Why BBQ?

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catfood
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Why BBQ?

Unread post by catfood » Wed Jul 08, 2020 11:48 pm

Odd off topic, kinda multi-part question, but curious how you all got/stayed here...
Some things confuse me:

Mixing Debian Sid with ancient WMs and no X. Sid giving the newest and "best" packages, yet running the bare bones minimum setups?
Why not Debian Stable with just a WM, or why not all out Debian Sid with heavy DEs if your computer can run it?

Running a bare bones Debian setup minus things you hate, why not run Gentoo, Slackware, or a BSD vs. compiling Debian from scratch?

I loved the BBQ site look. I downloaded and burned a cd for every spin available when I got here. It felt like 80's Nintendo and Atari distros. Old BBQ setups quickly ran and worked with my old and/or slow hardware toys, and despite not knowing much, it's been very idiot proof while i'm learning. Just trying to understand more pro's of staying with Debian as I learn and grow...

I don't know enough about Linux yet to judge anyone, and these questions aren't intended to. Rather, I'd like to understand more of why BBQ is good other than my retro taste in surface appearances, and my old hardware needs.
Thank You!
(I remember when debian "non-gui" installer scared me. #never-forget)

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wuxmedia
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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by wuxmedia » Thu Jul 09, 2020 11:27 am

why not the newest packages on old(er) HW? Felt a bit like sticking racing seats and a v6 in a trabant.
"why yes, this is a 486 with 128M of ram, and yes the version of ratpoison IS bleeding edge, newer than yours and looking nice thank you"

these days I do run newer hardware and stale (stable) Debian with i3wm nothing much more. more like a boring reliable SUV (now that I have a job which requires my machine to not bork every so often)

This project is honestly sort of dead now. the lead dropped of the face of the internet. we remain to rant and post stuff.
There is an IRC channel #linuxbbq on freenode you can find a couple of us on there.
"Seek, and Ye shall find"
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wuxmedia
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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by wuxmedia » Thu Jul 09, 2020 11:28 am

oh and we came here from the old crunchbang forums, that was slowly dying at the time, the idea of a lightweight distro remained I guess (we did have a few DE spins)
"Seek, and Ye shall find"
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ivanovnegro
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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by ivanovnegro » Thu Jul 09, 2020 12:23 pm

catfood wrote:
Wed Jul 08, 2020 11:48 pm
I loved the BBQ site look. I downloaded and burned a cd for every spin available when I got here. It felt like 80's Nintendo and Atari distros. Old BBQ setups quickly ran and worked with my old and/or slow hardware toys, and despite not knowing much, it's been very idiot proof while i'm learning. Just trying to understand more pro's of staying with Debian as I learn and grow...
There you said it. Old hardware, minimal setups, tons of window managers and the retro look. That is BBQ and it was and still is all about (us) the community.
We even had some spins based on something else. I am not sure if it was Slackware or something else. Though the times of cooking are over.
But who knows what happens in the future.

The reason to focus mainly on Debian is because of our background in it or as Wux said, Crunchbang. And mostly Debian sid because of our passion to follow the unstable branch even before LinuxBBQ was created. There we already had a lively upgrade warnings session and many people tried and sometimes broke their Openbox installs trying to upgrade to testing or sid. Fun times!

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GekkoP
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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by GekkoP » Thu Jul 09, 2020 12:47 pm

Come for the window managers, stay for the managers.

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gutterslob
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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by gutterslob » Thu Jul 09, 2020 12:55 pm

wuxmedia wrote:
Thu Jul 09, 2020 11:27 am
we remain to rant and post stuff.
That's what I joined for. That and I liked bacon.

