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MX-19


raymac46

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I have it installed now on my daughters old junker laptop with a broken hinge. It replaced MX-18 and I had to do a full reinstall to get it working.

I have had trouble with the Chromium browser though. It won't launch (keeps crashing.) So I installed the .deb version of Chrome and that works just fine. Go figure.

I uninstalled and reinstalled Chromium both with Synaptic and in the Terminal with apt and I can't get it to fly.

Edited by raymac46
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I installed to a usb and thought I had created it with persistence on root and home. Seems I made a slip up somewhere as persistence has taken for home, some files I added showed up after a reboot. However root has not taken as I installed Zim and KeePassXC and they have disappeared after the reboot.

I wonder if dipping the usb in hormone rooting powder before I do a fresh install would solve the problem ?

 

I'll give Chromium a try this evening on a fresh MX-19 and report back.

 

😎

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I checked in the MX Linux forum and I see that the devs have ported their own version of Chromium from the SID repo to theirs. Apparently Debian hasn't made the latest Chromium available yet in the Buster repo. Whatever the reason I cannot get Chromium to launch.

Google Chrome stable for Linux works well so no real problem.

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I don't use Chromium or Chrome, but I saw the thread title and wanted to post a quick comment... MX is such a nice distro! Don't have it installed on any of my computers here, but I do have MX-19 on a flash drive, with home persistence. Very handy to have around, at times.

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12 hours ago, abarbarian said:

I installed to a usb and thought I had created it with persistence on root and home. Seems I made a slip up somewhere as persistence has taken for home, some files I added showed up after a reboot. However root has not taken as I installed Zim and KeePassXC and they have disappeared after the reboot.

I wonder if dipping the usb in hormone rooting powder before I do a fresh install would solve the problem ?

 

MX have a several dedicated tools for setting up usb drives and each has a separate purpose and result. I haven't done it so can't help directly, but it's bound to be explained completely in the comprehensive and excellent MX manual. Also there have been a number of topics on their forum about this.

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14 hours ago, abarbarian said:

I wonder if dipping the usb in hormone rooting powder before I do a fresh install would solve the problem ?

 

Laughing here. I grow lots of plants and those powders have been good to me!

 

You'll probably get root persistence to work after another try.

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UoRGWee.png

 

Well here is MX-19 running from a usb stick.

 

I tried to set up persistence at the install but once again it did not work for root, home seemed to work. So I used the Remaster tool to save the root partition with my newly installed KeePassXC and Zim. After a reboot this has worked. Disapointed that the auto saving of root persistence has not worked. It is no big deal as I will only be using this stick as a rescue tool though it would have been handy to have the auto save function to keep any system updates. If I have to rely on manual saves I'll keep on forgetting to save 90% of the time. 😎

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Install a sticky note program and place a sticky note directly on your desktop, in the most visible place on your desktop, and call the note "REMASTER FOR PERSISTENCE!"  LOL!

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I just did a live USB install (for science and inspired by this thread) and set it up for both root and home persistence and both worked fine. Installed a few programs, removed a couple, saved some files in home, all were still there after a reboot. I also set up a separate DATA partition which I shouldn't have -  used a 16GB micro SD card in a USB adapter, making 8GB data partition doesn't leave much room for expansion so I will change that. I read the section in the manual about the Live-USB-Maker and watched the instructional video by dolphinoracle linked from there. Twice.

 

For the Chromium problem, make sure you have the package chromium-sandbox installed. Apparently Synaptic misses it but it's ok if you install Chromium with MX Package Installer.

See - https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php?f=97&t=54027&p=540082

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When I reinstalled Chromium I did it via the Terminal using apt. Chromium-sandbox was one of the recommended packages so I installed it. After that Chromium works fine. Posting from it now.

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Changing Debian's default setting to install recommends to false is one of the dumbest things in MX IMHO. It causes regular problems with users missing functionality. In Debian default is true IIRC. I guess it may be to reduce space used for a live usb install but I'd rather have full functionality of my installed applications personally.

