keep rolling antiX-11 vs reinstall as antiX-13 or MX-14???

jtwdyp · posted: 2014-06-05 09:32

Hi. I'm not sure if I remember exactly what I heard about running antiX as a rolling release back when I first installed from an antiX-11 iso. But I do know that I strongly disliked the process of recreating my user environment in a new clean install every 6 months using Ubuntu's release model.

Still whenever I look at the forum, everything I see seams to be about antiX-13 or something called MX-14.

So I'm wondering if there is any long term advantage of reinstalling with a more recent iso vs just continuing to run antiX-11 with:

grep ^deb sources.list wrote:

Code: Select all

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free 
deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org testing main non-free
deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ stable non-free

???

anticapitalista · posted: 2014-06-05 09:57

If you are happy with antiX-11 and keep it regularly updated via the testing repos, then keep on rollin'.

You miss some of the newer antiX features, but you may not want them anyway and you can always install them.

On an old Dell laptop with 384 MB RAM and 500 CPU, I have antiX-M8 (lenny) fulling updated to latest wheezy. Runs good.

jdmeaux1952 · posted: 2014-06-05 13:14

Like anti says, the choice is yours. Some people like to play with"the newest and greatest" while others are happy with what they have.

I like to tinker, so I have antiX13.2, MX-14, antiX13.3 with kernel 3.14.4, Linux Lite, and Open SUSE on my hard drive.

jtwdyp · posted: 2014-06-05 17:52

anticapitalista wrote:If you are happy with antiX-11 and keep it regularly updated via the testing repos, then keep on rollin'.

I do believe that sounds like what my plan was back when I installed it.

You miss some of the newer antiX features, but you may not want them anyway and you can always install them.

You could well be right about my maybe not wanting some of the newer features. Of course, If I don't investigate them to find out if I want them I might never know if I'm missing out on something I'd love.

I suppose there is a list of new features in some release notes somewheres, But do they describe the new features well enough to give the uninitiated a clue what the new feature is for?

On an old Dell laptop with 384 MB RAM and 500 CPU, I have antiX-M8 (lenny) fulling updated to latest wheezy. Runs good.

That's good to hear.

jdmeaux1952 wrote:Like anti says, the choice is yours. Some people like to play with"the newest and greatest" while others are happy with what they have.

That's true enough. Though it reminds me that during some update or other my rolling antiX-11 started identifying itself as"Debian GNU/Linux jessie/sid" at the virtual console login prompt. Unless I'm mistaken, When I installed antiX-11,"Debian stable" was named squeeze and at that time testing was referred to as wheezy, which is currently what they're calling stable, and testing is now jessie???

If so than in some ways, by running testing, I'll be getting something closer to bleeding edge application versions, won't I??

I like to tinker, so I have antiX13.2, MX-14, antiX13.3 with kernel 3.14.4, Linux Lite, and Open SUSE on my hard drive.

I'm also a multi-distro/multi-booter. With a few unusual custom settings that I was tired of recreating. So I experimented with some rolling release distros. The other two of which have since self destructed during their equivalent of an"apt-get upgrade"... And so far antiX has rolled along with out major upgrade issues. __{{emoticon}}__

One of the reasons I do this is every now and then I get stubborn about doing something my way instead of just letting the developers make all my decisions for me.

For example: I never permit any distro to force me to put up with any GUI login. I always boot to what used to be known as runlevel 3 and use startx when/if I'm ready for the GUI. {admittedly 99.9% of the time, my 1st command is a user script that uses $1 to select which pre-edited .xinitrc to copy to $HOME and call startx to fire up whichever WM/DE I feel like running that day. (I'm currently liking Openbox with Lxpanel as a default)

Another is in case I do something stupid, like failing to keep my partition backups current. (it's something I know I should do before any major system upgrade, but it's such a PITA...) And on occasion something some Distro or other chose to do wasn't compatible with my hardware. So I like being able to simply boot another distro, finish whatever I might have been doing, and try to repair the broken one using fully customized power tools instead of some rescue CD that doesn't even know the non-standard keybindings my fingers expect to find...

Currently my keepers (installed to both the desktop and the laptop) are:

antiX (rolling Debian based)

Opensuse (rpm based)

Mageia (rpm based)

Note: both Opensuse and Mageia have network methods to upgrade running system to next release that have (so far) worked better for me than Ubuntu's method ever did.