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vic
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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by vic » Thu Jul 09, 2020 9:41 pm

Hi catfood and thanks for posting. Made me think, and well the result are, just bbq whatever you want. Have fun, learn, break and bork! ;D
Sorry guys, no signature for a while, too busy with life. :|

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catfood
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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by catfood » Fri Jul 10, 2020 3:58 am

Thank you everyone. I just read the anti-bloat thread and got a lot of inspiration there. Also was surprised on Archvortex's comment, he learned more in a year here than 13yrs of Gentoo(ironically, as I'm currently installing my 1st gentoo started last night, lol). I plan on staying for the society and help anyways. I google a problem, I get 50 different Ubuntu based answers, some clearly wrong, many just opinionated "get _______ gui program" to do it for you. Seems harder and harder to find simple truthful help. Always got straight answers here, and always appreciate, I just feel bad when I have dumb questions, but 2hrs of searching the net yielded nothing useful and I have to bring it up here...

To reply to a few of you, I actually tried Crunchbang before I came to BBQ. I liked how it was setup, just at the time, the concept of openbox was weird to me. I've grown apparently. Needed a Debian VB to test something, didn't bother installing desktop, it gave me openbox, and I plugged away not really caring or noticing :D .

Sucks Bacon vanished. I was off for a while with moving and life stuff, then had to try and pick up where I left off on Netbook. Slow start. MachineBacon was always nice and helpful, like most of you (who always seem to be on, thank you). Hope he resurfaces alive and well!

I do have a bunch of BBQ roast ideas in my head for interesting spins, but I don't have the knowledge yet to actually make any of them. I'm not concerned with credit, so if anyone is bored and want's to make some spins, I'll dig up my list. I can at least GIMPshop backgrounds (and icons if needed), potentially learn themes too, though only tried coloring 2wm so far. Let me know if anyone want's a BBQ project... I'll help how I can, just to see them done, and maybe find new favorite toy distros...
Thank You!
(I remember when debian "non-gui" installer scared me. #never-forget)

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ivanovnegro
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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by ivanovnegro » Tue Jul 14, 2020 12:30 am

catfood wrote:
Fri Jul 10, 2020 3:58 am
To reply to a few of you, I actually tried Crunchbang before I came to BBQ. I liked how it was setup, just at the time, the concept of openbox was weird to me. I've grown apparently. Needed a Debian VB to test something, didn't bother installing desktop, it gave me openbox, and I plugged away not really caring or noticing :D .
I never liked Openbox and never cared for it. Only once did I made an Openbox setup from scratch just for fun. I only cared for all the window manager setups posted by Gutterslob. :D

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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by machinebacon » Sun Jul 19, 2020 9:29 pm

catfood wrote:
Fri Jul 10, 2020 3:58 am

I do have a bunch of BBQ roast ideas in my head for interesting spins, but I don't have the knowledge yet to actually make any of them. I'm not concerned with credit, so if anyone is bored and want's to make some spins, I'll dig up my list. I can at least GIMPshop backgrounds (and icons if needed), potentially learn themes too, though only tried coloring 2wm so far. Let me know if anyone want's a BBQ project... I'll help how I can, just to see them done, and maybe find new favorite toy distros...
Okay, where's the list?

Just to answer the original post: back in the day there was no distro that had an installable live session of Debian sid with non-free packages. There was sidux (which had to rename itself to aptosid) but they were extremely anal about non-free packages. Their devs made quite nice patches and spun really snappy kernels, which was a good enough reason for me to add their repos to sid. As time went by our bbq spins got less and less bloated to a point of being OCD about it. While crunchbangers celebrated the "Sub-100" club (RAM usage below 100MB after boot), pidsley and I were duelling each other scratching the 30MB (he won). While the world around us was waiting for the next GTK3 update, we had already purged gtk2 from our spins. That's BBQ - do exactly the opposite of what everyone is doing.
Hope it answers a few questions :)
..gnutella..

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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by machinebacon » Sun Jul 19, 2020 9:33 pm

And by the way, most of us (at least a few) don't really care about the base distro. You know that the biggest difference between distributions is the package manager. All Linux are more or less the same under the hood. Distrohopping is just an illusion.
..gnutella..

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ivanovnegro
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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by ivanovnegro » Mon Jul 20, 2020 4:30 pm

^ Absolutely!

