Positive criticism on my custom ubuntu fluxbox distro.
 

Hi all.

I have made a live-cd, installable cucstom ubuntu distro.
I am using fluxbox as the Window Manager and are trying to make a relative
light weight system. I did not like the set of applications that Flubuntu offers me. Here is how my system is set up

I used jaunty's debootstrap to set up my base system. I used chroot then to configure the rest of the system. The following applications were installed with with apt-get:

apt-get install --yes ubuntu-standard casper;
apt-get install --yes discover1 laptop-detect os-prober;
apt-get install --yes linux-generic;
apt-get install --no-install-recommends network-manager;
apt-get install x-window-system-core fluxbox gdm xdm feh thunar gedit pidgin vlc sun-java6-jre synaptic firefox gparted abiword gnumeric alsaplayer alsamixergui ubuntu-restricted-extras lxappearance brasero alsamixergui sysinfo conky grip lame autofs gqview xpaint evince ubiquity-frontend-gtk community-themes xmms2;

After this I created my squashfs of my system which i chrooted into and then proceeded to make an iso image which can be used with usb-creator.

I want to know if my choice of applications is good for my purpose and which other applications I can include in the list if need be and if there might be a better choices of applications for covering the various needs for a all-round light weight effective system.

Thank you for your input. :Pengy:

wow
sounds like what I'm doing:)

How did you make the livecd from your running system??

Is there a URL? I'd like to try it out :)

Hi

@ MbyBee
I will try to upload the iso file later tonight to mediafire. I dont know much about free file hosting. The image is 450 mb.

@linus72
I edited my initial post with a general description of what i did.
I mainly followed this guide at:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Li...ionFromScratch

hi,
all in all it would look like similar to me. I dont know the ubuntu-standard casper etc, but am building from debian without environment.
Therefor just a few notes, take it that way:
-xfe is a light file-manager and comes with an editor, a picture-viewer and what not (and looks quite ugly :-) ).
- i dont understand why you install two login-managers: gdm and xdm.gdm is about 20MB. Check for slim. Or: Why do you need one at all? nano ~/.xinitrc, enter exec startfluxbox and there you go.
-i would replace firefox by epiphany (perhaps midori or arora)
if you wanna stick with firefox think about ifox as a theme and start it with a blank page (remove history, remove remember passwd, dont look for updates etc, sorry: i cant find the link how to tune it atm, its a famous guy called Hermann ***)
- i would add a gtk2-engine (say gtk2-engine-nodoka) and gtk-chtheme.

i gotta link how to tune ubuntu a bit, but its in german:
http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Tuning
thats what i allways do :
- comment out tty3-tty6 (for ubuntu its in /etc/event.d/ttyX)
- change nice_value in /etc/X11/Xwrapperconfig to -1 (or lower)
- change /etc/sysctl.conf to :
vm.swappiness=20
vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50
-remove usplash, i dont think you got it insalled, jus to mention it
-comment out gfxmenu and pretty colors in /boot/grub/menu.lst

For all of that you might first make clear that it wont crash the house :-).

As said: just what i do. I cant say that its of that much use to speed it up.
And, as said, i like your choice of apps.
greetings

I agree with you on xfe - I dont like the looks of it (almost like windows) and I have
Thunar as a file manager.You have a point, I choose gdm because of the easy auto-login setup and also included xdm as a backup for older systems. But I removed them and added slim, I tried setting up auto-login but its not that easy, you cant just edit .xinitrc because that only gets called after startx is called, which only gets called after you logged in. What I tried was to write a script to execute and call startx just before you log in (using update-rc.d), everything worked except my sound didnt startup, so I gave up on that and used slim instead.I initially planned to do so, but then I saw that Epiphany require more packages to download than firefox. I also kept in mind that DSL (Damn Small Linux) uses Firefox. I did some google'ing on that, so i found that DSL used a much trimmed Firefox, so now i decided on Epiphany again :) I actually found this browser Kazehakase also, I wanted to use it, but later I found it was crashing so i dumped it :(. Looks much better now with nodoka, thanks.
Sorry I dont understand enough German to read that, I am Afrikaans, which is far enough from German..
I have done that, thank you.
I dont have usplash, and grub doesnt get set up until the system is set up, so theres no folder /boot/grub yet.

Thank you very much for your help.

sure youre right: gdm is very easy to configure.
But you might check this link for autologin without login-manager:
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.p...=29333&start=0
problem is that ubuntu aint using /etc/inittab no more. But you get the idea (perhaps some ubuntu-users might tell you or you may adapt it on your own).

I wasnt sure if one is able to translate web-pages, thats why i added the link to german-ubuntu-wiki (they got a lot of good info, its my first check if i need help or an overview). (btw off-topic: great thing the web: german, afrikaans, english and all that other language speaking people together...as long they speak english too :-) )

greetings and good luck with your "project", if you may seed it ... im here :-)

I have seen a something similar to this, the problem is that i cannot edit .bash_profile because that file is in ~/ which is not created until installation takes place. I dont know how to work around that.
I will surely seed it when im sure everything is as it should be.

Later

well i dont know about ubuntu-tools to do this, but when i create a debian-live i am able to add a user (when unpacking squashfs and chrooting in it i simply create one like usual). Anyway a login-manager might be the better choice.
greetings

good news!

Hi

I understand, the thing is, I am using a ubuntu-tool to install my custom distro, it is called ubiquity, inside the live session, the user just execute ubuquity (entry in the menu) and from there on it takes over, unpacking the squashfs, formatting the hd, setting up a home dir etc. I don't have the time to do that, and I dont know if it is worth it for me at this stage.

@j1alu
I still don't know if Epiphany is my best choice, I have started a new thread http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-arora-761763/ to find out the best browser for me because it seems to me that Epiphany, Arora, Midori, Kazehakase, Opera is equal in lightness and effectiveness.

Cheerz

Hi all

I just realized how much fine-tuning there is to be done, so I wont be uploading it yet, there is still a few things that needs to be done that is time-consuming. I am sorry, I wish I had more free time to finish it now but this is my final year at University and the final exams are around the corner. So thank you all for the input.

I have decided to use Opera at this point for my browser.

Greetings

You may want to check the Ubuntu forums (I can't seem to get in there right now), but I just read a thread discussing all of the libs that firefox requires, and there is a way to weed out the ones that aren't absolutely needed and that trimmed down how many resources are needed/used by firefox, and they also discussed slimfox (or something to that effect). Sorry I can't post the links to that discussion, but I am at work and can't seem to access the forums right now and don't have the time to wait on it as I have some calls to make. Good luck, and let us all know when you have it seeded.

Here you go, I found the thread that I was talking about in my previous post and here is the link to it http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1290158

hi,
as i mentioned the configuring of firefox here i will post here and not in your other thread. I finally found the web-page i mentioned earlier (...famous hermann...):
http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/confi...sable-bearable
After that firefox got much faster for me ( i also use ifox as theme)
I never got used to opera,therefor i removed it. But i guess/im sure its a very good one (fast and comfortable).

well: real live allways disturbs with the real fun :-) , so we gotta wait for you to upload your iso...just kidding.

greetings

edit:
ubiquity sounds good, i will look into it when i got some free-time
(and: yes, youre right. unpacking and configuring a squashfs manually aint what i exactly call big fun...)