MX Linux Forum

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/

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

@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!

manyroads wrote: Thu May 19, 2022 10:17 am 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"

Adrian wrote: Thu May 19, 2022 10:40 am
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

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.

Adrian wrote: Thu May 19, 2022 9:07 am 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.

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

user-green wrote: Fri May 20, 2022 4:36 am 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.

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.

user-green wrote: Fri May 20, 2022 8:19 am 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.

That highly depends how the available translations on transifext get fetched, prepared, converted to be usable by the app or system in question, and what type of translation system is in use.
E.g we have compiled gettext translation-catalog, qt-translations (most of MX apps are using qt-tanslation system), and we have cleartext translations, e.g. with desktop-files or other xml-based translation aware files (e.g. pkexec based authenticator can use cleartext translation from xml-policy files, where newer system allow to combine xml-trnslationed files with gettext catalog.
In addtion most gettext-based translations, do honor the LANGUAGE locale environment parameter,
where preferred lang/locale order can be specified. E.g KDE is uitlizing using LANGUAGE parameter, where in Xfce LANGUAGE parameter is normal not used.
Suggest, to open a new topic with detailed formulated questions and examples what is not working, otherwise this can led to transform this thread a confusing l10n/i18n-thread.
Thanks

Thank you for your suggestion. I am sorry.
I will end up my question on locales.

Please join discussions on "Minimal and CLI respins".

@Adrian : thanks so much for the Minimal respin. Having tried out MX KDE and Full previously, this new spin was mentioned by one of my fellow ArchLab'ers. A right moment to give it a go, and have it now installed on bare metal here, humming away. great stuff, thanks a lot.

For Your Information:
in case if you can not shutdown the system from a menu, using Minimal Respin,
execute the following command as root user:

shutdown -h now

@Adrian Hey there. Not sure if I am doing something wrong or what. But I booted to the cli, logged in with demo/demo and typed cli-installer-antix
Says command not found, while the other 2 commands are both there. Is there something missing or do I need to boot to some other option than what I am?

RaXorX wrote: Fri Jun 03, 2022 12:48 am @Adrian Hey there. Not sure if I am doing something wrong or what. But I booted to the cli, logged in with demo/demo and typed cli-installer-antix
Says command not found, while the other 2 commands are both there. Is there something missing or do I need to boot to some other option than what I am?

@RaXorX
This is a very good question. cli-installer-antix = command not found,

Minimal doesn't come with antix installer. I was shooting for 1 tool per task and I already decided to keep the GUI installer. You can of course install it with apt-get. (That's a bit of a "malicious compliance": you want a minimal ISO, you get it )

@RaXorX

Boot to prompt login.
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade. Install upgrades
sudo apt install cli-installer-antix. Install

At prompt type = sudo cli-installer (do not add antix)

Good Luck

p.s cli-installer-antix executable file 466 lines (444 sloc) 12 KB

@Helen-Earth
Thanks, I'll try this as soon as I'm home and update the post.

@Adrian
No I wasn't on minimal. I was on the MX Linux cli version. Minimal has gui for the installation and installed well and good. Then I tried to get the cli one going, and that's what gave me that error.

I will have to take I look I fully intended to add the cli-installer-antix on the CLI one.

I think I've found the culprit, I removed genisoimage and for some reason cli-installer-antix depends on that.
@anticapitalista is that correct dependency or we can get away with genisoimage? Why would the installer need to generate an iso image? Or maybe it uses another tool provided by genisoimage...

RaXorX wrote: Fri Jun 03, 2022 11:04 am @Helen-Earth
Thanks, I'll try this as soon as I'm home and update the post.

@Helen-Earth I tried that. And seems like Adrian already found the issue too.
@Adrian genisoimage has 2 other dependencies, libmagic-mgc and libmagic1 as per apt-get.
Installing genisoimage also installs the other. If I try to install cli-installer-antix then it also tries to download genisoimage.

Now WAIT a sec... I just tried that, ran cli-installer and along one of the lines it says this installer will not work for UEFI boot...

RaXorX wrote: Fri Jun 03, 2022 2:53 pm Now WAIT a sec... I just tried that, ran cli-installer and along one of the lines it says this installer will not work for UEFI boot...

Newest version of installer can do UEFI, but I think we don't have that yet in our repos, hold on, let me ask if we can add that to our repos.

