antiX-M8.5-beta4 available

[anticapitalista]

beta4 now available for testing.

* ext4 is now available
* latest icewm
* bug on custom install should be fixed
* latest Debian Testing and MEPIS upgrades
* halevt removed as it was causing slow writes to usb sticks. replaced by ivman
* smbc included for samba shares
* Minor modifications of menus
* newer version of absvolume
* a few new themes for fluxbox and icewm and wallpaper

http://www.mepisimo.com/antix/Test-releases/antiX-M8.5

Post comments here or over at antiX forum.

[m_pav]

Wow, server must be really busy, download for the be-b4 patch crawling in at 7.5kbps. Might be finished in 3 hours if I am lucky. Whoa, it just doubled to 14kpbs, maybe 2 hours then.

Glad you provide deltas.

Mike P

[Rebel]

Complete download via DSL took about 15 minutes....Thanks Anti!

[dolphin_oracle]

Quick notes - RT61 users must issue "iwconfig wlan0 power off" and put "wlan0" in WICD's preferences before the wireless will work. No need to modprobe rt61pci, that part is working fine for me.

Tapping on mouse pad does not work on the old Sony. Side scrolling does work.

Flux's menu looks very nice. I briefly checked out icewm, but I felt lost, so I went back to flux. Control Center might not be on ice's menu though (at least I couldn't find it).

[m_pav]

Come to think of it, you may be right. I seem to recall not seeing the Control Center last night when I took it for a spin in VBox.

Mike P

[anticapitalista]

In icewm the antiXcc is in the toolbar.

[ko]

Originally Posted by Rebel

Complete download via DSL took about 15 minutes....Thanks Anti!

Via cable 2 minutes here for the full beta4-iso...:-)

Regards, Ko

[Davo]

Really fast download with the xdelta ... couple of minutes max.
Anything specifically needs testing?
Control Center is back on the panel (and has my keyboard layout - Norway)

[anticapitalista]

Davo,

Apart from the usual debugging stuff of apps crashing, not opening etc, I would really like someone to test out the liveusb or frugal persistence option.

Here is a brief, but I hope complete, how to:

http://antix.mepis.com/index.php/How...ith_live_media

[Davo]

Originally Posted by anticapitalista

Apart from the usual debugging stuff of apps crashing, not opening etc, I would really like someone to test out the liveusb or frugal persistence option.

I tried antix2usb on a blank 4GB USB (fat32) stick inserted in my Dell Latitude D610 (Centrino 1.6Mhz / 1.28GB RAM) fromiso boot and
...it worked perfectly. Great addition and I'm loving it. Really nice to have persistance. working. Thanks anti (and bitjam) for this option.
Chose ext3 as filesystem and 2GB as "System". Then on installing to the usb-stick, it took just ca. 3 minutes total.
I then used the Meta-Installer (Antix > Applications > Accessories > metapackage-installer) to download the lxde window manager.
Also changed the background under icewm to DreamForest and saved 2 small test files - just to test if persistance worked.
Rebooted with the desktop=lxde cheatcode and it booted up to lxde. Some flickering getting to X, but it worked fine.
Then hit Logout and chose under Slim ( F1 session > back to icewm) and my "DreamForest" background loaded, plus the 2 saved files appeared too.
Didn't test installing to HDD just yet (as I only have 40GB HDD and already have 4 distros there ... might free something up later).

Couple of quick comments re: antix2usb
1) The antix2usb pop-up could be bigger. Hitting "Details" gave a incredibly tiny terminal screen.
Needed to scroll up/down and across/back to try to read it (luckily all output was saved under /tmp/antix2usb.log anyway, for easy reading)
2) Under antix2usb pop-up, "Filesystem" defaults to ext2, plus ext3 as option. Maybe have it default to ext3 and also include ext4 as an option here.
3) Under antix2usb pop-up, " System Partition Size" was initially confusing to me. Didn't realize that this really meant " Root Partition Size".
I didn't understand from the pop-up screen that the whole USB-stick would be used i.e. that anything left over after specifying
"System partition Size" would just become the allotted size of /home.
I entered 2GB here, which resulted in formatting the 4GB stick with a 2GB root partition (/dev/sdb1) and the rest for /home (/dev/sdb2 ...now 1.72GB).
The antiX2usb install (rootfs) on /dev/sdb1 took just 470MB i.e. same size as the iso, which increased to 545MB when lxde was installed.

Perhaps it might be clearer here to state "Root Partition Size (min. 1 GB), remainder will be utilized for /home" here under the antix2usb pop-up.

General comments:
1) I'm really impressed with the metainstaller stuff. It really simplifies installing suites etc a lot. Nice feature.
2) I'm pretty sure that antix2usb would work for Mepis Iso's too. Have you passed it on to Warren?
I think it would be a great, and welcome, addition to Mepis i.e. persistance on Live media. I boot Mepis 8.5 Beta 4 (current) fromiso quite often to test stuff
and then I'm spending at least 2~5 minutes on each (and every) fromiso boot doing initial set-up ... very tedious repetitive stuff like setting keyboard/locale etc
3) Have you considered Dream Forest as a default Wallpaper (background)? The current default for AntiX 8.5 (sunsetinfrontofme.jpg) looks a little washed-out