I would change it to true if I were you. Create a file in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/ call it something like 80myconf.conf and put this in it:
 

// apt defaults for raymac

APT::Get::AutomaticRemove "0";
APT::Get::HideAutoRemove "0";

APT::Install-Recommends "1";
APT::Install-Suggests "0";

Here's a brilliant explanation on Stackexchange - https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/77053/apt-installing-more-packages-than-specified-as-dependencies/77076#77076

And explanation of Debian package relationships  - https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html

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Yes, quite interesting. How is this set by default in Debian? I booted into a live session of MX-19 and I see the /etc/apt/apt.conf file, where the setting to install recommends is set to false. Looked at a couple of my Buster installations and found no /etc/apt/apt.conf file. I did find /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99synaptic, where the install recommends is set to true. (Same in my Kubuntu 19.10 installation.) But I don't use Synaptic for package management, I just use the command line.

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I don't know about Buster. There are no conf files in /etc that set it and I don't even have Synaptic installed. I think it may just be apt default and siduction may have carried over the config which I copied over for that post above from a time when it wasn't default in Debian several releases ago.

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I like MX but I prefer Debian for a number of reasons. Oh, and it seems that when Stable gets point releases like recently, some at the MX forums seem afraid to let the updates come through, which I find interesting. I never worried about that when I had MX installed, and I certainly don't worry about it with Stable!

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I actually prefer Debian myself. I've used it (well, siduction) long enough to know how to overcome any niggles and tweak how I like it mainly by editing config files.

I like MX mainly because of the enthusiasm and attitude of the developers. They are willing to help out any n00 new explorers asking stupid questions in the forums. I'm a bit less tolerant of some of the lame things I see posted there. There is a downside though, there are a few regular helpers there that throw every solution they can imagine at every problem, most of them wildly off-target. Every tool is a hammer, right? 😏

Another thing that puts me off using MX more regularly is the plethora of custom MX Tools which all do wonderful things but I know how to do most of those things with a simple one line cli command. Plus I really dislike Thunar and XFTerminal after being used to Dolphin and Konsole, and generally prefer KDE Plasma to Xfce. [I just accidentally typed Xfece, Freudian slip? :hmm:]

But don't misunderstand, I recommend MX freely especially for live usb use. 👍😎

But speaking of live usb, I spent ages last night making live USB keys with root and home persistence and got it wrong at least half the time although I was actually testing for creation of an added data partition for one of the devs. I mentioned a bug where it was created with root permissions and I suggested it should be user permissions instead. He made a new version of the live-usb-maker for me to test. Didn't fix it yet though.

Oh yeah, the best solution to having root and home persistence working is to set it up with persist_static rather than persist_all when first booting the stick and setting customisation. persist_static writes changes to the save file immediately whereas persist_all saves to RAM and only writes the save file at shutdown. I did have a couple of occasions where home changes were written but root changes were forgotten just as mentioned in the first post above when using persist_all.

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1 hour ago, sunrat said:

Another thing that puts me off using MX more regularly is the plethora of custom MX Tools which all do wonderful things but I know how to do most of those things with a simple one line cli command.

 

^ This. I would not want to come to depend on those MX Tools, because I use other distros. And I wouldn't want them included by default since I don't use them and don't need them. Although I do appreciate all the work that has gone into them, and I kinda like mx-live-usb-maker. I've used it only to set up home persistence on MX flash drives. I need to learn how to easily do that without MX. Haven't tried for root persistence.

 

My attachment to MX and that community comes from my days with Mepis, which was my primary distro for some years. Also, as with Mepis, MX live sessions are excellent for testing out old computers, and for quick installations when I need to do those. But it does seem like many other distros have nice live sessions these days.

 

Mepis was one of those that when it died it left a bad taste in my mouth for derivative distros, "one-man" distros, distros with small dev teams. Pushed me to become a better Debian user, though.

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I do like xfce4-terminal. Like sunrat, I don't like Thunar. No big deal, though, because I always add Double Commander anyway. I really missed Konqueror, and also Krusader, from the old KDE3 days, so eventually I took some time to learn to use mc (Midnight Commander), then started rolling with Double Commander. For all my file management now, I go back and forth between the command line and Double Commander.

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2czIXRJ.png

 

Well I finally managed to make a USB with persistent root and home. It took some time and several attempts.

 

Initially I tired to create a usb from my Tough Book which is old school, no uefi. I missed out the F8 option at the start screen where you set up boot options at the start of this journey and that caused a few extra problems.

