The only thing I could find on the repo I referenced is that it is for Debian Stable. Not real helpful. I didn't spend much time on it. It is probably explained in the Debian manual but I haven't had time to look into that.

It is something, now that I am thinking about it, that I want to find out but it will not be soon.

I know some folks like palimpsest but never liked it from the start. Not sure why, just doesn't blow my skirt up at all.

The more you do to a system the more cruft builds up. This is more noticable on smaller systems.

If you check all associated files for a package before removing them you can then check them all after the removal. It is a good idea to make sure the files are not used for some other package too though.

Do you have a /etc/apt/apt.conf?

You can configure the behavior of APT with that file. You might want to check the man page on that.

One thing you can do to help keep your system size down is to not install "recommends" automatically. As an example there is a package, getting senile in my old age and can't remember the name, that will install specific packages for AMD and Intel processors. If you install that package you will get the ones for both. Does my system running on AMD need the stuff for Intel. My old box ran Intel and I really didn't think it needed the ones for AMD.

To prevent these recommends being installed as depends just don't have APT install them. They will be listed when you use apt-get just as "suggests" are and you can then install them if you want them.

If you don't have the the file, it is not a default file, then create one with this content;
I have found that while I do install a lot of them it is well less than half and more frequently less than a quarter. Many times I don't install any of them.

I do not have "small and light" installs. I don't consider my installs bloated although many people would. I use what is on here, it is not bloat if I install it. Some applicatioons I want every bell and whistle available. Some I don't want any.

Recommends are not needed packages. They may provide more functionality and they may not. Not all the addons for some packages are even listed as recommends.

I run Xfce which is gtk based. A lot of recommends want to drag in Gnome packages for which I have no use what so ever.

Tint2 and I have a rocky relationship history. Until I tried Manjaro OpenBox version and found out what you could do with it I used the Xfce panel (which I love) which doesn't actually have full function under OpenBox at all because I knew how to deal with it. Since then I have really decided that tint2 really rocks.

Not at all like the xfce-panel which I use normally use and prefer but for a light install tint2 is just really hard to beat.

One thing missing on this new box, so far, is an install using OB. This needs correction. If Xfce goes crazy as has Gnome the OB will be my choice. I really need to learn more about the neat tricks you can do with it.

Haven't used other "boxes" but if they are anything like OB there is little you can't do with them to get any kind of functionality you want. You should probably be slightly better at scripting than I am though. So I need an install I can go and play with and learn.

I switched to Xfce from Gnome. Took a long time to decide what to use. Had one install to try out DEs and WMs (like OB) on. Think I went throuw about 12. Made the mistake of setting up Xfce like the Xubuntu folks do it. Works and is ok but things like the Xfce Settings Manager don't work completely because Nautilus is installed to run the desktop instead of xfwm. Just too much bloat.

Nautilus has gone to pot, Caja that comes with Mate is much better. Thunar under Xfce 4.10 has tabbed browsing. The Xfce panel starting with Xfce 4.8 is what the old Gnome 2 panels want to grow up to be.

It fits the way I want to work so it is obviously the best there is. Hopefully you will find one that fits you that way.

A guy on another forum is an OB user. He can make that sucker sit up and bark. Really lovely looking too. He likes very small systems. Amazing what he can do.

He seems to think it is obviously the best way to run a desktop for some reason.

Hi widget, got everything back together. Just got to use your APT::Install-Recommends "false" suggestion. Unfortunately not from the beginning of the install.

My last download was for texmaker, and it would just not stop downloading extra packages. Had almost everything I needed, all fitting in 1Gig. Texmaker alone then wanted another 1Gig. Uninstalled it, added the 'no recommends' and it chopped 1Gig off the install, it was mostly 'suggested' packages. Haven't tried using it yet though.

Same old problem with the video resizing. For a test I tried downloading gdm3, given that gnome player and gnome desktop share the same name, maybe the player would work . That thing was huge, and it would not start properly (it mentioned some hardware issue). Complete waste of time.

This is what I have so far, total root size is 1184268K

openbox
lightdm
tint2
xvt
obmenu
gnome-disk-utility
bleachbit
gnome-mplayer
mplayer
tightvncserver
git
texlive-base
texmaker
sudo
apt-file
lsb-release
midori
browser-plugin-lightspark (flash substitute, not working)


I came across a mention of palimpsest, that it may be an old leftover from Ubuntu.
Well, it's getting late and been watching a rolling screen for a long time.