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catfood
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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by catfood » Thu Jul 23, 2020 1:15 pm

machinebacon wrote:
Sun Jul 19, 2020 9:29 pm
As time went by our bbq spins got less and less bloated to a point of being OCD about it. While crunchbangers celebrated the "Sub-100" club (RAM usage below 100MB after boot), pidsley and I were duelling each other scratching the 30MB (he won). While the world around us was waiting for the next GTK3 update, we had already purged gtk2 from our spins. That's BBQ - do exactly the opposite of what everyone is doing.
Hope it answers a few questions :)
2nd person on here to mention OCD means I'm still definitely in the right place :D

Until I learn how to "Roast my own", distro hopping has been my life, lol. I got tired of premade distro's not working on old cool toys I want them to work on. Now I'm tired of extra bloat packages that crash anyways as well. I'm looing forward to your next re-release updates, I'm almost done making my retro Break work right, i look forward to adding all my configs to a newer base I can actually safely upgrade! No rush, just happily anticipating. After I get my Break fixed and "ported" to a more recent build, I will eventually learn to make my own roast off its work as well, but I have a lot to learn still.
machinebacon wrote:
Sun Jul 19, 2020 9:29 pm
Okay, where's the list?
I'm still digging through all my computer boxes to find the pile of sticky notes with them...
A few I remember off the top of my head:

Japanese Food
(or Sushi, or insert better title name here ______)
Bare minimal BBQ build with ICEWM on top(frozen fish...)
ICEWM looks like old school nintendo grey color scheme to begin with. I haven't spent time doing a config for ICEWM yet in my learning process, but I'm pretty sure I could GIMPshop the icons to make NES Power button for menu. + select start A B could all also be added somehow to menubar in some way, though haven't thought in depth about uses. Or Start could be the menu, Reset and Power could be annoying joke buttons on the bar that just straight reboot or shutdown right away (tiling wm's train us not to click on things anyways) lol.
Anyone good with ASCII art could go as far as making neofetch show Nintendo in some way.
(Remember, FBI fair use act allows copyright material for education, humor, etc as long as not for profit...)
Basic alpha concept, details still largely open to debate.
(edit:
NESpwr_start.png
NESpwr_start.png (1.86 KiB) Viewed 21617 times
,
start_button1.png
start_button1.png (1.38 KiB) Viewed 21617 times
Didn't turn out amazing, I need to find better NES button pics to start with, but took about 3 min rough draft to size it over default icewm "start.xpm", made .png to show here, but saving .xpm is easy. Make better ones when I find better stock pics...
Also https://github.com/bbidulock/icewm/blob ... _32x32.xpm the way .xpm files showed up in github, I think I understand how to make custom ASCII art with hex color codes now, lol. Will take longer to do by hand than exports from GIMP, but I think I could figure out a Nintendo Neofetch from this example code alone(no time estimate will be provided though!) :D )


Teenage Mutant Ninja Rodent
( I know its not technically a food based title, but I'm pretty sure I ate rat on a stick in Korea, so kinda counts?)
I know most people here won't use this, so low low priority, just seems fun in my head.
XFCE4 DE with Ratpoison put into it for its window manager. Whisker menu would be on Super_L(mod4)
hi48-app-poisonmenu.png
hi48-app-poisonmenu.png (3.23 KiB) Viewed 21615 times
, so could still use it's function and scroll items without mouse, but it does give a free panel to ratpoison with clock and other things built in. Yes, it is bloated and runs X, but it is funny. I already have an obnoxious Gimpshop Japanese panel style wallpaper in my head with various "poisoned" TMNT Splinter pics across it.
TeenageMutantNinjaRodents_wallpaper_WORK.png

I could probably build this on my own off anyone's ratpoison build, or just off the next re-release of whatever though, so again very low priority.
(currently trying in franken Xubuntu, but I think all of XFCE's default keybindings break ratpoison bindings? though might have compiled wrong, or some other things I frequently mess up)

Steak
A Gentoo based Openbox build (with room for plenty of Larry the Cow and Boxen based puns)
Though as I'm currently practicing Gentoo builds, I see some issues already. It would have to have a bloated kernel running generic x86_64 cpu setup since anyone could be using either AMD or Intel computers. Need 32-bit support enabled. Would pretty much need the full fat live .iso kernel so anyone could use it, and that seems to defeat the point of using Gentoo with BBQ mandates... Seems like extra work as well for whoever downloads it would probably have to re-compile their own slimmed down kernel. Unsure if all this is worth it, but it is an idea if someone's bored.