Adrian wrote: Fri Jun 03, 2022 3:17 pm

RaXorX wrote: Fri Jun 03, 2022 2:53 pm Now WAIT a sec... I just tried that, ran cli-installer and along one of the lines it says this installer will not work for UEFI boot...

Newest version of installer can do UEFI, but I think we don't have that yet in our repos, hold on, let me ask if we can add that to our repos.

Yer thats what I found to no uefi support. So I installed the minimal last night works just fine. Thanks

Hi @Adrian, I tried to make a snapshot with iso-snapshot-cli both from your respin "CLI" and from "Minimal",
I have tried it both in virtual machine and physical machine, and in the only partition that has the system "/" without /home, there is plenty of space on the hard disk... but I always get this error:

What is the version of the program?

Adrian wrote: Wed Apr 19, 2023 8:29 am What is the version of the program?

Hi:
Now it is the latest 23.4, but it also happened to me with the ISO-cli downloaded a few days ago from https://sourceforge.net/projects/mx-lin ... y_Respins/, then I suppose it has been updated to this last one but the problem persists...

OK, I see what happened. the file is actually in /etc/iso-snapshot-cli-exclude.list for mx-snapshot there's a link that is creates when the package is installed to /etc/mx-snapshot-exclude.list, but I forgot to add the same link creation for iso-snapshot-cli-exclude.list. Not sure how it worked for me, I will fix that shortly. If you want to use it you can just create a link by yourself

Adrian wrote: Wed Apr 19, 2023 4:03 pm OK, I see what happened. the file is actually in /etc/iso-snapshot-cli-exclude.list for mx-snapshot there's a link that is creates when the package is installed to /etc/mx-snapshot-exclude.list, but I forgot to add the same link creation for iso-snapshot-cli-exclude.list. Not sure how it worked for me, I will fix that shortly. If you want to use it you can just create a link by yourself

Code: Select all

sudo ln -s /etc/iso-snapshot-cli-exclude.list /usr/local/share/excludes/iso-snapshot-cli-exclude.list

Hi:
Working both by creating the link and with the new 23.4.01 update.

Hi @Adrian,
thank you for CLI respin, I have liked it a lot - very useful for my miniserver. Wanted to use minimalistic version suitable for server, as little attack surface as possible, stay at Debian base, but without systemd.
Looking forward to Bookworm version, very much.
I plan also use the USB maker functionality, which makes it exceptional.

Please, if possible, prepare it for us!

You are welcome, no problem will probably release it the same day or around the time we release MX-23 (as you know though this gets less testing so I rely on people like you to submit bug reports if you encounter problems).

Is it possible to automount additional partitions in Thunar in MX Minimal?

Looking at MX-23 Minimal, and it seems that Pipewire is not used. OOI, what is the thinking behind that?

Chris

chrispop99 wrote: Sun Aug 06, 2023 11:59 am Looking at MX-23 Minimal, and it seems that Pipewire is not used. OOI, what is the thinking behind that?

Chris

Could be an error, what packages are missing?

Sorry - false alarm. Pipewire is there.

Chris

Hello Adrian,
thank you and the team for bringing MX-minimal and MX-cli to us,
looking forward to use these.

Hello @Adrian , thanks a lot for your effort I really like the Minimal But I hope it becomes official, I worked with 21 Minimal for more than a year and I'm sharing my note of things to do after installing Minimal:
minimal version(as downloaded) needs tweeking after install
- install gvfs so that thunar can see external drives or usb flash, and gvfs-fuse & gvfs-backends for ftp server to open within thunar.
- install menulibre for edit applications on the whisker menu to work.
- enable AHS repository for latest Nvidia drivers, from MX Repo Manager goto indivdual sources, find mx.list, check the box that containes ahs at the end of the line.
- after enabling AHS repo, install Nvidia driver normally, from the app menu find "Nvidia Driver installer"
- install Xarchiver for the extract here in the right click menu inside thunar file manager to work.
- to install Qiuck system info which is required by MX forums to give support, you have to know the right package name "qiuck-system-info-gui" (that was a tricky one)

I might add gvfs,gvfs-fuse,gvfs-backends back, not sure about the rest. If I start to add stuff though it won't be "minimal" anymore.
I still don't recommend people to use this, this is mostly for people with OCD, or people who think for some reason that the number of packages in a distro matters.

