AntiX on Asus eee PC

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Another comment, one that I used to employ whenever possible, especially when I used to run “Live” many years ago from either CD or DVD – those devices were pretty slow, BUT if you have enough memory, load the entire operating system directly into RAM (or whatever type of memory you have). In the old days, everything would fit. In the new days, it still will, provided you have a lot of RAM and you aren’t constantly running a thirsty Web browser.

This, in fact, was one of the main things that attracted me initially to PCLinuxOS, MEPIS, Kanotix, and antiX, all of which, in their early days, could run 100% from memory. Even on my memory starved Dell Dimension 4100 from those days, I could fit the entire OS into memory, and if I browsed only one tab at a time and read mostly text-based stuff – like this forum, I could operate live, only loading from CD or DVD initially, then having mostly silent operation; it was FAST for what I had at the time.

These days, Web browsers tend to chew up ALL available memory, but the idea is still there – load as much as possible into available memory and performance will be anywhere from acceptable to excellent, even on aging equipment. If you are lacking in sufficient memory to load 100% of the OS into memory, THAT is your system bottleneck.

The other thing I’d suggest is that for most common workloads, system tend to be I/O bound, that is, reading and writing greatly slow things down. The exceptions to this are when you are performing a LOT of calculations or compilations, then the workload is considered CPU-bound. My Dell Inspiron 5558 has a LOT of internal memory, so when I’m doing things that are reading and writing, I try to get them into memory as much as possible, then it performs quite well, even though it’s 7-8 years old now. Where I notice the slowness is when I have to build something. A lot of the package update stuff concerning kernels requires rebuilding the modules; on the Dell it seems very slow (though not nearly as slow as the older Lenovo Thinkpad X201 or the two old HP units, all of which are even older; those crawl, so I keep only a single OS image and one distro; that minimizes those changes).

I hope these comments are helpful to those trying to get the most out of their systems.

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Brian Masinick

[Member marcelocripe]

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RTFM: Read the F… Manual (some versions of this use a curse word in place of the “F”).
LOL: Laughing Out Loud
BTW: By the way

We can replace the curse in F for the RTFM to be “Read the Friendly Manual”! 🙂

Thank you very much Sir Brian for your clarification on the English acronyms. For example, if I use the acronyms in Brazilian Portuguese, that’s when no one will understand me, even with automatic translation.

I hope that Garrycook and all newcomers here on the forum don’t consider PPC tutorials to be just a “Read the Friendly Manual”, because that’s not it. You and I know the importance of the information contained in the PPC tutorials, as they are information that everyone needs to understand how antiX works and how to make it even easier to use for those who come from another GNU/ Linux or Windows. Without the PPC texts, we would have to keep repeating the same instructions here on the forum thousands of times for each new forum participant. And, that’s why I urge people to read PPC tutorials so much.

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RTFM: Read the F… Manual (some versions of this use a curse word in place of the “F”).
LOL: Laughing Out Loud
BTW: By the way

We can replace the curse in F for the RTFM to be “Read the Friendly Manual”! 🙂

Muito obrigado senhor Brian pelos seus esclarecimentos sobre as siglas inglesas. Por exemplo, se eu utilizar as siglas em idioma Português do Brasil, é aí que ninguém vai me entender, mesmo com a tradução automática.

Eu espero que o Garrycook e todos os recém chegados aqui no fórum não considerem os tutorias do PPC como sendo apenas “Read the Friendly Manual”, pois não é isso. O senhor e eu, sabemos que a importância nas informações contidas nos tutorias do PPC, pois são informações que todos precisam para se situarem de como o antiX funciona e como deixá-lo ainda mais fácil de ser utilizado para quem vem de outra distribuição GNU/Linux ou do Winodws. Sem os textos do PPC, nós teríamos que ficar repetindo aqui no fórum milhares de vezes as mesmas instruções para cada novo participante do fórum. E, é por isso que eu insisto tanto para as pessoas lerem os tutorias do PPC.

[Member garrycook]

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I hope that Garrycook and all newcomers here on the forum don’t consider PPC tutorials to be just a “Read the Friendly Manual”, because that’s not it. You and I know the importance of the information contained in the PPC tutorials, as they are information that everyone needs to understand how antiX works and how to make it even easier to use for those who come from another GNU/ Linux or Windows. Without the PPC texts, we would have to keep repeating the same instructions here on the forum thousands of times for each new forum participant. And, that’s why I urge people to read PPC tutorials so much.

