skidoo wrote:bootmenu colors, submenus, etc...
I suspect you would need to retrieve

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"https://github.com/BitJam/antiX-Gfxboot"
linktext was:"https://github.com/BitJam/antiX-Gfxboot"
====================================
(AFAIK, its use, in terms of building, is undocumented) and edit the"source" files, then build a new
gfxboot.c32 (cpio archive file?)
^--- and THAT resides within the iso-template which you'll first need to unpack...

I see…

As a betatester, it never occurred to me to test changing the hostname.
I don't know whether what you're describing (unchanged line(s) in /etc/hosts) represents a bug.
Shouldn't expect a casual user to delve into iso-template and self-edit the hosts file...
...but, if the desired hostname is changing (no line in the .conf file for this?) the snapshot program could
assist the user (by prompting, and opening the working_dir copy of etc/hosts in a text editor) during the workflow.

I don't know, I had never met that either, but I would suppose something in the remaster scripts should be added or changed.

I had done plenty remixes with PCLinuxOS, in 2010 and 2011, with a remaster script running in the user session, which I believe was issued from the same origin as the one antiX uses. I have later done plenty remixes with Ubuntu, since 2012, whith a chroot method, using a build tool (Ubuntu Builder). And never did I have to check the / etc/hosts and / etc/hostname to see if they matched after the resulting ISOs were used to install the system on a test machine. In antiX, I figured out because of a strange message in the console when checking manually for updates. (Or other command lines, not sure what now).

So I would suggest"there is a bug in the remaster scripts". After you will have installed this Edu version can you check and say what you think about it?

Haha, no, I wasn't asking you to send me a pendrive.
I somehow had the notion that you were making a special gift for the child of a relative or friend...
...and that along the way you decided to also publicly distribute the special iso.
My suggestion was toward"fix0ring" a pendrive you had seemingly already created (You wrote"too late, it's already done".)

I see…

Well then you're a hella quick learner. A year or so ago, I tried then got frustrated then gave up.
c3pio archives?!? Seriously, it 2015 ~~ why are we _still_ resigned to fussing with"packing" those 35kb worth of datafiles?

a remaster script running in the user session, which I believe was issued from the same origin as the one antiX uses.

Aha! You wrote"remaster". In my vocabulary too, that (vs"snapshot", aka backup) indicates a goal of redistribution. Anyhow...
I thought PCLinuxOS employed a lightly modified"remastersys" script ~~ easily identifiable by skimming the script.
Remastersys had an asinine limitation; user could specify only 50(max) exclusion patterns.
Really, I suspect that limitation reflects the authors attention toward"providing a nice GUI". How many text input boxes can dance on the head of a pin? Tada! 50

The live boot setup/handling mechanism is, IMO, the prime differentiator when comparing snapshot/remaster tools.
From what I've seen, the remaster script most similar to the current antix script is"refracta".
antix, refracta, porteus, and various puppy variants are still employing aufs (I haven't checked knoppix past v7); everyone else has changed over to using overlayfs.
Skimming various forums, I notice many current liveboot mechanisms can't cope with EFI, or grub2, and many (most?) still do not offer persistence.
I like the"on-demand, per each boot" optional modules loading offered by porteus and puppy, but for me,"pupmode 13 vs pupmode 91 vs..." is too confusing,
and porteus, um, seems like its devs have an arrogant disdain toward supporting fat32 boot media.
During your distrohopping, if you discover a"better mousetrap" mechanism for live persistence, I'm eager to read/try it.

skidoo wrote: During your distrohopping, if you discover a"better mousetrap" mechanism for live persistence, I'm eager to read/try it.

The best I know is a script done by a guy at the PCLinuxOS community. It makes you use a ext3 partition, in the USB stick and the persistent files and changes done in the Live system are stored in a small tree directory as it would be in a regular hard drive, following the usual Linux tree directory of the system. Then, when you install from there, all the changes done in the pendrive are ported as well to the installed hard drive.

The other good one would be the USB Creator GTK tool, from Ubuntu, because it's easy and fast to use, however the persistence is obtained by using a special compressed archive, and the changes done in the usb stick aren't copied to a hard drive when you use it to install.

