MAIN EDITION: Spring 2014 (i486/i686/i686-pae) Release News

[machinebacon]

I am very happy to announce the immediate availability of "LinuxBBQ Spring 2014", the new base edition that replaces "Tiny" and "Clit". This release has been rebuilt from scratch and is a snapshot of 2014.02.03. "Spring 2014" is now the official no-X release and can be used to create an own remaster.

The respective kernel versions are as follow:
- Debian's linux-image-3.12-1 for i486
- siduction's linux-image-3.12-8 for i686 and i686-PAE

Especially the i486 image has an extremely small memory footprint, but a slightly larger ISO and installation size.

Changelog:
- sysV is the init system of choice
- general cleanup and lower dependency count
- restructure for better script support
- various applications have been removed to create a leaner base system: mutt, centerim, mplayer2, sucrack, john, aircrack.
- the new CLI browser is w3m with image support and replaces links2
- e3 and mcedit replace vi and nano
- git, pms and raffles are added
- inclusion of new bbq utilities from team members: paletter, dkeger, env-info, bbqgit, fbcolors, get-kernel, frenchmaid, kxt, passwux, grillmeister
- various color schemes for Xresources in dedicated folder
- liquorix kernel sources removed, they can be added via smxi

The kernel for the i686 and i686-pae releases are set to stay static. To enable a rolling release, please apply

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# for i686
sudo apt-get install linux-image-siduction-686 linux-headers-siduction-686
# for i686-pae
sudo apt-get install linux-image-siduction-686-pae linux-headers-siduction-686-pae

or run the get-kernel script for easier installation of kernels.
To detect missing drivers for your hardware, run fw-detect and follow the instructions there.

To create a bootable USB stick, copy the ISO to the device (e.g. /dev/sdc) using the command:

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sudo dd if=/path/to/linuxbbq-spring-*.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=1M

The username and password are "bbq". Please run sudo bbqinstaller to extract the ISO to your hard drive. Please read the last info screen of the installer for more information about your setup.

Download location: http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxbbq/files/2014/

The upload is ongoing, please allow a few hours.

[mrneilypops]

Great!
Look forward to using this for a dwmX sid spin...

[ChefIronBelly]

I went thru last week and compared aptosid, siduction , debian sid and the bbq offerings.

This will make a excellent base thank you and

Rock out with your sock out.

[machinebacon]

All the 32-bit editions are being uploaded. Following changes and bugfixes have been applied:

- added simple Xsession with wmii for easier build process
- fixed console-colors directory, now system-wide in /usr/local/share/console-colors
- added missing packages mpg123, firmware-ipw22x0, mkmnt, ali, fstab-build
- replaced e3 with nano

Allow a few hours to sync fully. 64-bit version follows in the next 24 hours.

[ChefIronBelly]

Thank You for this gem.

[pidsley]

Sweet spins. All that extra goodness (including X) and the iso files are only ~30M bigger. Will make new spins that much easier to have this as a base. Thanks.

[p120d16y]

Just started using Spring yesterday, so far pretty sweet. I'm not fully used to w3m yet, but I'm working on it.

[machinebacon]

right, w3m can be quite confusing if you used links2 before, because especially form fields don't behave exactly the same way. Actually you can replace w3m with links2 (both have img support if needed) if you anyway don't use emacs and its w3m integration. or to keep the bloat count down: dillo.

[p120d16y]

Both seem to have their strengths and weaknesses. (w3m & Links2) For example, I love the simple Esc menu for Links2 and the way it lays out pages in a better fashion.
But W3m seems to be neater in forum logins, and navigating the page. So currently I'm jumping back and forth in them both. I might just continue this pattern.

[machinebacon]

You could try lynx, elinks, netrik and retawq (not in the repos) as alternatives. Or if you really want heavy-metal ghetto-gangstah surfing: edbrowse.

[p120d16y]

Never tried netrik, retawq, or edbrowse so I'll check them all out. What I've basically boiled it down to is links2 -g in a spawn x session +tmux and no wm. :)
Still tweaking a lot of stuff until I have it a bit more comfortable, but I've been listening to a lot of bbqradio and running tests. One thing strange( and this is most likely my hardware setup) is a Raspberry Pi I've been working with this weekend uses between 20-30mb less ram in a full graphical Raspbian distro with all kinds of default stuff installed (2.5 Gb distro) using midori for browsing, etc than my Spring install on my netbook with nothing running. Again, I think this is my chipset/hardware, but I'm finding it strange that the Rasberry Pi with full GUI is running lighter than my plain Spring even running nothing but a plain x session and no terminals.

[machinebacon]

That's absolutely normal. The less RAM you have, the less RAM you have cached. http://www.linuxatemyram.com/

Install the 486 version and it will use 22MB RAM in tty1 on a netbook with 1GB RAM, and around 40MB in an Xsession. The same version uses 47 MB RAM on my desktop PC with 2GB RAM in tty1, the 686 version 66MB with tmux. I suppose you have the B Model Rasp, so 512MB RAM will have around 35MB for an Xsession. Note that there is no ARM version yet for Spring (there'll be one for Summer), and then you can be sure that BBQ is no RAM hog.

BTW another graphical browser for the tty is netsurf.

[p120d16y]

Ah, that explains it then! Thanks for explaining, I really didn't know why it was, just thought my chipset was being a serious resource hog! I love Spring though, like I said I thought it was somehow a problem on my end. I'll compile/install Spring on pi if you make it an ARM arch version, for sure. Yeah, it's a version B. Probably pick up a few quad-core Odroid boards soon and I'll test on them certainly as well. Also will try Spring with Linpak and make a Beowulf cluster this spring/summer. Sorry to get so far off topic!