But I"LIKE" the idea of not having to think about when it's time to upgrade to the next release... So I'm tickled pink that antiX seems to really have the rolling release model working.

rokytnji · posted: 2014-06-05 20:20

I suppose there is a list of new features in some release notes somewheres, But do they describe the new features well enough to give the uninitiated a clue what the new feature is for?

Documentation is a thankless job that is hard, tedious, and meticulous. Between testing new features, building workable scripts, developing new releases. Well. We are a small team so we are spread pretty thin. Anti does a fine job on the main page. I used to active helping in the wiki. Not enough members are stepping up to help though.

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Old_News"
linktext was:"http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Old_News"
====================================

Just in case you could not find it. I keep it bookmarked for my own reasons.

PS. I have not killed my 11 install yet, though not through lack of trying.

how-to-break-your-antix-11-install-t4637.html
gtk-update-icon-cache-3-0-9970-gdkpixbuf-warning-t4891.html

Now it is Base 11 Fluxbox with KDE-Lite though 1 gig of ram makes for a painful KDE experience.
So I stay in Fluxbox. But she stills purrs like a kitten. I also went to Unstable/Sid on that box.
Customers still play with it and it makes a good media center.

jtwdyp · posted: 2014-06-06 06:29

rokytnji wrote:Documentation is a thankless job that is hard, tedious, and meticulous. Between testing new features, building workable scripts, developing new releases. Well. We are a small team so we are spread pretty thin. Anti does a fine job on the main page. I used to active helping in the wiki. Not enough members are stepping up to help though.

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Old_News"
linktext was:"http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Old_News"
====================================

Just in case you could not find it. I keep it bookmarked for my own reasons.

Thank you!

PS. I have not killed my 11 install yet, though not through lack of trying.

how-to-break-your-antix-11-install-t4637.html

You, I like! __{{emoticon}}__

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"antix.freeforu ms.org/gtk-update-icon-cache-3-0-9970-gdkpixbuf-warning-t4891.html"
linktext was:"antix.freeforu ms.org/gtk-update- ... t4891.html"
====================================

Now it is Base 11 Fluxbox with KDE-Lite though 1 gig of ram makes for a painful KDE experience.
So I stay in Fluxbox. But she stills purrs like a kitten. I also went to Unstable/Sid on that box.
Customers still play with it and it makes a good media center.

My desktop has only about 1 gig of ram too, And while it runs e17 well enough for me, I'm tired of rebuilding all my keybindings with their painfully rodent dependent tools every few months, so I've converted to openbox. I've got a script that lets me have separate wallpaper on each of my 12 desktop areas. And that makes it"pretty" enough for me...

Speaking of rolling along with my antiX-11 however:

While I was waiting for your reply, I got around to catching up on my system upgrades, I'm ashamed to admit that I apparently hadn't upgraded my antiX installations in a while.

This includes both my antiX installations. The one on the laptop went smoothly. But I'm somewhat concerned about my desktop installation.

At this time I also got around to updating my kernel from the:

vmlinuz-2.6.36-1-mepis-smp

I'd been running for too long to a more current kernel. Since both machines have amd64 processors I went with:

vmlinuz-3.14-1-amd64

In both cases I installed the new kernel first. Though in the case of the desktop I had to also deal with nvidia legacy drivers. (It's an old hp pavilion with built in"nvidia geforce 6150 le" which has never responded well to any distro's Nouveau driver. Nor with the latest proprietary driver.)

For some reason, I still had the 173 driver installed to my antiX even though I'd discovered that the 304 driver worked well with my desktop. So since I was upgrading the kernel, I also upgraded to the nvidia-legacy-304xx-driver...

On both machines I rebooted with the new kernel and checked that my openbox"desktop" was working properly before upgrading the rest of the system.

On the laptop I first did an apt-get upgrade, This upgraded over 600 packages. but it left over 200 packages"not upgraded" So since I know that synaptic would have used the equivalent of apt-get dist-upgrade, I followed through with that.

Since that went so smoothly on the laptop, when I got to the desktop I went right to apt-get dist-upgrade. It upgraded over 900 packages

At some point I looked at the screen just in time to see words to the effect that something probably meant my system was broken, scroll off the screen.

Needless to say I was somewhat nervous when apt-get was finally done. But after a reboot everything seems to be working. except that every time I boot, I see several permutations of this:

Code: Select all

[   43.246012] udevd[2123]: failed to execute '/lib/udev/socket:@/org/freedesktop/hal/udev_event' 'socket:@/org/freedesktop/hal/udev_event': No such file or directory

And that makes me nervous...

Once it finishes booting it all works as expected. But I never saw this error before. So I'm hoping you might have a clue what's actually happening?