Here is
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/pclinuxos/pclinuxos/apt/pclinuxos/32bit/RPMS.updates/PCLinuxOS-liveusb-0.9.14-1pclos2015.noarch.rpm"
linktext was:"a link"
====================================
to a package containing this script.

If you can modify it to make it work with deb distros, I'm interested to get a copy!

Else, I'm not diving in the specific tech stuff as much as you, regarding all the remix/remaster methods, I just try to find one that will allow the Bento Openbox project I'm leading, to live long, and this antiX adventure is just a fun and a pleasure to share with the antiX community.

I just realized, btw, that I should not have removed the nonfree firmware, because it triggered the videos to display in a jerky way. The Radeon GPU is of a model which is not listed in the package description, however reinstalling the package fixed the issue.

PS: here, this is an install on a Compaq Presario 920 EA, with 1 GB, an old AMD ATI Radeon GPU, and a AMD Athlon XP 2000+ CPU with no sse2 flag.

(had to install mpv for the videos, deadbeef for the music, and Netsurf to browse the web, to avoid crashes with"dump core illegal instruction" error messages).

Let me know about your testing!

quirks at first boot:
English boot menu, but only French locale available.
Boot menu default entry is labeled"mx-14.4-snapshot", not Qimo.
Boot help menu mentions antix / MX, not Qimo. It also (incorrectly, confusingly) mentions user/password"demo/demo".
I selected timezone, chose Root Persistence, and set F7 save. My chosen timezone was ignored in the desktop session.

quirks / observations during desktop session:
What is age of the intended audience? I worry that the panel icons are too small (will frustrate young users).
Panel background would be better as a solid color. The"stars" displayed (from the recycled wallpaper image) look confusingly like panel icons.
Cyan terminal font is nearly unreadable. Prompt shows"....mx" and the downward strokes of the 'm' are blurred together.
(didn't check. Is it set to display a monospace font? For best result, it probably should be.)
In settings, font hinting, default subsampling is set to"RGB". If the default is"none" in stock xfce, I believe it should ship that way ("none").
Something I clicked (an"about" button in one of the xfce settings dialogs?) tried to open"default browser" and failed. It was trying to launch iceweasel.

I'm surprised that you chose to include gottet and e-peg, but none of the other fine Gott games.
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://gottcode.org/gottet/"
linktext was:"http://gottcode.org/gottet/"
====================================

(I don't have the download url at my fingertips, but recall that .deb packages were available for all the Gott games.)

If you search synaptic for"tangram", I think you'll find an alternative tan game with a better GUI.
( If not, you might check gtk-apps.org or qt-apps.org or softpedia.com )

I didn't notice whether you included an"internet radio" app. If not, you might consider adding (and preset a curated list of kid-oriented and/or ethnic/folk stations).

I reconfigured locales to add english (i can't speak French) and intented to shutdown/restart. Persist-save was successful...
...but, upon reboot, I encountered a fatal syslinux error ~~ one I've never seen previously throughout my distrohopping travels

syslinux version blahblah 1.04 blahbla
unknown keyword in configuration file: ë
no default or ui configuration directive found!
boot: {{{prompt cursor}}}

The default startup services are sensibly configured, IMO, and I noticed that you did a great job of paring unneeded packages.
Many of the quirks I encountered (I've refrained from posting an exhaustive nitpicky list here) are inherent in MX.
Without knowing the age(s) of the intended audience, I can't responsibly comment on the selection of installed applications.

Hello,

Thanks for all your findings. Intended age is kids in primary school. From the moment they can use a keyboard and mouse (let's say, between 2 and 5) up to 14 years old if they had little or no prior experience with computers. When starting at 2 or 3 years old, the limits are reached around 10 years old (my experience with my son who started with"paint" in Windows at the local mayor's cyber space when I started myself : my son is now 15).

Well as I told you, the package for non free linux firmware should go back into it. As for the different parts you are explaining me that can be improved : would you do it, and respin it again? I can't use more time on it to learn how to do that, but I would gladly test a new version if you do it, and host it once it would be fixed.

As for a better Trangram I don't know them. I have done an Edu at PCLinuxOS with the participation of many people who brought their ideas and experience with Edu games, along with their children. I still use the findings from that time.

What do you think? Do you feel like you can work on it? It could be fun to make it the antiX next Christmas gift perhaps?