Thanks for the apt.conf tip. I may redo everything over! But I would like to start experimenting with Linux programming, so maybe not. I wonder how big a Linux programming tool-chain will be.

Maybe I can pass on a tip I learned today or yesterday, before I started this new build. All of a sudden I started getting these errors:
Unfortunately I forget where this came from, but it fixed the problem:

Looks pretty good.

I would loose bleachbit. If you do a little study in the cli tools available with the base install, some Linux many Gnu, you will find they do the same thing.

Bleach bit uses them. Problem is it makes the choices of what to remove to screw up your system instead of you doing the screwing up yourself.

You can learn from your mistakes. Bleachbit can't.

If you run a search on it and follow the links for forum threads you will find an awful lot of people have problems with it screwing things up.

This is partiuclarly true in custom installs such as yours (actually most people that are adventurous in the least).

If you use it be very, very careful.

Much safer to run the individual commands one at a time.

You may want to check your /var/cache/apt/archives file. I don't know how your system is set up but the default is to keep everything you download through dpkg. So when you get a kernel package upgrade, for instance, there can be a pretty large package, the .deb, stored there.

Having an up to date bunch of .debs is great but it can build up pretty fast. "apt-get autoclean" will clear out all packages that can no longer be downloaded. As these are pretty much obsolete this is a good thing to do pretty regularly. It is one thing I am sure that Bleachbit does.

You can also empty that directory using "apt-get clean".

Good thing you brought this up. I hadn't run auroclean for a while. This is Sid. We get a lot of package upgrades. That, in a matter of seconds removed nearly 4000 stored, useless .debs. Should have checked the size of the directory before and after but I didn't.

Popped back to a chroot of my testing install. Had a total of 16.15gigs used in the / partition. Ran apt-get autoclean and now have 8.11gigs used. That stuff builds up. And those .debs removed were useless.

I know myself and use large / partitions on installs I use. That testing install; Stoned Lizard, shares /home with this Sid install; Lounge Lizard. But each of them has a 30gig / partition. That way I can ignore things like this for too long a time.

Tomorrow when I run all my installs update/upgraades I will run that on the rest of them. Wheezy could have quite a few itself. May not have ever auto cleaned it since sometime during freeze for Wheezy-testing.

EDIT
Your problem in /tmp is a good example of why some folks like a separate /tmp partition. My bloated /var is an example of why a lot of people like a separate /var. Have thought about a separate /var my self.

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Hi widget, I was holding off till some positive news developed, but nothing exciting has happened.

Bleachbit messed up TightVnc last night. Odd thing is, and this is happened twice (different program), typing the start command 'vncserver' in a terminal window resulted in a command not found, which is normal, but also continuous scrolling of 377/377/ on and on, that wouldn't quit till after several tries at ^C. I may have run bleachbit prior to the other incident as well.

I'm keeping it for now, because other things are needing attention. Maybe this is part of the Linux bug: keep going forward at the risk of the ship sinking! We can build another boat if we have to. Reminds of the story about a fisherman trying to catch a whale, that didn't end so well for the fisherman.

Anyways, I just ran it again, after all the 'apt-get' autoremove, clean etc. and it found another 100Mb to get rid of. Checked all my programs and they still work. Will look for a safer replacement.

Just checked the /var/cache/apt/archives:
I bet bleachbit would find another 800M to clean up for you, no don't try it, just kidding.

This thing with the temp partition, if I understand correctly, the OS could take it over/mount it at any time, even if you are in the middle of an upgrade? I guess it has no choice, if you run out of space, you would crash anyway. I have a swap partition on my hard drive, why would it not use that? To my knowledge Linux has never used it, it's always 100% free.

The browser battle. Last night and this evening it's been all about finding a nice browser and a flash plugin. I tried Firefox, but including flash, it was just past what my board could handle. Frame rate couldn't have been higher that 1 per second. It was like watching a series of stills, in slow motion. I think the flash driver was Gnash. One other thing it was doing was using over 40% cpu when there was nothing playing.

Today I found Midori. Actually last night. The first thing it did was display a page saying that I had been selected for a survey. There was 'googalia' in several places, then at the bottom of the page it said they have no affiliation with Google. That smelt really bad, I purged it immediately. After more searching today, I saw some positive comments about Midori, so ignored my reservations and tried it again. Deleted the offending page and cleared the history. Hard to say it's a likeable browser, but you do get used to it. I don't remember the size of it, but it should be much smaller than Firefox.