In case it's helpful I extracted a little system info with a command I saw in another thread...

inxi -Fxxr {slash}etc modified ouput wrote:

Code: Select all

System:    Host antiXme2012 Kernel 3.14-1-amd64 x86_64 (64 bit) Distro antiX-M11-686 Jayaben Desai 01 May 2011
CPU:       Single core AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (-UP-) cache 512 KB flags (lm nx sse sse2 sse3) bmips 2004.23 clocked at 1000.00 MHz 
Graphics:  Card: NVIDIA C51 [GeForce 6150 LE] bus-ID: 00:05.0 X.Org 1.15.1 Res: 1024x768@75.0hz 
           GLX Renderer GeForce 6150 LE/integrated/SSE2 GLX Version 2.1.2 NVIDIA 304.121 Direct Rendering Yes
Audio:     Card NVIDIA MCP51 High Definition Audio driver snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 00:10.1
           Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Version k3.14-1-amd64
Network:   Card NVIDIA MCP51 Ethernet Controller driver forcedeth port f200 bus-ID: 00:14.0
Disks:     HDD Total Size: 463.0GB (4.0% used) 1: /dev/sda ST3200826AS 200.0GB 
           2: /dev/sdb ST3250820A 250.1GB 3: USB /dev/sdc DataTraveler_2.0 7.8GB 
           4: USB /dev/sdd USB_Flash_Drive 4.0GB 5: USB /dev/sde USB_SD_Reader 1.0GB 
Partition: ID:/ size: 28G used: 19G (70%) fs: ext3 ID:swap-1 size: 4.00GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap 
           ID:swap-2 size: 4.19GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap 
Repos:     Active apt sources in file: {slash}etc/apt/sources.list
           deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
           deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
           deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org testing main non-free
           deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ stable non-free
Info:      Processes 135 Uptime 19 min Memory 405.1/935.9MB Runlevel 5 Client Shell inxi 1.4.95

So ummnn... Any suggestions???

anticapitalista · posted: 2014-06-06 07:10

Just to check all got installed ok, do

apt-get -f install

If you have hal installed, remove it. That maight get rid if the errors.

rokytnji · posted: 2014-06-06 14:02

Some errors are non issues if you are working OK.
I get boot errors and ignore them if I get to the desktop and everything works OK.

But. It takes a lot to get me nervous. I never sweat the small stuff.
Not when the bigger picture looks OK to me.

You will see in my threads I am a loosey goosey linux user with not much fear of breaking anything. That is why they like me here. I am game for anything.

The apt-get -f install is a old habit of mine when fubar sets in.
Errors don't mean much to me till I get to a deesktop.
If I see obvious breakage. I open another thread like I did with gtk-youtube-viewer.

Even then. That is just a small moot issue with me that does not even make me lose
one moment of sleep over.

Minitube is there if I want it.

jtwdyp · posted: 2014-06-06 21:47

anticapitalista wrote:Just to check all got installed ok, do

apt-get -f install

Yeah OK... Didn't seem to do much this time though.

If you have hal installed, remove it. That maight get rid if the errors.

That nailed the problem right on the head.

rokytnji wrote:Some errors are non issues if you are working OK.

I get boot errors and ignore them if I get to the desktop and everything works OK.

True enough. But when the error is a new thing that wasn't there before a major upgrade, I like to KNOW that it's a non-issue. And when I removed the hal I had forgotten was still there {like anticapitalista suggested} not only did the error messages go away, but it boot up became about a minute or so faster... Probably something was waiting for hal to give up.

But. It takes a lot to get me nervous. I never sweat the small stuff.

Not when the bigger picture looks OK to me.

You will see in my threads I am a loosey goosey linux user with not much fear of breaking anything. That is why they like me here. I am game for anything.

No fear here. Except that my lady gets jealous of the time I spend with my computers. So I really like to avoid crashing them so bad I have to start from a clean install. But if it does crash, I simply run one of the others until I have the time to fix it.

The apt-get -f install is a old habit of mine when fubar sets in.

Errors don't mean much to me till I get to a deesktop.

If I see obvious breakage. I open another thread like I did with gtk-youtube-viewer.

Yeah, when I don't know (or can't remember) how to fix it, I tend to reach out to a user forum to.

Even then. That is just a small moot issue with me that does not even make me lose one moment of sleep over.

Me either, I mean if the problem starts cutting into my sleep, my face hits the keyboard... No sleep is actually lost. I just have a stiff neck later on... __{{emoticon}}__