Hi!
I'm considering switching from Ubuntu to antiX as my computer, it seems, is getting far too old to run Ubuntu. I have a few concerns about antiX and hope you'll clear them.

First of all, what exactly is antiX? Is it a selection of packages from Mepis and Debian that combined are a better choice for those with older computers? If so, Mepis is based on Debian stable and antiX on testing. What happens if the two aren't compatible?

What is Mepis and what does it add/remove from Debian? What does antiX take from Mepis and what from Debian? I believe Debian testing can get unstable because of the lack of control of a security team. How does antiX overcome this instability?

Since there are, now, so many packages available to me from Debian, am I right in presuming I can run multiple desktop environments side-by-side? (e.g. GNOME, KDE, fluxbox, etc). Say I don't want a lightweight DE and want to use GNOME/KDE (I may want a lightweight one, I'm just finding out about the options), am I better off going with Mepis or Debian?

What are the release cycles that Mepis/antiX follow? Are they simply based on Debian, or is there a separate cycle?

A lot of my above questions might be repeating themselves. It's just that I've been pointed to antiX and I'm trying to understand what exactly I will get in antiX that I will not in the distros it is derived from.

How have others who share their computer with not so tech-savvy people found their transition to antiX from say Ubuntu, or even Windows? (It took a while for everyone to get used to Ubuntu, so the transition is a concern)

Thanks in advance!

I'll try to answer some of your questions.

Mepis is debian with a custom kernel and some distro-specific user utilities. mepis/antiX has its own installer that is quite friendly for your basic installs. Most if not all debian packages will work with antiX or mepis. Mepis uses the KDE desktop environment. antiX defaults to a customized icewm environment, and fluxbox is also available out of the box. Debian testing can get wonky from time to time, but the anti and the rest of the team are usually right on top of those issues. If that is a concern, once the original install is complete, you can enable the debian stable repos. They are already in the sources for apt-get/synaptic. I often do this myself...

You can run other desktop environments. Many folks here have used XFCE or LXDE with success. Fewer of us have tried gnome and KDE. There are lite versions of these DE's available in the antiX metainstaller (this is different from synaptic).

antiX nominally is a rolling release based on debian testing. Mepis releases with debian, with a package update roughly half-way through debian's cycle.

my wife can use antiX without any trouble, particularly the icewm configuration, as it looks a lot like windows. We use it mostly for web browsing and the occasionally office-type document. I usually install openoffice for the latter, as I find abiword doesn't format .doc files quite the same way as MSword, and that is an issue for me. If you don't need format compatibility with word, abiword is a very nice word processor.

There are a lot of utilities in antiX that are specific. You have the antiX control center, which gives you a more or less one-stop place for system settings, including buttons that open the correct configuration files for some of the WM's features. I use this regularly. The work into the control center is really quite a benefit to this distro and is something that many other light weight distros don't have.

personally, I used a lot of other light distributions prior to antiX. I've been here since version 7, and while I try out others from time to time, antiX is my permanent install on my older computers and I actually keep a usb-key version in my backpack for use with my newer netbook. I've tried the slackware based stuff (zenwalk, vector, wolvix) and the 'buntu's (crunchbang, xubuntu) and some odd balls (elive), but I also come back to antiX. For me its the perfect combination of features and performance.

Plus with this community (here and at mepislovers.org), any hic-ups that come along can usually get addressed.

Hope this helps.

d.o.

Thanks for that! __{{emoticon}}__ I'm now going to try the antiX LiveCD with everyone sharing this computer. If everything works out well, I'll switch to antiX.

I have one clarification. If I am not wrong, there was an occasion when one Debian distribution wasn't binary compatible with the previous. Should this happen again, we can't keep jumping up and down between stable, testing and sid, right? How does this work, then, with Mepis based on one release and antiX on the same and the next?