Next thing was hunting down a flash plugin for it, and that's where I'm stuck now. Midori doesn't seem to have as many flash options as other browsers, but I did find this: browser-plugin-lightspark. The only how-to I found was in this Midori FAQ:midori-browser.org/faqs/. I tried following but if I remember right it does not apply to the setup I have. Just info about where the flash driver .so files should be. Have a nagging feeling that the info is all there though, just can't follow it at the moment. I've moved the .so files around so much that I don't think it's recoverable now. Some of the so files might have been left-overs from Firefox, now everything is a right mess!

The rest of the penguins are behaving well though. Except for the one that duplicates itself when you resize it.

One thing Bleachbit looks for is packages that it thinks are orphans. These are generally of the state "auto" and represent depends that are no longer needed because the package that depended on them is no longer installed.

If you install a meta package and want to remove something dpkg will remove the whole thing. You can break the meta package to avoid this with;
Which change the state of the packages installed by the meta package to be changed from auto to manual. Very handy tool. Don't even think of using Bleachbit if you ever use that command.

I used Bleachbit once. Ubuntu 9.04 I think. Was actually a minor respin that I was using with some added packages from 3rd party repos and was pretty much a wreck.

Started paying attention to all threads I could find on Bleachbit. Keeping in mind that normal people don't start help threads because thing work great so you don't hear much about things working, I found an awful lot of wrecks caused by Bleachbit. I think it is a very bad tool.

Somewhere there may a bleachbit file that has the actual scripts in it. I would check that. It is using standard tools I am sure.

If such a file doesn't exist get the source package and check it out. If it was written well at all the comments in plain language should tell you all you need to know.

From checking the depends on bleach be I can say that all the utils it uses are standard default install tools.

Your output for /var/cache/apt/arhives show that it is using apt-get clean instead of autoclean. That is not a particularly bad thing but those .debs can save you a lot of trouble if a package is inadvertently removed particularly if you need to reinstall some package needed to connect to the internet. As in;
Which should install any of the depends for the package too from those present in that directory.

It is just a good tool for a default install of a standard desktop type OS that is Debian based and much better if Ubuntu based. Start getting creative and you will run into problems with it.

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Hi widget, this will be a short one. Spent way too much time trying to get yuotube videos playing on Midori... why!

I found where the bleachbit scripts are located, at least some of them:
/usr/share/bleachbit/bleachbit
There's .py and .pyc files in there, quite a few.

Have come across those meta packages (I think) and still need to learn about those. I noticed some packages at packages.debian.org have nothing in them. That is a very nicely set up site, easy to see if a package exists for your distribution and processor.

I was going to list all the steps for getting the youtube videos working on Midori, but I can't remember them exactly, so will uninstall the parts and redo it. Roughly though, there's no flash plugin needed. There's a script that you can put in the browser called ViewTube, then you need to install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg. It's supposed to use the regular player that you already have installed, in my case mplayer. Mplayer doesn't just pop up, but it gets used somehow.

As far as viewable, I'd say yes, just barely, at the lowest available youtube resolution. For me that was 240 (something... never figured out if that's dpi or what, but should know that by now). Since I'm short sighted, and use reading glasses, that's ok. More importantly it was a huge step up from anything I have tried. But one snag, haven't got the sound to work yet. I also found out that there is no video hardware acceleration going on in my board, the drivers are missing. So that video performance might be improved many times over on a real computer.

Ok, I did what I said wasn't going to happen, working on Linux through the new year. Oh well.

Happy new year to you and any unfortunate passer by that was hoping to find some useful info in this post.

Never used Midora. A lot of folks do so there must be something to it.

Too many choices for just about any kind of application to try them all.

Check your documentation on the board and see if videa accelleration is supported at all by the hardware. Could be it isn't.

If it is there should be some sort of driver available for installation if it is not already there. Could be it just needs configured.

Just to let you know; I just redid my usb stick with the Wheezy Live image with non free content with persistence. That image takes up 1.1 gigs of space on my stick. Somewhat larger than your install. But that is the CD Live default install with Xfce DE.

32 bit so I can use it on just about any box that comes my way to check out or do data recovery on. 32gig stick so I even have some room for data if needed.

Working on Linux through the new year sounds good to me.

Have a great 2015.

Hi widget, apologies,I must have missed the email notification for you reply.
Happy 2015 to you.