Chicken Bone (nowison nowison nowison)
A re-release of Chicken Wings "sponsored" by a Shake Junt theme makeover:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyI2j_XA0aA
Mid 2000's Skateboarding videos. The artwork and themes scream bbq to begin with. Again, I'd try to GIMPshop menu icons for Shake Junt logo
jwm-shakejunt.png
jwm-shakejunt.png (10.69 KiB) Viewed 21617 times
, chicken, booty, 40's and blunts art could be put in wherever. Would even love to put the intro theme song into startup if possible, lol. Once it got in my head, it hasn't left for over ten years, but I still laugh.

I will let you know when I find the actual list. I didn't wanna resurrect the Wish-a-Spin thread when everyone said you were MIA, but now that your back, I'll try to add some inspirational ideas for when you, or whoever, are bored enough to make something different. I still suck at Linux and can't make these yet, but I can photoshop about anything in 15-30min, so I will gladly offer artwork support to anyone who wants to pursue.
Last edited by catfood on Mon Aug 10, 2020 3:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
Thank You!
(I remember when debian "non-gui" installer scared me. #never-forget)

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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by johnraff » Sun Jul 26, 2020 8:20 am

Heard rumours that Machinebacon had been released from the re-education centre and was back in the "real" world, so came to have a look. Pleasantly surprised to see the BBQ forums still going, with so many familiar faces - hi everyone! And especially hello to King Bacon! It's been quite a few years.
All code is one.

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ivanovnegro
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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by ivanovnegro » Tue Jul 28, 2020 12:42 pm

Hello to you John. I see you are also alive and kicking.

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catfood
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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by catfood » Thu Jul 30, 2020 1:03 am

WHYBBQ1.jpg
(yea, paintbrush/fonts are garbage, but the MESSAGE is what matters, lol.)

I want to apologize if I'm annoying anyone. I know I'm kinda spamming this forum lately(covid-bored). I got old comps/HDDs out of storage and want to pick up where I left off. I really like this place. It's weird, different, doesn't make logical sense, yet is brilliant and creative and perfect. Every time I find something i like, people stop making it; I get sad. I don't wanna see that happen here, so yes, I'm resurrecting 10yr old threads, getting crazy with "fanboi" art, doing whatever asinine shenanigans I can think of to reignite the fire I saw when I first got here... I gave up on windows because I was tired of paying a dick to tell me how my computer should work. I'm thankful for Linux Mint and Ubuntu for a nice foot in the door, but I got bored of training wheels quickly. I found BBQ and the GTA Vice city main page theme alone kept me. I burned a cd for every spin, and drew my own crappy art on each. i love this place. I appreciate all you active members who chime right back in to my dumb questions as if no time had past.

I just wanna do whatever I can to help ensure THIS does not vanish! I suck at code, but consider me your free self-appointed art department. I'm trying to make a business off "photoshop" work, but for friends and those who help me (cough cough, everyone here), consider the offer of open-source artwork. Ask and you shall receive.
Last edited by catfood on Thu Jul 30, 2020 5:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
Thank You!
(I remember when debian "non-gui" installer scared me. #never-forget)

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vic
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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by vic » Thu Jul 30, 2020 4:11 am

^hehehe
Sorry guys, no signature for a while, too busy with life. :|

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Re: Why BBQ?

Unread post by machinebacon » Wed Aug 05, 2020 10:56 pm

burned steaks matter lol nice to see somebody still loves us
..gnutella..

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