduction has been pretty solid and has a good community even though they didn't put out a release for some time until 2016.1 came out on New Years Eve.

I had to abandon certain distros like Semplice, and other Debian spins. Just because the newer xorg shipped with all of them would not play nice live on my IBM T23.

Anything with cutting edge xorg packages are a no no on Sis, Savage,and Via graphics gear lately.

I never tried
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on my Savage graphics IBM T23 laptop or my Stuck under the shelf from city hall Sis machine IBM E50, low profile desktop, to see what they used. But I bet it is just stock Debian with stuff stripped away with no mods to graphic driver problems like these machines give a user. I think Puppy is one of the few that gives a vesa choice on boot instead of xorg.

DeepDayze wrote:Note that sidux has now morphed into Aptosid which later became known as Siduction now. Siduction has been pretty solid and has a good community even though they didn't put out a release for some time until 2016.1 came out on New Years Eve.

Yeah, the history of Kanotix ---> sidux ---> aptosid ---> siduction have yielded many high quality distributions.

Kolibrios.
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Only for fun, not very useful. But I am impressed how fast boot (only 1 sec) and how low it is in resources, only 8Mb of Ram. A lot of games are added.

The reason I use Kanotix LXDE on my cheap Lenovo laptop (quiet but slow and underpowered so needs light OS),
is that I need my 4G modem to work (Huawei 392u)

And this does not work whatever you do in current antiX or MX. Kanotix also gets the brightness controls working
without having to use command line tricks.
Weird with the modem, it worked in both nm-applet and wvdial up to Wheezy and ubuntu 14.
Then it stopped working in nm-applet and then wvdial started giving trouble also.
For whatever reason it does not work in versions of Jessie that are 'too upgraded' in my experience.
So on my desktop I had to go back to Xubuntu 14.04. (too slow for the Lenovo and bluetooth does not work too well)
Which is a very good distro, boots in a few seconds where Mint 18 used several minutes with systemcrap.
Systemdfree except necessary deps, end of a long line of ubuntu development.
Actually a nobrainer if you want to use ubuntu and don't need something from latest ubuntu or mint.

When I see articles mentioning the"top five" or"top ten" distributions, especially if it's the top distributions for older computers, it bothers me when I do not see at least one of our antiX derivatives - or even both of them, when I see what I perceive as distributions that aren't any lighter than ours, and often not as flexible.

At times I've written about our distributions and commented, but I do not always have time to research and check every article and respond.

I hope that if any of you run into such things, you also mention antiX and MX, especially if you can do so in a complementary way and cite a few (of the MANY) reasons why both distributions are light, useful, and well worth using on a regular basis.

Puppy has served me well on many occasions and I occasionally grab a copy.  In the past, I've also tested Absolute Linux, a nice light implementation based on Slackware.  About a decade ago now I was on a crusade for light distributions; Feather Linux, SliTAZ and several more that I can't remember any more were among those that I tried out.  it's a credit to the work done here that antiX is among the few in this category that was around a decade ago and has managed to improve while still keeping at least one version available that fits onto a small capacity media source.