The chip I have has a built in graphics processor called Mali. I followed the accelerator trail till I reached instructions on how compile your own drivers.
Found some for downloading but they were for the wrong operating system.

While experimenting with browser video, I posted a question here in the Linux desktop section. Members teckk and Miati opened up a whole new approach using a program called youtube-dl. You can supply this program with the video's Youtube link, and it will open up and play the video in another window, using mplayer.

This sounds like a bit of a clumsy way to go about it, but the results are so good that you forget about accelerators and whatever else. In fact I had forgotten about the video accelerator till you mentioned it. The video output is just as good as when playing a local file.

A couple of days ago I ran across a Youtube video about greasemonkey (or some name close to that). It lets you manipulate incoming web page content. If this could be combined with youtube-dl, maybe you could replace the video window in Youtube with mplayer, or at least automatically have mplayer open when you click on a video link.

I don't think I have tried Xfce. All these terms are still confusing. The screen shots look like just what I would be comfortable with though. Before trying it I would like to rebuild my system using that 'no option' download you mentioned. See what effect it has on size. Also I have been installing and purging so many times, god knows how much garbage is hiding away.

If you can get the source code for the driver for your video controller and compile it on your system it will be compiled for your OS.

Packages for Debian that you get in the .deb form are binary. They have been compiled for your architecture on an Debian kernel from source code.

There is no reason why you can't do the same.

Those scripts look harmless enough and may work but I doubt you get better performance until you get a driver for you video chip.

That first script looks like it is well crafted and nicely interactive.

Scripts are supposed to be started with "./". That is bash scripts are supposed to be started that way.

Ubuntu in an attempt to make it easier for users that are, let's face it, generally retarded, have generally completely screwed the security system and making scripts "easier" to run is just another way to make attacking scripts run easier. I don't believe that the average user is that dumb. If you didn't want to learn something why did you switch from Windows?

You will find a lot of ex Ubuntu users on here. We have our reasons but many really don't like what they are doing to GNU/Linux proceedures that have worked well for a long time just because they think their users are idiots.

Sorry, some of us kind of resent being treated that way.

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Hi Widget, I think I got sick from too much Linux. Got a headache and been feeling nausiated since Friday morning. Today things are better.

About running user created scripts using only ./, is that safer, or it doesn't make any difference now, because as you say the security system has already been screwed up?

About the drivers,I have been trying to research the topic and have not made much progress. There are available (for compiling) X11 drivers. However I don't know if my system is possibly using a different system, that's part of my confusion.

My mplayer works best when I select xvmc for output. It does have an option for X11, but then the system just bogs down. I assume because there are no drivers for that, and everything is being done in software?

Looking up xvmc I found this:
Given that selecting xvmc output for mplayer works really well, this should mean that I have x11 drivers installed somewhere? But then selecting X11 for the mplayer output should also work?

Currently lsmod command gives me this, even while mplayer is running:
I think my problem is trying to figure out too much in a hurry! All will come.

You are obviously using some sort of video driver or you wouldn't be seeing anything.

I am sure you have the xserver-xorg-video-all package installed. This is the foss drivers supplied with the xwindows system. They work pretty well generally.

I use an radeon card and the foss drivers actually give me better performance than the driver from ati does.

Your resolution problem seems to me to indicate either that the driver being used isn't up to it or the hardware is not configured correctly for your monitor.

I have looked up this xvmc stuff and find that I actually have the libxvmc1 package installed. Have no idea what it is there for.

Can't really understand enough of what I read about it to see how it can be of any help for your problem. If it works better it sounds good to me.

Sorry you have a hangover from imbibing too much Linux.

Hi widget, just for kick I tried 'apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-all' and it said the latest version is already installed.

Did find something else out though, the resizing problem looks to be driver related. There is an mplayer config file '/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf' in which you can find a setting to enable zooming:
This fixed the resizing, but as the warning said, it really bogs down the processor. I commented it back out.

Next to find the right drivers, and learn how to compile from source if need be.
I've done quite a bit of programming, particularly with Microhip processors, so I'm not sure why the hesitation to just dive into this.

http://www.aboutdebian.com/compile.htm

Should be helpful enough to at least point you in the right direction.

There is also the debian handbook. You can find it online. You can also install it from the repo. debian-handbook is the package name. This does cover the compiling of a kernel.

debian-reference is also in the repo. And the debian-kernel-handbook.

