Minimal and CLI respins

[Adrian]

I know some people want for some reasons that kind of escape me streamlined ISOs. I created two. One called "Minimal" under 1GB, and one called "CLI" about half of that.

Here's the deal:

Minimal is meant to look and behave (more or less) like the regular Xfce MX release but without ANY main application, other than Firefox. So I guess one could download that and customize it however they wanted. It's not meant for newbies or anybody who wants the full "MX experience", just get the regular release, but if you need or want for some reason an ISO under 1GB you can try this one.

It's not going be perfect either, sound is disabled for some reason (I think I removed too much of the ALSA stuff) and many other things might be broken or missing... IT"S NOT TESTED or SUPPORTED by MX devs and I have only did a cursory look at it and ran it just a bit in a VM.

CLI is even more reduced, it boots only to CLI (command line), it doesn't even have Xorg installed. It's meant only for experts, people who need to run a Linux OS from a CD, or people who want to build servers or other custom ISOs starting from a bootable system, but otherwise pretty much nothing. It does come with 3 important tools:
* cli-installer-antix -- a CLI based installer that comes from antiX. Be forewarned, the installer will prompt you about some antiX features that are not available on this ISO
* Iso-snapshot-cli -- this is mx-snapshot app stripped down that doesn't depend on Xorg and runs only from CLI; it can create custom ISOs for the running or installed system
* live-usb-maker -- for burning ISOs, or the current live system to USB drives -- haven't tested it, it's possible that it might even miss some important piece, let me know I can always add stuff back.

I could probably get it even smaller than 500MB if I remove some firmware and other useful stuff so I will people who want to do that remove the stuff they don't need (firmware that is not relevant for their hardware) and then use iso-snapshot-cli to take a custom snapshot. cryptsetup stuff is also a candidate for removal if you don't plan to use encryption. Anyway, I reached the point of diminished returns, since it's small enough to boot from a CD (even if you add Xorg back), so I'm fine with that.

Not even sure if anybody will find these useful, but I had fun working on them and posting them here for people who want to play with them.

Minimal and CLI are here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mx-lin ... y_Respins/

[manyroads]

Nice @Adrian . Next new build I do, I'll try them out. It sounds like your builds are "dangerously close" to antiX.

[pianokeyjoe]

@Adrian I will check your spins out and see what is what! Thankyou for daring to go where only a few of us will go!

[Adrian]

Nice @Adrian . Next new build I do, I'll try them out. It sounds like your builds are "dangerously close" to antiX.

Yes, antiX Core was an inspiration too. The bootloader looks different and it points to our repos and of course antiX is more militant against systemd we have both systemd and sysvinit available, so there are differences.

Oh, forgot to mention by default only en_US locale is configured, one could set other locales if they need in /etc/locale.gen and rerunning "locale-gen"

[chrispop99]

Oh, forgot to mention by default only en_US locale is configured, one could set other locales if they need in /etc/locale.gen and rerunning "locale-gen"

You can tell I'm GUI-focussed; I've been doing it using the MX tools...

Chris

[baldyeti]

Thank you very much for the minimal iso, Adrian ! I know you also have the richer workbench edition, but this one here makes for a darn convenient rescue tool already, with boot-repair, boot-rescue-menus, chroot-scan, gparted and whatnot... Very nice.

[siamhie]

I know some people want for some reasons that kind of escape me streamlined ISOs. I create two. One called "Minimal" under 1GB, and one called "CLI" about half of that.

Having played around with your last re-spin (in a VM), this one deserves hardware this time around. I'll check back in with my "Minimal" results.

[user-green]

Hello,
Thank you very much for releasing a nice spin.

I found out this topic today and it seems a good way to use this minimal size of ISO image.
This ISO is very small, thus I thought using this image was suitable to make another spin.
Testing another snapshot was successful but I noticed that there is only one locale for Japanese: "ja_JP".
We should use "ja" locale, instead of "ja_JP", don't we? There exists no plural locales for Japanese language.

Please see the past discussion at:
https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=57242

Green

[fehlix]

We should use "ja" locale, instead of "ja_JP", don't we? There exists no plural locales for Japanese language.

Don't get confused with the locale and translation system.
The system wide supported locale definitions are listed
here.
/usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED
and here within another represention.
/etc/locale.gen.all
where only ja_JP is supported locale definition are mentioned.

The translation system is using locale environment parameter,
to get translated strings/"messages" displayed to the user, based on LANG and LC_* and LANGUAGES environment parameter,
which do start in the format LL_RR ( LL= lang code and RR = regions code).
Translations are looked up based on the locale parameter of the system / session,
where most of the time a fallback for "LL-lang code) is used if no translation
found under LL_RR (lang plus region code.)
So even fo only one lang "LL" and one region code "RR" like "ja_JP",
translations strings are searched for LL_RR (ja_JP) and
if not found translations register under under "LL" ("ja") will be used.

[user-green]

Thank you, fehlix
but as for translation system, I am not quite sure despite your explanation in detail.
I am afraid that on Transifex translation strings are searched for LL_RR (ja_JP) and
if not found, translations registered under "C" (en) rather than"ja" will be used.
I think an Ubuntu-MATE developer also made such a comment in the past.