 

As I did not seem to be able to set up permanent persistence on the Tough Book I thought I would try from my Skylake pc. I tried to use Etcher as I obviously do not have the usb-creator tool shipped with MX on my Arch set up. For some reason this would not work as it kept telling me my .iso was not a usable type. That was strange as it was the same .iso I had used on the Tough Book. Undeterred I thought that dd would do as an alternative so I created the usb. This was to cause more problems.

With the newly burned usb inserted in my UEFI Skylake rig I found that there were no "F" options showing up on the opening screen. I bumbled through trying to set up persistence from the opening menu but made some errors and had to try several times before I managed to boot up to a desktop. From within the desktop I could not for the life of me get persistence to look as though it would work. Buttons on tools were greyed out and I finally picked up on the fact that this was a read only Live Session. I think I did manage to use the RemasterCC tool though which threw me slightly. After bumbling around for a while I gave up and decided to try a fresh install from the Tough Book.

It was on this try that I found out that if you make a Live USB of MX with the "dd" tool then you only get a read only usb with no possibility of creating persistence on it.It would be most helpful if this information was on the download page for MX.

The new install worked and I remembered to use the F8 "save" option at set up. Made a few changes added a couple of programs and some personal files and yay persistence worked.

Now to try it in the UEFI Skylake rig. On booting to the opening screen once again there were no F options but I chose the second entry in the menu. This led me to a set of steps starting with setting the language. At this point I thought I had yet another failure on my hands. Running through the options I came to setting up persistence. this led me to a option I had not seen before asking me to "save or not" I saved and the stick booted to a desktop. Where to my surprise I found that all my changes had been saved.

Finally I had a persistent usb that would boot both in a UEFI and Legacy pc.

 

MX-19 runs very nicely both on my Tough Book and my Skylake rigs. I have tried both from the stick and from ram and would leave it running from ram as it is much faster. However I only have 4 GB on the Tough Book and I noticed that swap was being used at some point and I had a minor panic as I did not want the set up to be spoilt due to lack of ram. I think I will use the toram feature though as I will do any heavy tasks for the stick from Skylake as I have 32 GB of ram which hardly ever gets used.

 

One thing I did notice after I had changed the conky on the desktop was swap. From what I see MX seems to pick up on any swap partitions you have on your pc. I have a 2 GB swap on the Tough Book and 1.48 GB on the Skylake and both show up in the conky. Whether they are usable by MX or not I do not know at this time. If MX can utilise already available swap partitions then there is no need to create a swap partition on the usb as I did on my first try out.

 

MX-19 after a few minor hicups gets my vote for older pc's and as a very useful backup Live USB. The persistence feature is great as you can keep the stick up to date and keep personal information to hand, like my KeePassXC and Zim files. Well done the MX team.

 

😎

 

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6 hours ago, abarbarian said:

 

 

Well I finally managed to make a USB with persistent root and home. It took some time and several attempts.

...

With the newly burned usb inserted in my UEFI Skylake rig I found that there were no "F" options showing up on the opening screen. ...

It was on this try that I found out that if you make a Live USB of MX with the "dd" tool then you only get a read only usb with no possibility of creating persistence on it.It would be most helpful if this information was on the download page for MX.

 

...

One thing I did notice after I had changed the conky on the desktop was swap. From what I see MX seems to pick up on any swap partitions you have on your pc. I have a 2 GB swap on the Tough Book and 1.48 GB on the Skylake and both show up in the conky. Whether they are usable by MX or not I do not know at this time. If MX can utilise already available swap partitions then there is no need to create a swap partition on the usb as I did on my first try out.

 

 

You picked a really bad time to try out the MX live-usb-maker as we just found a serious bug this week which prevented saves if you selected persist_all, persist_root, or persist_home, which all write changes to RAM and only write back to files on shutdown. Fix has been found but not pushed to the repos yet. The best save method is to use p_root_static which saves all changes to file as they happen and wasn't affected by the bug. The root persist options do save all changes including home (as home is in root partition) so persist_home is fairly useless. I have learned a lot about making MX live usb drives this week. 😉

As you found, the live boot options menus are different depending whether MBR or UEFI. MBR has the F keys menu for customising while UEFI has the "Customise" option in the main boot menu. dolphinoracle mentions this in his video about live-usb-maker.

dd tools will only write a read-only live usb drive.