I do consider the PPC tutorials to be RTFM. That’s a good thing. RTFM is a reminder, to read, not just ask. Which I was doing prior to asking, but not finding what I needed.
I read them all, and really appreciate you putting them together for me in the original post. Thanks!
Perhaps those and some other great posts are already organized and posted as a sticky somewhere in the forum. If so, I missed them. If not, they should be.

I really do appreciate the OS and all the forum responses. Both appear to be ‘lightning fast’ so far!

I’ve got the OS running on my eee PC last night, installed on the 4GB SSD so I don’t have to have my keys plugged into it all the time. They are almost heavier than the computer itself. I will be getting a Cruzer Fit to use for live installs going forward, instead of the big old USB stick on my keychain.

The issue I’m working on now is that after cloning from the USB live instance to the SSD, wireless is disabled. Looks like it can’t find WPA_supplicant. I’ll dig into that later tonight and see if I can find a solution, or if I should reinstall using a method other than cloning.

[Member olsztyn]

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garrycook wrote:

The issue I’m working on now is that after cloning from the USB live instance to the SSD, wireless is disabled. Looks like it can’t find WPA_supplicant.

This should not happen. Wireless and all settings should be cloned. Are you using Connman and CMST, which is default or another network manager?
On CMST just enable wireless if it shows disabled, chose your WiFi. It should be saved automatically next time you boot.
About not finding WPA supplicant puzzles me though. Is the source usb antiX connecting to WiFi? And did you clone via live-usb-maker as outlined before?

• This reply was modified 7 months, 3 weeks ago by olsztyn.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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@garrycook: I am happy that you are willing to read and take a look at the great work that PPC and others have done to make this a very good distribution and the fact that we have some practical documents, not just regurgitation of old, often out of date manual pages says a lot for the participants of this work.

Thanks for your willingness to contribute.

By the way if anyone spots something that would benefit from further discussion or clarification that’s fine. Many of us have read the work, suggested improvement and they’re incorporated, but if anything has changed or you want verification of what you understand, feel free to discuss it.

Active community participation is what makes the good distributions even better!

--
Brian Masinick

[Member olsztyn]

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garrycook wrote:

The issue I’m working on now is that after cloning from the USB live instance to the SSD, wireless is disabled. Looks like it can’t find WPA_supplicant.

Another thought:
One principle to keep in mind, particularly applicable to your hardware:
– The Live usb stick you use as origin (source) for cloning – make sure it connects to WiFi and it is configured optimally for how you want your system to look and operate.
– Once you configure everything on your usb stick and you are happy with it, you just remaster that usb stick. Remaster is part of antiX and you find it in antiX menu.
– After you remaster your source usb antiX you need to reboot it.
– After you reboot go to the Live – Boot-Dev – antix folder on your usb stick and delete all files suffixed *.old, particularly linuxfs.old. To delete these files you must use your zzzFM file manager logged on as root.
– After deleting these old files, result of remastering, now you proceed to clone your final antiX to your 4GB SSD as in the original post.

The reason you need to do these steps is that any remastering on SSD will not have enough space on it to create linuxfs.new file, which is just about the size of your entire antiX. It is new antiX in fact. You need to remaster on your original stick until final and then clone to SSD. Temporary config will not be cloned.

• This reply was modified 7 months, 3 weeks ago by olsztyn.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Member garrycook]

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olsztyn wrote:

This should not happen. Wireless and all settings should be cloned. Are you using Connman and CMST, which is default or another network manager?
On CMST just enable wireless if it shows disabled, chose your WiFi. It should be saved automatically next time you boot.
About not finding WPA supplicant puzzles me though. Is the source usb antiX connecting to WiFi? And did you clone via live-usb-maker as outlined before?

That’s what I thought too, “This shouldn’t be happening.” Yes, using defaults. When starting off with a new distro, I try not to make any real changes until I know my way around a bit.
Using CMST, both Ethernet and Wifi are ‘powered on’. I can turn them off and back on with the button under in the ‘Powered’ column. However, in Global Properties the State shows ‘Idle’. And on the Wireless tab, there are no SSIDs listed (and there are about 20 around me).
This is not what happens when I run it live from USB. There, I see all the SSIDs and can connect to mine.
I tried another route via terminal to turn it on, based on another post I found somewhere, but I can’t recall what that was today and I apparently don’t have history. This brings up another question that I’ve been thinking about… I should probably setup the live USB with persistence before I clone it?

