Dirty Laundry, general question

[Launfal]

I had to work today, so I only got a little time with it, but I'm off the next two days, so I'll be playing with all the shiny buttons. I do know that it runs great off a USB key, and the first updates went great. I do have a general question, though.

It looks like powerline, airline and the vim plugins are all installed in the home directory. I don't want to mess around too much with the USB copy other than merging my vim and tmux configs that I'm already using. From the little time I had with it, I'm loving the look and feel, and I"d like to have it on my main box, too., but if I install it there, with hplip and the other stuff I' need, I'm stuck with systemd, among other things, and I want to put that off until the dust settles and they get that all straightened out.

So, can I just copy over the home directory from Laundry to my main rig and have it just work, or are there dependencies/programs I would need to install first to make it work the same way? Right now I'm just thinking of powerline, airline and the vim plugins. I can study the rest of it later to better understand how it was put together.

This spin is the rockmost. I'm due for another marathon writing session, and this is just what the doctor ordered.

[machinebacon]

With regards to the configs: you can move the stuff over, they do not have depends:

- airline is just a .vim file
- tmux-powerline is in /usr/local/bin
- tmux-mem-cpu-load too
- the vim plugins are there in home, but also in /etc/skel (which is the folder that gets copied to a newly created user). They are not really installed, because they are (like airline) just .vim files. You can *also* use Pathogen (or any other plugin manager) to 'install' them in VIM.


I made this spin because some people like live sessions, and Dirty Laundry can handle Windows partitions. It also means that people can save their work on the hard drive (of course also in git). If I know that you 'only' need the handful of plugins, I could have written a bash three-liner. Basically, it's just 'git clone https://github.com/blabla/bla.git'

Nevermind, somebody will find it useful.

I see you said "the updates went great". I hope you know that the updates are not persistent if run from USB. It means, after a reboot they are gone. It is a live system if run from USB. So also any document you write and save (in /home/user or anywhere on the stick) will not persist. So, if you run this thing live, please mount an actual hard drive and save your work there. (choose "Mount drives" in the menu, then start writing, then save it in /media/PARTITION/, and not in /home/user!) Thought I mention this because it is damned important :)

[pidsley]

So the Dirty Laundry comes with these things on board:

- optimized to run as live session

If do my occasional printing on my wife's WInbox, and I won't even need cups/hplip, and thus no systemd for a while, either.

and I"d like to have it on my main box, too., but if I install it there, with hplip and the other stuff I need, I'm stuck with systemd

There appears to have been a major miscommunication here. Bacon designed this spin to run live. As he says, if all you really wanted was the plugins, you could install them yourself. And the Debian transition to systemd has already happened, without anyone (except the haters) even really noticing.

[Launfal]

I don't know where systemd comes from when installing hplip. I forgot to check what pulls it in, but on install, it deletes sysvinit-core, then installs systemd-sysv. It's a hard dependency of something, and until I understand what's going on with it, I'd rather wait until Jessie goes stable to figure it out.

As for the live session, that's absolutely perfect, since now when I get roped into going to my wife's family, I can just plug my key into their comp and keep up with my writing using my own tools, and once I learn git, I can access my work no matter where I do it. No more trying to figure out which folder has which story in it. Windows partitions will come in extremely handy, since I'm the only Linux user in my entire circle of family/friends.

"Just the plugins" is fine for when I'm at home. This spin is exactly what I need for when I'm not.

And thanks for the heads up about persistence, since I didn't know. I don't know why I thought that live systems were always persistent, but sure enough, I'd have assumed it was and been in for a nasty surprise.

This spin will go everywhere I do, and I"ll drive it until my fingers fall off. I only asked about my main rig to see if I could have the same look/interface at home that I will on the road.

[pidsley]

You can create a persistent "live" install on a USB stick, but it's a little more work.

[Launfal]

^ OK. A quick web search explained the difference, so I understand that a little better. I don't need persistence, and at least now I understand why not.

As for systemd, I don't know anything about it except Debian says it's good, and the haters say it isn't. The technical debate is over my head, and the rest of it seems to boil down to "The guys who wrote it suck, Redhat's taking over the world, so systemd sucks, too." Linus doesn't like it, Slackware doesn't like it, and everyone else seems to either not know what's going on or pretending that they do.

For now, if Deb says it's good then I'll take their word for it. I've got enough faith that they won't let it reach stable until they're sure it works.

[pidsley]

^ good philosophy. Don't listen to anyone who doesn't have a really good technical argument.

[machinebacon]

Thanks for your input pidsley and launfal.

The systemd dependency gets sucked in via systemd <- libpam-systemd <- policykit-1 <- hplip. In fact, it does not do much harm on something like a no-X system ;) I might respin it for fun, including hplip, running on systemd, just for kicks.