Stuff that has not yet gone into the official build.
Wed Sep 03, 2014 11:25 pm
After trying out many debian based live distros (pointlinux, crunchbang,siduction,wattos,solidx), I found the Sid-Refracted-9 ISO in a testing section.It was only a 500 MB download, smaller than any of the other mentioned.Got it going from a 1GB USB stick, and started playing with it, ----XFCE out,--- MATE in.
MATE DE has 50 % less memory usage than XFCE and it is also much more nicer. (menu+panel+applets)
It worked so nicely, that I installed it to a Lenovo T61 harddrive , 10 GB ext4 and 2 GB swap.
I liked that during install, I was able to see the names of files copied.....no other distros have this feature !
Also, I was happily surprised, that the harddrive install saved the same MATE system I have created, not the original on the USB......no others have done this either!
Continued to add more packages, to see how far I can go before something would stop working:
Internet: Iceweasel, Claws mail,Remmina, Skype, WICD
Graphics: xsane,Eye of Mate
Office: Atril, Libre writer, Libre calc
Sound: Audacious, PAVU
System: Bleachbit,Caja,,gDebi,MC,Refracta,xterm
Admin: gparted,synaptic
Acessories: pluma, engrampa,geany, screenshot
Ended up with a fully fuctional, slim and fast SID-Refracted-MATE system, using only 2,574 Mb disk space.
I would like to thank for all members of the REFRACTA team, to provide such as rock-solid base ISO !
Thu Sep 04, 2014 11:54 am
Cool! I made that smaller iso mainly to test refracta tools in sid, but I also thought that someone might use it and add the apps they prefer. I've never tried mate desktop, but maybe I will when I get some extra time and hard disk space.
Both the installer and the snapshot tool use rsync to copy your system. Any configuration changes you've made or files you've saved get copied along with everything else. The scrolling list of files as they're being copied is also because of rsync (with the -v option.)
Thu Sep 04, 2014 1:30 pm
I think, there is no Debian-SID-Mate distro even exists......going to check on distrowatch.
the MATE DE is overlooked and underrated by many, however it is nice and has menuedit +panel +applets
its attachments like pluma (txt-edit),caja (file mgr) ,screensaver etc...can be easily ignored and replaced by smaller and maybe better packages like leafpad, pacmanfm,xscreensaver
MATE DE with its 42 MB memory usage about as light and fast as LXDE

the more popular XFCE4 with whiskermenu added has a decent look, unfortunately whiskermenu's backward openings (right-to-left) is a no go for me
I also had some issues regarding root and user passwords, new system did not remembered what I have entered during install,... once system was up, changed gksu-properties to sudo, and just entered passwd user_name new_password.....so "user" is fine now, however "root" still has "root" as a password
I have seen a thread on this forum about "password" issues, it sounds complicated and way behind my understanding.
Now will give a try to "save" my creation and hopefully create a bootable USB ISO image.
Thanks again for your excellent work to make it possible for all this to happen .
Fri Sep 05, 2014 1:05 am
You might get better results with dzz's rebuild of the 9.1.0 installer. I put the deb file (gui only) in the testing folder at ibiblio. It does a much better job of handling the passwords and sudo mode vs. root. I'm planning on using it to build the next version (9.1.1) but I haven't had time to do it. I need to set aside a few days when I won't be disturbed.
Here's the link to the file -
http://distro.ibiblio.org/refracta/file ... z3_all.deb
Wed Sep 10, 2014 6:26 pm
the included version worked fine after a few trial run (needed to set up "excluded")
for user password I have my own, the root password is still "root
thanks again