@olsztyn thanks again for the help and detailed responses. I’m going to work through the additional instructions in your latest post to remaster the USB prior to install to SSD and see what comes of that.

[Member Mynaardt]

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Hope you get that ASUS eee PC working nicely.

Those are great little machines!

What have the Romans ever done for us?
Apart from: sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, fresh water, and public health?

[Member olsztyn]

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garrycook wrote:

I should probably setup the live USB with persistence before I clone it?

Utmost importance before you clone it:
Remaster. After you set up the way you want it, remaster, regardless whether you will use persistence or not.
After you remaster you must reboot Live usb, so your system file linuxfs becomes current. Now if your SSD was at least 8GB you could clone at this point. But you have just 4GB so in addition before you clone you must delete *.old files in antiX folder. Otherwise the total of linuxfs and linuxfs.old files alone will not fit in your 4GB.
So delete *.old and then you can clone. Cloned antiX will be exact copy of your remastered Live USB, including WiFi behavior.

• This reply was modified 7 months, 3 weeks ago by olsztyn.
• This reply was modified 7 months, 3 weeks ago by olsztyn.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Forum Admin rokytnji]

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Base iso is what I* ran eeepc on eeepc 701sd 4 gig drive back when I had a eeepc.

Then later on used a external sd card for the /home partition. Auto mount and used during boot up.

There is no current how to on how to do this.

Since I sold or gave away my eeepc’s.

https://antixlinux.com/forum-archive/how-to-install-antix-onto-a-sd-card-on-a-eee-pc-70-t3757.html

Also. The eeepc.com forum with all it’s useful links is now gone and is history. Lost a lot of good info there.

Sometimes I drive a crooked road to get my mind straight.
Not all who Wander are Lost.
I'm not outa place. I'm from outer space.

Linux Registered User # 475019
How to Search for AntiX solutions to your problems

[Member olsztyn]

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rokytnji wrote:

Base iso is what I* ran eeepc on eeepc 701sd 4 gig drive back when I had a eeepc.

Indeed. I you try to traditionally install system then there is not much space you have to play with. Just 4GB. However if you install antiX as Live on it then it easily fits the Full version and more. That it because antiX Live all OS fits in one linuxfs file, which is compressed. The entire antiX Full version fits in under 3GB.
I have been routinely setting up antiX Full also on 4GB USB sticks, to have dedicated systems, such as one that currently runs full time in the kitchen to play my wife’s music service and browse Internet…

• This reply was modified 7 months, 3 weeks ago by olsztyn.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Member Dr Dre]

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The heck are my replies disappearing from in here? @OP, AntiX 19_2_1 base 386 will resolve your issue!

• This reply was modified 7 months, 3 weeks ago by Dr Dre.

[Forum Admin rokytnji]

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Dr Dre wrote:

The heck are my replies disappearing from in here? @OP, AntiX 19_2_1 base 386 will resolve your issue!

Don’t feel lonely. It has happened to me also. That is why make make backup text files of my long technical replies so if it happens. I have a backup.
Since this is free forum. I shrug my shoulders, or purse my lips and move on.

just checked the dashboard and see 2 posts on hold or pending there. inizit member posts on androidOS. None with your handle.

• This reply was modified 7 months, 3 weeks ago by rokytnji.

Sometimes I drive a crooked road to get my mind straight.
Not all who Wander are Lost.
I'm not outa place. I'm from outer space.

Linux Registered User # 475019
How to Search for AntiX solutions to your problems

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I’ll take a peek into the Clean Talk anti-spam software to see if any recent posts have been “eaten”, consumed, or otherwise blocked. We’ve fixed most of that, but as @rokytnji: notes, 1) we are using free forum software, 2) our development team, forum team, and community members are all volunteers, doing our best to keep things light, lean, simple, and free. We don’t claim everything is 100% perfect at all times, but we do look into problems. Sometimes we find them quickly and fix them; other times things are elusive and difficult to fix; we don’t get them all 100%, but we do make a reasonable effort.

As one of the moderators and as our primary interface between the website leads and this forum, if I can make it better I will, but again, we do at least TRY!

--
Brian Masinick

[Moderator christophe]

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https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/split-antix-on-asus-eee-pc/

It’s my fault. I’m sorry I didn’t post to the original topic, mentioning that I split it. (Will do so going forward. I assumed it would be self-evident, but now I know.)

confirmed antiX frugaler, since 2019

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