Thanks again!

umang,

here's a little insight into Debian branch's, by biotube, a regular on the debian forum's:


Biotube wrote:

Unstable (permanently Sid): When a new version of a package(or a new package all together) gets uploaded, it usually goes here. Sid machines can be highly volatile, (giving birth to the saying"If it breaks, you get to keep both halves"), although it's calmed down in recent years thanks to experimental.

Testing (currently"Squeeze"): After a while, a package in Sid with no really bad bugs gets moved here(the exact time depends on the urgency of the update). For this reason, it's much more stable than Sid. Since packages are updately fairly quickly, it's recommended for desktop users(don't let the name fool you - testing can be more stable than some distros' (especially the-one-that-cannot-be-named) releases).

Stable, (currently"Lenny", soon to be"Squeeze"): Every once in a blue moon, the Debian release team puts testing in what's know as"The Big Freeze". During this time, nothing but bugfixes may be moved to testing. Once all release-critical(RC) bugs are gone, testing becomes stable and a new testing branch is opened. Since only bugfixes are allowed in stable, the packages tend to get dated rapidly.

For getting to know antiX, check out:


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://antix.mepis.org/index.php/Main_Page"
linktext was:"http://antix.mepis.org/index.php/Main_Page"
====================================
and have a look at the antiX FAQ which you will find under help on the livecd or install


cheers,
oldhoghead

oldhoghead, thanks. __{{emoticon}}__ However, I actually know that pretty well - I maintain a package on Debian __{{emoticon}}__ . I was just wondering whether there are any issues when the compilers change. IIRC, you lose compatibility when you change something like gcc.

Once you have antiX-M8.5 installed and if you keep dist-upgrading via the Testing repos as default (or for the adventurous enable Sid), antiX becomes more and more Debian and less and less MEPIS. You'll notice that the MEPIS repos are not enabled by default. This is to avoid the possible incompatibility issues.

It isn't too difficult to convert an antiX install to a full Debian only install. You would have to install another kernel, liquorix is recommended, check all works ok and then remove the MEPIS components.

Wow! Gave me an answer before I could begin to say anything! I was typing this when I got the notification:

Also, am I right in guessing that once antiX is installed I can jump to Debian by messing around with the sources.list, right?

Also, I'm a bit worried about not having GNOME. If I or others don't like IceWM, how easy is it to back out and make my antiX installation a Debian-GNOME installation (I guess Debian's GNOME will be more stable than Ubuntu's so I won't have many of the problems that I am having now).

Open Synaptic, if you haven't done already, and search for the localy installed packages. I believe there are a couple of them that ain't in Debian's repos (like gtkdialog and xmms) and the ones that came from MEPIS (mainly the kernel related).
I can't talk much about how the system was built because I don't understand about that (I believe you may understand much better). Like anti may have built it based on how MEPIS is built (when I say 'built' I mean set up, the init thing et. al.).
Package wise it's plain Debian testing but may be stripped of something to start with.

To be honest with you, I believe any lightweight window manager (graphically operated, not the likes that one has to use the keyboard) like IceWM and Fluxbox are much easier to learn than a Gnome or KDE thing (not to speak of Windows). Even if one has to edit text files to configure it this is quite simple since the WMs themselves are simple.

If antiX works fine in you machines, it's a good option.

I don't recommend installing LXDE. I have installed it in antiX sid and even having it uninstalled there's something that makes the first 'open file' dialog of the session take ages to open. I think it's an Openbox bug but don't take my word for it because I didn't take the trouble to find out. This happens in my Debian sid installation too (which has IceWM, LXDE and the default Gnome) but it doesn't affect the Gnome environment. I believe it happened in my antiX testing too but this time I had installed only plain Openbox and when uninstalled it things got back to normal.

-edit- having seen your post, you can just install Gnome over antiX. the 'advantage' over the Debian testing cd is that it installs much quicker and also you can build your Gnome starting with a minimal one.

As I recall from past posts (or maybe chats), the gnome-lite install from the meta-installer is quite memory friendly too.