Hi @Adrian,

Just a word of thanks for releasing Minimal 23.4 back in Sep-2024. When I boot up Minimal 23.4, MX Updater reports a bunch of upgrades which if fully applied will increase the distribution size by 479Mb. I'd like to keep Minimal 23.4 both up-to-date but also as small as possible. Would you direct me to which packages you kept or removed to create Minimal 23.4 please? Then I'll review the updates and decide on my own how to proceed with the MX Updater upgrades.

Happy New Year and Kind Regards,

Kevin

Not sure, try "sudo apt upgrade" directly in the CLI instead of "sudo apt full-upgrade" which is the default in the mx-apt-updater. Then after you do a simple upgrade, try the full-upgrade and notice what packages are pulled in. If you don't want to upgrade those you can pin them.

Hi @Adrian, thanks for the advice! Much appreciated. Regards, Kevin

Got a new computer where MXLinux was a good choice: https://i.imgur.com/mG75x0e.png

I've installed MX Minimal & added my selection of programs to an old computer I had spare => 5GB installed size, so mid sized now, compared to regular MX XFCE.

(Many thanks for this version of MX.)

@Adrian Thanks for this! You mentioned the live-usb-maker tool but I can't seem to find it anywhere using the CLI respin. What am I missing?

tghuguenin wrote: Mon Apr 14, 2025 10:29 am @Adrian Thanks for this! You mentioned the live-usb-maker tool but I can't seem to find it anywhere using the CLI respin. What am I missing?

That's because you need to install it

Adrian wrote: Mon Apr 14, 2025 11:00 am

tghuguenin wrote: Mon Apr 14, 2025 10:29 am @Adrian Thanks for this! You mentioned the live-usb-maker tool but I can't seem to find it anywhere using the CLI respin. What am I missing?

That's because you need to install it

ah gotcha

OK @Adrian sorry I have tried to figure out what I'm doing wrong here but can't for the life of me get cli-installer to run without something going wrong with the grub installation using the ESP UEFI option

I'm installing MX 23.6_CLI on a mid-2012 intel macbook pro. I had previously whatever is the latest full version of MX linux on it, installed with no problems, but wanted to clear it out and start from the CLI version. It is my computer for experiments, learning linux, and breaking things, so losing data is not a problem at all.

once I figured out how to use wpa_supplicant I had no problems connecting to my wifi network and getting internet access prior to the installation

I have my file system partitioned & formatted, even though I know the script does some formatting
esp partition is sda1 (fat32) 550M
root partition is sda3 (ext3) 10G
swap is sda2 8G

(The ssd is actually ~500G but I wanted to leave extra space for other partitions later)

something breaks when running grub-installer. As far as I can tell based on the output, I think something is going wrong at Line 330

at one point I wrote an extra line above 330 to echo the chroot command below it, here is that output and then the error:
I abort the script here and lsblk shows
sda1 mounted at /media/sda3/boot/efi
sda2 [swap]
sda3 /media/sda3

Sorry I didn't get the full output of lsblk, I'm typing this on a separate computer. let me know if you need more info

If i let the script keep going, it will act like everything's set up, but on reboot I get no Grub menu (just a flashing folder with a question mark). I can still hold Option to boot from the live usb, which I've kept doing in trying to troubleshoot.

You need to install grub2, that takes 40MB or so. Not everybody needs to install this so I left it out, plus theoretically there are other ways to install like using a UEFI kernel stub install (not with the cli-installer, but I might add that as an option, we might have to edit cli-installer to check for grub presence and maybe offer the stub installer option instead)

Adrian wrote: Tue Apr 15, 2025 1:00 pm You need to install grub2, that takes 40MB or so. Not everybody needs to install this so I left it out, plus theoretically there are other ways to install like using a UEFI kernel stub install (not with the cli-installer, but I might add that as an option, we might have to edit cli-installer to check for grub presence and maybe offer the stub installer option instead)

Thanks. Sounds simple. I will try that next time I get a chance to work on it.

That was the ticket. Did that yesterday evening and got the OS installed, whole thing took less than five minutes probably. Thanks! BTW I love the color scheming, makes it a lot easier to interpret the CLI

Thanks for the report. I'm updating the cli-installer to install grub if not installed and also give an option for stub installer.