PS: the games you speak about were already in MX, I just kept them thinking"why not?"

You might disagree, but I think a better approach toward"gifting" a curated selection of EDU apps would be to create
a script which modifies an already installed MX system and is installed via"metapackage installer".
Parents who are already using MX, or are familiar with MX"brand" because one of their acquaintances is using it,
are more likely to trust that it will"provide a safe computing environment for my child".
Compare that to the prospect of expecting parents to blindly"download and trust" an unknown/unsupported obscure"branded" respin/distro.
The base doesn't need to be MX. Could be xubuntu...

Can't expect it to be widely regarded as a"gift" unless the full range of languages is supported.
I mentioned language paring in the context of"help! I can't fit everything onto a CD".
From the outset, my personal choice would have been to ensure the iso would NOT fit on CD.
Consider: if booted from CD, a child's progress cannot be tracked by gCompris, which undermines the stated (edu) goal.

I'm not an MX user. My primary motiviation for participating in this thread was emphasized (blue text) in my initial post.
Considering that you didn't have time/interest in providing feedback as to how much"space savings benefit" each paring step yielded,
at this point my further participation in this thread is unlikely. Good luck with your project.
Post to mepiscommunity.org and someone may step up to assist with polishing the edu respin, or creating a metapackage.
Whatever course you follow, if you intend to retain the 'Qimo' branding displayed on the wallpaper,
soliticing an acknowledgement / authorization blog post on Michael Hall's blog is in order.

skidoo wrote: Considering that you didn't have time/interest in providing feedback as to how much"space savings benefit" each paring step yielded

When you suggested that, it was already too late for me to do that : I had already done it almost completely. However I will keep that in mind in the future if I am brought to redo the same kind of customization.

Also I have been blocked when I tried to answer after your first post, because of this stupid slash-bug (I had kept a copy of my post in a text file on the Destkop in order to post it later, whenever possible).

at this point my further participation in this thread is unlikely. Good luck with your project.
Post to mepiscommunity.org and someone may step up to assist with polishing the edu respin, or creating a metapackage.

I would if I could but there are too many things ongoing on my side now.

Whatever course you follow, if you intend to retain the 'Qimo' branding displayed on the wallpaper,
soliticing an acknowledgement / authorization blog post on Michael Hall's blog is in order.

Isn't it free for use? It's available as a package on the Ubuntu repositories…

PS: the idea of a meta package as"Edu" is a good one, and Xubuntu : no, not that a good idea. antiX MX as a basis is a much better idea, believe me! Actually after I removed a few more services/packages provind some of those services, when idle just after boot, the distribution uses only 92MB RAM (seen in htop).

A nice idea! Sorry, I didn't join the discussion earlier.
Apart from technical problems, I would give the advise (while not being an expert, so only imho) to drop some goals or at least give some of them less weight. For example, why does the ISO have to be CD sized? Such a goal leads to choosing programs like Netsurf and other compromises. If you drop this goal you can choose a fast, well readable and hopefully safe browser (not implying Netsurf isn't safe, but it is often unreadable). You can include educational programs, a collection of audio and video files in different languages, more icon sets. And I think the best DE for children would be Gnome, as I know from personal experience that even smallest kids are able to use Android.

eugen-b wrote:A nice idea! Sorry, I didn't join the discussion earlier.
Apart from technical problems, I would give the advise (while not being an expert, so only imho) to drop some goals or at least give some of them less weight. For example, why does the ISO have to be CD sized? Such a goal leads to choosing programs like Netsurf and other compromises. If you drop this goal you can choose a fast, well readable and hopefully safe browser (not implying Netsurf isn't safe, but it is often unreadable). You can include educational programs, a collection of audio and video files in different languages, more icon sets. And I think the best DE for children would be Gnome, as I know from personal experience that even smallest kids are able to use Android.

You are not an expert but you can become one by starting to work on a spin. The remaster and backup scripts are making it easy to get started!

Goal:
This is a share which you can use as basis or as inspiration to make your's. Gnome? Are you kidding? This is the antiX basis, with Xfce4, that's just the right balance for lightness and comfort.

Why CD size? Yes, why not even smaller, which makes it faster and easier to download. People having low bandwidth will appreciate.

