antiX-forum

to Anticapitalista and all the Antix crew members:

this is a very fine piece of work! I installed yesterday night Antix-M8 on an ancient HP Omnibook 900, a PII 300MHz with just 160Mb RAM. It used to have MEPIS 6.5 in a dual boot configuration with Win98 SE. Now Antix-M8 has replaced Mepis, and so far I must say I'm impressed. The footprint in memory at boot is about half of that of Mepis and the OS response is noticeably snappier. I installed the "full" Antix-M8 and it seems to have all that a typical user would need and some more.

I had IceWM installed as an alternate WM for Mepis 6.5, but this "custom" incarnation on Antix-M8 is the first one I really like. I'm still getting used to its simplicity (in a good sense), but it was easy to take care of few things with quick interventions "under the hood". For example make my theme selection to stick, add few more items to monitor in conky and make the menus "auto-update" after new programs installation. The Control Center is just great, coming from years of using Mepis it helps with the learning curve!

All the hardware has bee recognized immediately and works properly. Only pending issue is get ACPI to work. I get the "BIOS age fails cutoff message" at boot and the suggestion to use acpi=force. However, putting that as boot option doesn't seem to help. Well, it is not even 24 hours I have been playing with Antix-M8, so I have already achieved as great deal (including wireless to work), it wouldn't be fun if I had everything fixed in one day!!!!

Again congratulations for the great job. This old HP notebook is a 12" model, although not very powerful is small and light. It is great to be able to continue to use it with a modern yet light OS like Antix.

Keep up the good work, Paolo.

Glad that antiX works well on that old HP Omnibook 900.
That might just be the lowest spec machine running antiX so congratulations.

Have fun with antiX and feel free to post on the forums.

anticapitalista

Hello Anticapitalista,

I'm sure having fun and I'm definitely going to post as I fine tune the installation. Now that I think of it, I have an old 486 DX2-66 with a whopping 32Mb RAM in the basement.... Just kidding, that is beyond hope even for AntiX.

Well, I'm glad to have established a new low-end record! While I wait to buy one of those fancy Asus Netbook I'll squeeze out of this old NB every ounce of power Antix will provide.

I'll see you around.

DSL will probably run on the 486. I have 2 of them running deb 2.2, console mode only. They both have 64 meg ram, though.

Hello, glad to see that old of a machine can run Antix. One pointer you might want to do is make a swap Partition for that old of a computer. That is if you have not done so already. Well any way thought I would point that out.




Greets
n3v3r_m0r3

Paolo, so glad to hear that antiX M8.0 is working out well for you. Just wait until you get a look at antiX M8.2 Test 1, which is undergoing testing right now! As far as I am concerned it is going to be the best release ever! It is still reasonably small and tight; mostly the same applications, updated, with some very nice fresh splash screens, wallpaper, and nicely designed interfaces. The antiX artists have done a terrific job already, the community has been helping to improve language translation, and anti has been doing his usual outstanding job of packaging and integrating it all together. Great community effort!

Glad to have you become a part of our community!

masinick wrote:Paolo, so glad to hear that antiX M8.0 is working out well for you. Just wait until you get a look at antiX M8.2 Test 1, which is undergoing testing right now! As far as I am concerned it is going to be the best release ever! It is still reasonably small and tight; mostly the same applications, updated, with some very nice fresh splash screens, wallpaper, and nicely designed interfaces. The antiX artists have done a terrific job already, the community has been helping to improve language translation, and anti has been doing his usual outstanding job of packaging and integrating it all together. Great community effort!

Glad to have you become a part of our community!

how do we update to 8.2?

What version are you updating from? Simply updating to the latest packages will give you the equivalent software. There are a few new themes and additional localization; those are some of the main differences between previous releases and the current testing release.

If you want to install the newest release, you can do an installation of a newer release and retain the /home directory, then do not overwrite the partition that you were previously using; that, in essence, performs a release upgrade if you want the latest configurations.

Doing a fresh installation completely over any existing installation is also possible, but any files that you have saved are lost using that method unless you back the files you may want to keep first. There are, therefore, multiple choices that you have if you choose to install a newer version over an existing version. Is that helpful?

masinick wrote:What version are you updating from? Simply updating to the latest packages will give you the equivalent software. There are a few new themes and additional localization; those are some of the main differences between previous releases and the current testing release.

If you want to install the newest release, you can do an installation of a newer release and retain the /home directory, then do not overwrite the partition that you were previously using; that, in essence, performs a release upgrade if you want the latest configurations.

Doing a fresh installation completely over any existing installation is also possible, but any files that you have saved are lost using that method unless you back the files you may want to keep first. There are, therefore, multiple choices that you have if you choose to install a newer version over an existing version. Is that helpful?

thanks brian; i want to update from 8.0, but how is it done through synaptic? is there a command line for update?

basically, what are the differences between 8 and 8.2?

i want to update from 8.0, but how is it done through synaptic?

Press the Reload button, let the package cache get reloaded (refreshed with the most recent package descriptions), then press the Mark All Upgrades button, then finally press the Apply button. Before the changes are actually applied, you will have an opportunity to examine them to be certain it is what you want to do, then confirm it and proceed.

To do the same thing by command, you can do

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

.

The basic differences between 8.0 and 8.2 are newer packages, some new art work, additional localization (language translation for applications), and a few additional system management tweaks. The CD should have a description of changes; anti will have the full description when the work is officially released - if you need more specifics, check the posts around the forum and ask anti for more info if you still need more. (I don't have an inventory of the exact changes handy, but that's what I know based on what I've read so far in the forum).

Hope this helps. Feel free to ask more questions. If I cannot help, I'm sure someone else can - especially anticapitalista himself.

Summon, if you're using antiX with only the stable repos enabled maybe you should leave it like that since you'll certainly have fewer problems. Now, if you're using it with all (stable and testing) repos enabled and you want to test this one (maybe to localize it in japanese ) then you may try. If you can, just burn another cd from the test2 iso .

Just to mention that 8.2-test2 is not finished yet, in fact, there is a problem with the localisation particularly of pt_BR (sorry about that secipolla). This has now been fixed and 8.2 when released should have few if any bugs.

Also, antiX doesn't have sudo set up by default, so you have to use su in a terminal, root password

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

and read what it will do before hitting the Enter button.

If you are happy with antiX-M8, then you can simply use apt-get as above to keep the apps up to date.

masinick wrote:To do the same thing by command, you can do

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

.

Who is this new guy with the sudo commands? Where did he come from?

eriefisher wrote:

masinick wrote:To do the same thing by command, you can do

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

.

Who is this new guy with the sudo commands? Where did he come from?

Hey, I tend to install all of the tools because I can't always remember who has what. I know that many Debian based distros either have or at least have available sux for use with X, but it seems that people are either gung ho for sudo or they hate it; personally I find it convenient when I am using the command line, eg. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade. In fact, I've made an alias called ug which invokes those very commands, so I tend to install sudo if it is not already there. You can laugh though, but it might be early alzheimers creeping in too!