Another way to check to see if some package is installed is to use;
Apt-cache is a very handy tool check the man page. I have a typing problem, fumble fingered, and really like aliases in bash. I have an aliase
"ac" just for apt-cache. There are so many handy commands with it I don't have an aliase for all of them. Probably should for "show", "policy" and "search". There are a lot more.

You can do all of them as user as you are not messing with the system just looking for information.

I would recommend that find the name of your particular chip in your video controller and run that, not the manufacturers name, in;
may not turn anything up at all but could save some bother.

Slackware still uses the original way of installing all packages in Unix like systems, compiling. It has the advantage of setting up the binary for your system not just the base architecture of your system.

Can't say I have done much of it. Did a kernel patch in some ubuntu-testing version. Was that or use the older kernel. Patch was published several days before the patched kernel was in the repo for some reason.

Compiled something else, can't remember what. Only available as a binary in .rpms and I didn't no about the package "alien". Worked, didn't really like what ever it was. Probably why I can't remember what it was.

One of the members here has, or had, in his sig "if it is not in the repos it doesn't exist or you don't need it". I tend to agree with that with the Debian repos.

Drivers for strange hardware would be a real likely thing to be missing though. Sounds like a good idea to me. Let the video controller do the work.

If your system is slowing down the cpu must really be dogging it. You could check with "top" to see what it is doing exactly. This is going to increase heat generation. I am sure the boards and the cpu are pretty robust but abuse like that may not be in the cooling system design.

Hi widget, just read part of the Debian compile.htm manual. Nice intro to compiling with detailed instructions, perfect for Sunday project.

Yesterday in frustration I decided to go back to the beginning, the boot process. Felt that maybe I was overreaching with the harder stuff. Every topic in linux can suck you in, so you need to be careful! Looking into the boot process was no exception. Then you wonder how it's possible to ever get a real grasp of any topic, since there are thousands of people working on every bit, constantly.

I tried using the command
Where Mali is the name of the graphics chip. Got several pages of package names, anything with mali in the name, for example: 'minimalistic', 'normalization'. Also some listings which didn't have 'mali' in them at all:
That's an odd command, or maybe I'm not using it correctly.

Heat is something I have not had to be concerned about with this chip. It seems like you reach unacceptable performance way before any danger limit on heat. When it's struggling to resize a video to full page, with at best jerky playback rates, the chip is still barely warm to the touch. Compare this with my Dell laptop running Windows xp, sometimes, if I forget to manually set the fan to full speed, temps will reach over 70C, above 72 you get the blue screen.

Off to do some compiling. Thanks again for all your assistance.

-------------------------------------------------

Ok, it's 5pm and why not report on the progress since I know this at least will work.

Just for kicks I downloaded linux-3.18.1.tar.gz from https://www.kernel.org/ .
I'm still at the unpacking stage!

Attempts
1) Saved the tar file in nand memory, tried to unpack it, but it crashed the terminal I was in. Maybe ran out of memory space.

2) Saved the tar file on the hard drive, and unpacked it from there, but kept getting warnings about things happening in the future, then it would fail to unpack. Since the board has no cmos clock I installed ntp. That seems to be working great. However...

3) The hard drive partition is FAT32, extracting fails because it tries to create 'symlinks' and apparently those cannot be done on FAT 32.

So, getting nowhere but learning lots about what not to do. I tried following the example at http://www.aboutdebian.com/compile.htm, but couldn't connect to ftp.scrollz.com, where the exercise package is located.

Batting 0 is usually a good sign, it means you are just around the corner from success!

Forgot to mention I am following this how-to: Building Your Own Linux Kernel, at http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplan...orials/6853/1/
...

Finally managed to unpack, this time from inside an ext4 partition. I haven't read ahead in the tutorial, so don't know what the goal is here. Really just an excercise. I can Unpack! Let's see, original post was at 10:47am, now it's 6:47pm

I was looking at this "mali" too. Looks like it is not the manufacturors name but part of the name. There is however more than one. A very casual search turned up at least 2 versions (mali-T604 and mali-T800). That is what you would need for the search.

That search goes through the plain language part of the .deb packages in the available list and pulls in, as you have seen anything that might possibly be related to what you are looking for. Run a search in Synaptic and you will get the same type of result. Some people think this is because Synaptic search is buggy.

No, just very complete in trying to get you results from a search that may not be complete name wise.

Chips all have some number associated with them as a version number if nothing else.

Running a search for the mali-T800 returns nothing. Same with the other. So have fun compiling.

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