And yes, I discovered it's a waste to put a swap file on the USB stick.

 

I do really like the default wallpaper with the grass and sky. Think I will be keeping that for a while. :cool: Disliked the MX-18 one a lot. 😏

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Not sure I'm correctly following what you're saying, sunrat. And, I'm not sure if any of what follows is relevant...

 

In my case, I didn't try to create root persistence, but I created the MX-19 flash drive w/ home persistence from another MX-19 live session (which did not have any persistence). (I have not done a MX-19 installation to hard drive.)

 

For creating the original MX-19 flash drives, the ones with no persistence, I used cp to write the iso, not dd.

 

After booting into the live session with the flash drive that had no live persistence, I inserted an empty flash drive, then used the live USB maker from within the live session and went with the Select Persistence Option (6 - persist_home - Only home persistence).

 

I did this once with MX-19beta-3_x64.iso, then later followed the same steps with the MX-19 final. Created the flash drives on a UEFI computer, but they boot the MBR computers as well, and I've had no problems with home persistence. On a MBR computer, from the screen that comes up at boot I press F5, then select persist_home, then press Enter.

 

Really all I do is save a few files into the /home/demo/Documents directory. I haven't even bothered to to make any configuration changes yet. But I don't do a lot with these flash drives -- for me they're mainly handy for when I have to fix something or whatever. Which has already been the case!

 

And, yeah, I see that the booting steps are different on a UEFI computer.

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Today I did make a few configuration changes. Just a few -- toggled Conky off, made some changes to Geany's preferences. Rebooted into a new session, everything saved ok.

 

Not sure what it is about Conky -- it's cool and everything but it doesn't take long before it starts to bug me.

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11 hours ago, sunrat said:

You picked a really bad time to try out the MX live-usb-maker as we just found a serious bug this week which prevented saves if you selected persist_all, persist_root, or persist_home, which all write changes to RAM and only write back to files on shutdown. Fix has been found but not pushed to the repos yet. The best save method is to use p_root_static which saves all changes to file as they happen and wasn't affected by the bug.

 

Typical, I choose the worst week to try.

 

I have no idea now as to exactly what I have done but I seem to have a usb with persistency.

 

I tried to set up p_root_static but for some reason I could never set up the disk space properly. Thinking about it I was probably trying when I had the dd'd image so it would not have worked properly. I may have a go later on as writing to disk will slow things down a tad but speed up shutdown. I''ll  have a go at using two usb's in a similar way to saturnian's efforts later on aswell when I have found a spare usb.

 

It is cool that we have a few MX users here.

 

😎

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Seems like there can be a lot of variables involved. If I'm understanding what sunrat was saying, what I did shouldn't have worked.

 

MX is the only distro where I try to set up home persistence.

 

Speaking more generally, like with other distros where I'm simply trying to write the iso to a flash drive, lately I've been using cp most of the time even when the distro's instructions say to use dd, although in some cases I'll follow the instructions step by step. I don't know if it makes any difference in the end.

Edited by saturnian
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I still don't understand why I can't find anything in the MX documentation that mentions using cp to write the iso to a flash drive, like here in the Debian documentation, section 4.3.1: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch04s03.en.html

 

Maybe I'm just missing it. Generally speaking, I find the MX documentation about as clear as mud. But I understand that there's really only so much that a small team can do. The MX documentation seems to mainly point the user towards GUI tools, and especially to its own live usb maker. And there's a little bit there about using dd, but I'd like to see more clarity about that approach.

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  • 2 months later...

So far no problems or glitches with MX-19 on the old ToughBook or on the usb stick. I have just persuaded my sister living nearly 300 miles away to replace Windows 7 with MX-19. Hopefully this will mean an end to support calls, to be truthfully she only had three occasions where her 7 glitched and one total wipeout on her 7 set up.

 

Monumentally I have persuaded her to have a go at downloading and burning to a usb the Live MX-19. Then doing a install of MX-19 to her hard drive. Will it work out ???? I have faith. 😎

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