Great. When I first started this thread, I really didn't think I'd consider antiX as seriously as I am now! Sounds really cool.

I finally installed AntiX!

Great work, really! Awesome installer - very easy to use, mind-blowing speed, it confirmed all and only the things I wanted confirmed In short it was really very good. My only complains were the next/back buttons. I though they were for going across the intro slides while the install took place and I lost an install mid-way thinking I had missed slides and clicking"Back". (In the next install, I thought that there were no more slides after the first one because"Next" was disabled and didn't read most of them).

The LiveCD was great. I think it booted faster than an installed Ubuntu did a few years ago! Very good job. It's going to be my default LiveCD for any recovery, etc type of work. You need to be congratulated for managing to make a LiveCD work so very well..

About the actual install: IceWM and Fluxbox both took less than a second or two to log in, on this ancient PIII. Fantastic! However (unfortunately there has to be one), I never really like how either worked. The menus, desktop, ROX, etc really didn't feel natural and I began to miss my GNOME desktop.

I didn't have any problems as such. I had removed all the configurations files before installing (except that of those programs whose settings I wanted to hang on to). Because of this, I was given a message that went something like"Failed to execute login command". This fixed it: I would suggest that while doing a fresh install where the /home partition is retained, the user should be prompted to allow this command to be executed automatically - you never know what sort of a Linux system the user is coming from and this can cause problems. An advanced user can always take a diff and see what he/she wants copied.

While booting, I was asked about video modes and an undefined video mode number. Changing vga=791 to vga=normal fixed the issue for me. AntiX then booted in a terrible hurry, as if it had missed a plane - slim showed up before I could blink my eye!

Although I didn't go with the minimal CD, I did feel that there was a lot of unnecessary software. I felt a little flooded with the number of image viewers/digital camera related tools and the sound/CD related software. Some of these, I felt, could have been replaced with other software - GNOME Do (I believe it runs on IceWM and Fluxbox), gtg (which has been so popular recently) and Liferea maybe?

Overall, I'm really impressed with AntiX. Fantastic work! For those who really need to run a really old computer, I'm definitely going to suggest AntiX. However, I personally found the need to use a lot of heavy software (even if it is at the cost of performance) and lightweight applications and WMs didn't click like I hoped they would. I later ended up installing GNOME-Lite (and plan to install the full desktop environment soon). My computer is now"antiX-almost-Debian".

I have one last question: Does AntiX have a different video driver/video components in some-place-important (like kernel)? Although the computer itself is really really fast, videos don't really look good. A flash app (inside Iceweasel) was not smooth at all (it was in the Ubuntu installation on this computer) and when I tried to play an avi file, I didn't manage to get it to work well (it worked with a small size, when I made it full screen, I lost the video and could only hear the audio). Do I need to install anything extra to get videos to work properly?

Also I read on the AntiX wiki that I shouldn't use aptitude and apt-get - I should choose one and stick to it. Any reason for this?

Once again, I think AntiX is a great OS! I just don't think it's the best fit for me, right now. I'll certainly come back sometime and look at it, possibly even contribute in whatever way I can (documentation, participation on the forums, code, etc) but for now my AntiX installation is headed"debianwards".

Hi,
Also wanted to know whether there is a bug tracker for antiX. I found a thread on the Mepis lovers forum, should I post there?

Right now, I've found that many programs that are not installed as packages (already there in antiX but cannot be remove through apt) put files in /usr/share/applications. If I am not wrong, these should go in /usr/local/share/applications (especially if there are installing in /usr/local/). I'm not usually supposed to manually mess with things inside /usr/share/ which I would have to do if I were to remove some of the '.desktop' files.

There were a couple more that I've forgotten right now, but when I remember them where should I post them?

Start a thread in this forum would be better.

Done. __{{emoticon}}__ It's more of a suggestion than a bug, but here it is anyway: suggestion-about-files-packages-t2408.html