Why CD size as a max size? At least the people whose machines don't boot to USB or who don't know about plop boot manager, or who don't have a USB stick will be able to use it.

Why NetSurf? If you would read the former posts in the thread you would understand that the other web browsers, such as Iceweasel, or such as Midori don't work. Why? the"sse2" flag is missing in the instructions of the CPU and these programs have most probably be compiled with the SSE2 flag, which makes them unusable in a machine having AMD Athlon XP 2000+ and others of the same family CPU. The same reason applies to some other choices : mpv for the videos, deadbeef for the music.

Anyway the small kid does not really need to use a web browser, it's there just in case. More icon sets? What for? The people who this version is intended for want to use it out of the box and don't even want to visit the preferences options. Well, if they happen to want more icons, they can install more sets from the repos or choose nice ones on the gnome-look.org, and the other xfce-look/openbox-look... places.

I have installed the very gartoon-redux-icon
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"https://launchpad.net/gartoon-redux"
linktext was:"https://launchpad.net/gartoon-redux"
====================================
theme which has been improved over the one which is in the Debian repositories, to make sure all the icons needed would show, and that none is missing : and believe me, it's time greedy to seek for the right one (but this is something I've done before, for several sets of icon themes among other things).

I don't drop goals, I have installed for a specific machine, intented for a unique use, a 5 years old girl will have her very own lappy which was probably going to end in the trash bin, when I was handed it with the question"do you think you can get something out of it?".


Now it can play videos nicely, and the educational games are just enough numerous to bring the child gently to a good ease of use on a nice basis : antiX, the distribution for oldies, developped since so many years by the team here.

Many thanks to anticapitalista and to his helpers!

melodie, thank you for an extensive answer!
You easily refuted my main counterargument that Netsurf is a questionable choice for a browser from usability POV. I don't know what sse is, so this point didn't get my attention, but believe me I've read the whole topic. If no other browser works, I would prefer Netsurf over Dillo for a child.
Ok, if Gnome is not viable because of the old machine (I would love if it were less heavy), the you already did s.th. very good from visual design POV, you placed many launchers on the panel. Children love icons and they understand them better than adults, they have more of a photographic memory. It is a pity that the panel has limited size so you cannot enlarge them a bit. Using Quicklauncher plugin which can have launchers set up in rows could work. I would test a dock on the bottom whether the user likes it. The icons in the menu - is it application menu or Whisker? - should be large as well.
But am I talking here about customization which can only be done in the home folder, or can they be done on a general purpose ISO? Should be possible, how esle would the distros have different looks?
What I mean by a different icon set is that it could be for comic like as well. But children are sometimes unpredictable - who knows if she would prefer Faenza or perhaps buuf icons. Of course the parents could download some icon sets and set them up together, an educational process.
One more tip: install a Liquorix kernel and set boot parameter vga=xyz, with xyz I mean the correct resolution code, you know. Then the MEPIS Tux (you know, with Buddhist symbols) will get displayed on boot screen and you know how children like him. __{{emoticon}}__
On the whole, I hope my overall approving tone about your work could come across to you. It is an inspiration for me to try a similar thing.

Hello melodie!
I just came across a Pale Moon build for processors without SSE2 support.

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://www.palemoon.org/contributed-builds.shtml"
linktext was:"http://www.palemoon.org/contributed-builds.shtml"
====================================

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://www.romanstefko.com/pale-moon-sse/"
linktext was:"SSE build (x86)"
====================================
by Roman Štefko
A rebuild of Pale Moon from official source catering to particularly old processors that don't support SSE2.

Hi eugen-b,

You have many reasons to start working on remastering. You are curious, have ideas, and need to test them. I don't have time to continue anything myself with an antiX edu spin, but if I can help you in anyway, it would be my pleasure. (Though there is a bunch of things in antiX which I'm not aware about).

sse and sse2 : there are sets of instructions in the processors. Type"cat /proc/cpuinfo" in your console, and watch the sets of instruction listed in the line"flags".

When a program is compiled with"sse2 on" and the processor does not have sse2, when you start this program in the console to see why it does not start from the menus, all you get is"crash dump. illegal instruction". ;-(

This is why I had to test several programs in categories such as multimedia and internet to get a few needed that would work.