Rev on two minimalist Linux distros

[David Bovill]

Thanks for the report Peter. It's really useful to get a feel of what is and
is not working on these minimalistic Linux distros.

On 16 September 2010 08:22, Peter Alcibiades
<palcibiades-first at yahoo.co.uk>wrote:

> I have finally fired up Rev Media 4.0 on two minimalist Linux distributions
> as a start on the effort to discover whether the problems are really due to
> not having all the necessary files installed, and whether they are due to
> the mulifarious nature of Linux.
>
> I began with Slitaz and Tiny Core, the latter of which gives new meaning to
> the expression 'minimalist'.  It is gui userland Linux system in 11 Mb.  If
> we still had floppies, it would just about be deliverable on a handful.  It
> uses almost none of the standard components.  All applications have to be
> installed from repository.  Both of these distros run in memory, so they
> are super fast.
>
> If you do this at home with Tiny Core, you should probably go with 3.1,
> just out.  I used 3.0.  It has 2.6 kernel, BusyBox, Tiny X, FLTK graphical
> user interface and flwm window manager.  Without getting too far into the
> recherche details, this is not your standard distro.  This is as minimalist
> as X windows can get.  Get it here:
>
> tinycore_3.1.iso
>
> The other distribution is Slitaz, less minimalist, this has a whole 30 Mb
> and runs OpenBox, so a standard GUI, though not one most folks here may be
> familiar with.  It comes with XOrg and LXDE bits and pieces.  Midori as web
> browser, leafpad editor.  It is a usable desktop out of the box, unlike
> Tiny Core.  Get it here:
>
> slitaz-3.0.iso
>
> I did not use these in VMs, but on a spare bare metal machine we now have
> available.  There is not going to be any difference if you run from CD in
> live mode, or if you install on hard drive, since in either case they both
> load directly to memory.  I don't use VMs for this stuff in the interests
> of eliminating as many variables as possible.
>
> I made no modification whatever to Slitaz, but on Tiny Core, using the
> terminal, was unable to cd to the USB drive on which I had placed Media.  I
> therefore installed PCManFM from the repository, which brought down a
> modest bunch of dependencies, including Gtk2, all of which went by in a
> flash.  I didn't make a note of the others but can find out what they were
> if anyone is interested.
>
> It would be nice to know what people think should be tested for to make
> this rigorous.  What I did was two things.  First, some minimal exercise of
> the IDE.  Created a new mainstack, dragged objects onto it, resized them.
> This worked fine.  The font (yes, singular is intended) could be resized
> fine.  The dictionary displayed and worked fine.  You can alternate between
> IDE and browse mode.  Buttons work.  Second thing was, when I had a stack,
> I then moved it to another virtual desktop, popped over to the virtual
> desktop and clicked it.  It instantly went back to the first one, where
> Media was open.  So virtual desktops do not work here.
>
> It does not look like the problems could be missing dependencies.  Rev
> seems to work exactly the same if its in one of these totally minimalist
> environments, including with Tiny Core which has out of the box almost
> nothing the big ones have except what you absolutely have to have to run
> the kernel and a command line, or if it is full fledged and bloated like
> Gnome or KDE.
>
> The environment I have found where Rev doesn't work at all is Ion2 window
> manager.  This is actually a very nice working environment, its becoming my
> favorite.  Its a tiling and tabbing WM.  You have tiles open, and your apps
> take up the entire tile, in a tab.  The tiles sit side by side on the
> desktop.  It handles pop-up windows in an unusual way, they all appear at
> the bottom of the tile you are in.  Rev does not like this, and it crashes.
> When you get used to Ion and know the keyboard shortcuts, its simply
> superb, fast, intuitive and very easy.  You start apps from the keyboard
> with auto fill to help.  Everything else seems to work with Ion, so this
> may be an indication that Rev is not standards compliant on the desktop
> issue.
>
> So, tell me what else people want to see exercised, and I will do it, this
> is just a start.  And next week I will hopefully have time to do a full
> scale slackware install and bash around with that.  I am not all that
> lively lately, and the latest is, have a proper phone system to install....
> in addition to a server.  But we will get to it, we really will.
>