Thanks for the report Peter. It's really useful to get a feel of what is and is not working on these minimalistic Linux distros.
On 16 September 2010 08:22, Peter Alcibiades <palcibiades-fi...@yahoo.co.uk>wrote: > I have finally fired up Rev Media 4.0 on two minimalist Linux distributions > as a start on the effort to discover whether the problems are really due to > not having all the necessary files installed, and whether they are due to > the mulifarious nature of Linux. > > I began with Slitaz and Tiny Core, the latter of which gives new meaning to > the expression 'minimalist'. It is gui userland Linux system in 11 Mb. If > we still had floppies, it would just about be deliverable on a handful. It > uses almost none of the standard components. All applications have to be > installed from repository. Both of these distros run in memory, so they > are super fast. > > If you do this at home with Tiny Core, you should probably go with 3.1, > just out. I used 3.0. It has 2.6 kernel, BusyBox, Tiny X, FLTK graphical > user interface and flwm window manager. Without getting too far into the > recherche details, this is not your standard distro. This is as minimalist > as X windows can get. Get it here: > > tinycore_3.1.iso > > The other distribution is Slitaz, less minimalist, this has a whole 30 Mb > and runs OpenBox, so a standard GUI, though not one most folks here may be > familiar with. It comes with XOrg and LXDE bits and pieces. Midori as web > browser, leafpad editor. It is a usable desktop out of the box, unlike > Tiny Core. Get it here: > > slitaz-3.0.iso > > I did not use these in VMs, but on a spare bare metal machine we now have > available. There is not going to be any difference if you run from CD in > live mode, or if you install on hard drive, since in either case they both > load directly to memory. I don't use VMs for this stuff in the interests > of eliminating as many variables as possible. > > I made no modification whatever to Slitaz, but on Tiny Core, using the > terminal, was unable to cd to the USB drive on which I had placed Media. I > therefore installed PCManFM from the repository, which brought down a > modest bunch of dependencies, including Gtk2, all of which went by in a > flash. I didn't make a note of the others but can find out what they were > if anyone is interested. > > It would be nice to know what people think should be tested for to make > this rigorous. What I did was two things. First, some minimal exercise of > the IDE. Created a new mainstack, dragged objects onto it, resized them. > This worked fine. The font (yes, singular is intended) could be resized > fine. The dictionary displayed and worked fine. You can alternate between > IDE and browse mode. Buttons work. Second thing was, when I had a stack, > I then moved it to another virtual desktop, popped over to the virtual > desktop and clicked it. It instantly went back to the first one, where > Media was open. So virtual desktops do not work here. > > It does not look like the problems could be missing dependencies. Rev > seems to work exactly the same if its in one of these totally minimalist > environments, including with Tiny Core which has out of the box almost > nothing the big ones have except what you absolutely have to have to run > the kernel and a command line, or if it is full fledged and bloated like > Gnome or KDE. > > The environment I have found where Rev doesn't work at all is Ion2 window > manager. This is actually a very nice working environment, its becoming my > favorite. Its a tiling and tabbing WM. You have tiles open, and your apps > take up the entire tile, in a tab. The tiles sit side by side on the > desktop. It handles pop-up windows in an unusual way, they all appear at > the bottom of the tile you are in. Rev does not like this, and it crashes. > When you get used to Ion and know the keyboard shortcuts, its simply > superb, fast, intuitive and very easy. You start apps from the keyboard > with auto fill to help. Everything else seems to work with Ion, so this > may be an indication that Rev is not standards compliant on the desktop > issue. > > So, tell me what else people want to see exercised, and I will do it, this > is just a start. And next week I will hopefully have time to do a full > scale slackware install and bash around with that. I am not all that > lively lately, and the latest is, have a proper phone system to install.... > in addition to a server. But we will get to it, we really will. > _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution