antiX performance

[Member Hector_A]

I’ve been using antiX-bullseye-b1-runit_x64-full since mid September in two laptops: A Dell XPS13 9350 and an HP Mini netbook. The performance was really outstanding and the improvement on the HP Mini as compared with Lubuntu was truly spectacular. Took some timing readings as follows:

On Dell XPS13 9350

System boot 31″
antiX boot 1’04” (time to password prompt)
Ready 2.5″
Shutdown 25″

On HP-Mini

System boot 7″
antiX boot 48″ (time to password prompt)
Ready 4″
Shutdown 10″

Curiously, both the System boot and the Shutdown times are noticeably faster in the (much older) HP Mini. The Dell had previously Debian 10.7 installed and I followed some guidelines found somewhere in Internet for it to work. Among other details, the boot is set to Legacy. I wonder if booting in UEFI would improve things. If the answer is yes, I’d like to have some advice on the correct procedure to follow.

Additionally, I have already downloaded the final version 21 and would like to upgrade my system. Again, some directives would be much appreciated in order to maintain my customized Openbox as well as my home directory intact.

I look forward to hear anyone willing to lend a hand. Thanks in advance. Cheers!

[Member sybok]

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Hi,

you have at least two options:
1) Upgrade existing installation; change the repo-lists ‘/etc/apt/sources.list.d/’ (buster -> bullseye).
This has been discussed elsewhere in the forum, please see
https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/upgare-anix19-to-anix21-without-reinstalling/

2) If you have ‘/home’ on separate partition, then you sure can reinstall while preserving ‘/home’.
I do not remember if the “preserve home” option in installer applies to single-partition (root+home together); I believe that the range of applicability is explicitly stated in the installer.

Regarding UEFI:
Not quite sure about changing boot from legacy to UEFI and its benefits.
A quick web search reveals that UEFI boot may or may not be faster/better, see e.g.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/647303/uefi-or-legacy-which-is-advised-and-why

Few more notes:
– Fresh (re)install may lead to a (slightly) different system than upgrade.
– In any case, it is advisable to backup ‘/etc/’ and ‘/home/’.
– I usually store the list of installed packages, e.g. ‘dpkg -l | grep ‘^ii’ > ~/INSTALLED.txt’ to make recovery easier.
– Some people (currently, I am not one of them) use frugal installs.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by sybok. Reason: Preserve home made more clear

[Member ModdIt]

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As BobC recently posted to get the complete new antiX 21 package you would need to reinstall,
if you prepare it is probably far less time consuming.
Not sure if anyone has a full workaround yet.

I reinstalled, added my ton of extra programmes then copied my config from a live stick, that was
made using antiX snapshot tool then Live USB Maker.

Only thing which did not work was carry over claws mail configuration, possibly because I have the
very latest version which is not/not yet available as part of antix.

[Member Hector_A]

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Hello sybok and Moddit:
Thanks for the guidance. I went for a reinstallation and all went well nearly perfect. I say nearly because there are two issues remaining, as follows:

1) The new OS scaled my screen layout of 3200×1800 using a factor of 6. I found it usable but would prefer slightly bigger text fonts. How can I correct this? and should I use a higher or lower factor?

2) My wallpaper initially appears too big (and displays partially). To correct this I have to access Control Centre/Wallpaper and press Apply.It appears that the above scaling is not applied to it or that the wallpaper is displayed out of sync.

Thanks in advance for any additional help you can provide.

[Moderator BobC]

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Try Set Font Size and restart afterwards. Doing that should change the setting in ~/.Xresources, and then autoscale.antix should notice that and leave it alone at boot.

If that fails look at man xrandr and look at the –scale option, and then adjust ~/.screenlayout/default.sh to have it make the change for you at login.

Xecure may have better ideas. I’m the goofball that came up with the 9 pixels per mm max calculation that drives the sizing defaults, so if anyone is at fault its me. Feel free to suggest a better default calculation…

Attachments:

1. 

   screenshot-2021Nov20_023534.jpg
   

[Member Hector_A]

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Hello BobC:
Thanks for the help. I just used your first suggestion and worked fine. Set the font size to 1.50 144dpi and it became persistent. Now my system looks good to me and my eyesight!

Any idea on how to deal with issue 2) of my post?

[Moderator BobC]

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I’d say see if you can get the wallpaper to redisplay after the screen is changed. If you can only do it before, then put in a sleep to get it to wait till after.

The command I’d run would be, not sure if it would need an & after it to get it to run in background or not.

desktop-session-wallpaper

[Member Hector_A]

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I’m using Openbox which has an autostart file, but the option that used feh to set the background was disabled. I tried to enable it but nothing changed. It was already at the end to ensure the wm had finished loading.

I suspect antiX is using its own autostart file but searching for desktop-session-wallpaper yielded several results in which I was unable to find where or when the wallpaper is set. Could you be more specific? Thanks.

[Moderator BobC]

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Did you try adding the command I gave you at the end of it?

Also, you might want to add a little debug output to a log file before and after so you know it ran.

PS:I don’t know what you do know or don’t. I guess you must realize that if you aren’t running what the Devs created, you are going to need to learn a lot to get things to work and keep running.

Here is how I add debug output that I can look at to see what happened…

echo "$(date) $0" >> $HOME/startup.log &
echo "$(date) $HOME/.desktop-session/startup started" >> $HOME/startup.log &
printenv >> $HOME/startup.log &

• This reply was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by BobC.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by BobC.

[Member Hector_A]

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Here is what your debug reports:

$ echo “$(date) $0” >> $HOME/startup.log &
echo “$(date) $HOME/.desktop-session/startup started” >> $HOME/startup.log &
printenv >> $HOME/startup.log &
[1] 2977
[2] 2978
[3] 2980

And desktop-session-wallpaper does not report anything.

[Moderator BobC]

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My guess is that your system isn’t running the programs it needs to run in order to setup the variables needed for antiX’s wallpaper script to run. Have you tried changing the wallpaper settings from the control centre?

If you aren’t able to program, yet, and you really want to run openbox with antiX, I would suggest trying Bento antiX which uses openbox to learn how it works.

Another thing you could try would be to boot your version of antiX from a flashdrive, and after its up, open a terminal and run

printenv

You could compare the output from there to output from the same command from your current setup, and look for variables used in desktop-session-wallpaper that aren’t set, or not set correctly. Maybe your openbox setup doesn’t do wallpaper in a way compatible with antiX’s scripts. If that’s the case, you need to either bridge it, adjust it, or replace with something that will work in your environment.

Depending on your skill level and your time and willingness to work at it, you can just use something already included with antiX, instead, or try a respin like Bento (antiX with Openbox), or try different wallpaper packages, or change something in antiX to fix the problem. It sounds to me like you are running things the antiX Dev’s didn’t anticipate with their design.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by BobC.

[Member ModdIt]

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is your wallpaper scaled same as the screen resolution ?.
If not you will always experience delays due upscaling, often done by a monitor to fill screensize.

[Member Hector_A]

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Thank you both for the help provided.

@ BobC I’d like to point out that my Openbox runs flawlessly in all situations AFAIK. The only issue is the wallpaper which initially displays OK but afterwards is out of scale (much bigger) and shifted to display from the upper left corner.

@Moddit I tend to agree with your opinion. My screen resolution is 3200×1800 and I scaled the font size to 1.5 (144dpi). However, this did not impact in any way from the wallpaper display. As said above, it initially display correctly and almost immediately redisplays out of scale. It would seem that antiX applies screen scaling afterwards and therefore affects the wallpaper display.

[Moderator BobC]

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Sorry, Hector, I don’t know exactly what you are running to be able to figure it out. I tried to get you to add debug statements so you could see what code ran, but you weren’t able to do that, so we don’t know if the script ran or not, or where it got to, or what the variable values were..

Maybe someone else can figure it out.

[Moderator BobC]

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Btw, I think the basic problem might be that you need to put up the wallpaper after changing the screen

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