MX Linux Forum

Can we have a proper guide/chronological workflow/tips/tricks related to making a respin for public consumption?

I'm looking to work on LXQT or other DE respin soon and need an official (from devs here and others are welcome too) list of workflow or things to maintain in the final iso for public distribution.

TIA

Umm....?

Good idea. MX Snapshot does a good job, not much needed to say besides the provided options. The main thing is to know what to add in /etc/skel which includes the installer and setup files of /home. The information is there in the form but scattered.

agnivo007 wrote: Thu Feb 18, 2021 1:40 am Can we have a proper guide/chronological workflow/tips/tricks related to making a respin for public consumption?

I'm looking to work on LXQT or other DE respin soon and need an official (from devs here and others are welcome too) list of workflow or things to maintain in the final iso for public distribution.

TIA

Apologies on no one from the MX Team responding yet, as you already know we are always pretty busy.
I assume that there were no replies mainly for that reason and for the following...

1) You're asking for an "official" thing for creating "unofficial" respins
2) There are about 4 ways (off the top of my head) to just start creating a respin, and tons of workflow possibilities after that
3) Creating a respin and what is in it is up to the person doing the respin
4) All of the above and more almost create a huge endless document of possibilities based on what you asked
5) Back to #1 here and the fact that we are busy doing official things for the official versions of MX

There are lots of threads here about respins and what not.
And honestly outside of learning the live persistence, remastering, and MX-snapshot... everything else is up to the respiner.
One respin may just be MX with a few applications, another may be a whole differnet DE with additional configs replacing the MX ones.
And there is the whole legalese and ensuring you don't violate things like that too

rasat mentioned /etc/skel, which is a whole big discussion in of itself and may or may not even be needed to discuss depending on what the respin entails.

But the basics are:
1) start with whatever version of MX you want to base your respin on (MX-19, MX AHS, MX-KDE, MX-BASE, MX-Workbench, etc) (Live USB, VM, physical, build-iso, etc, etc)
2) change whatever you want, however you want
3) remaster cc if running Live USB
4) MX-Snapshot (general snapshot)

The catch is #2 up there.

You don't see major actual respins or ones that are maintained long because of the fact that doing it properly and maintaining it is not a trivial thing and because of the endless possibilities that may exist. Heck, you might as well make it part time job.

Good job, SR--thanks!

I *intended* to do something today, now that RPi is released, but couldn't think of how to start since I've only done one and it isn't applicable.

Has the OP searched for and viewed Dolphin_Oracle's whole series of videos on building a custom antiX iso (MATE) from the antiX net iso?

While this used the alpha of antiX17 as the base and the antiX version of the snapshot tool, the general points should still be applicable to someone making their custom iso snapshot from MX (or MX base iso by m_pav).

If I'm wrong, perhaps @dolphin_oracle can clarify what has changed.

@asqwerth mostly the video series is still valid. there are antiX packages that are different that MX's versions these days due to the way we handle systemd/nosystemd. but the general principles are the same.

we build from scratch using debian and mx repo packages, so we don't start with an iso. I know some distros do that, but the antiX build system is pretty good, especially for hand-crafting stuff.
if you start from an iso, SwampRabbit's list is pretty good.

the main thing to watch is to remove settings packages, or else you risk us overwriting custom configs with package updates.

agnivo007 wrote: Thu Feb 18, 2021 1:40 am ...need an official (from devs here and others are welcome too) list of workflow or things to maintain in the final iso for public distribution.

Didn't noticed this particular request for an "official" guide. Doesn't correspond to asking for "unofficial" respins as was mentioned by SwampRabbit. This doesn't mean that an unofficial guide could not be created and posted in the MX Respins forum. If becomes useful, later be tagged as a sticker. Is there anyone to take the task?

It shouldn't be that difficult, but there are probably a few things to consider.

Let's assume you know how to make a personal respin with MX Snapshot. That is straight-forward. MX Snapshot will guide you through the process.

So the problems start to arise when doing a customized respin intended for distribution. From a legal perspective as long as you point out that it is an unofficial respin of MX Linux I think you should be good to go.

The process could be pretty simple in theory. The old respin program Systemback could automatically copy user settings to /etc/skel/. This can now be done with MX User Manager (or manually).

However, BitJam pointed out that some of those user files may contain the username and because of that not work correctly. So BitJam advised a cleaning process. This is probably the most complex part. Is it necessary? I'm not 100 % sure (because I have successfully used MX User Manager "copy user" functionality - so anecdotal evidence!), but if BitJam says it's good to do, then you will probably avoid some errors by doing it.

Have a look at this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=100&t=61998&p=612775

The other question is: How much of your home should be copied to /etc/skel/? I don't know. You could try copy everything and replace existing files, but without cleaning that might not be a good idea.

Then there are other questions to consider:
How do you make your desired DE the default DE on your respin? You should probably google the MX forum.

Will the MX Installer and other MX tools launch from your desired DE? This must be tested. As an example htop didn't launch from MATE menu, only from terminal. I didn't figure it out.

There is work to do with autostart desktop files. Maybe some of the autostart files are unnecessary in your chosen DE and others must be added.

There is work to do with (start) menu desktop files. Maybe some of your applications don't show up in your desired DE and other applications show up that you don't want there.

There might be work that has to be done with Qt or GTK integration. MX Xfce generally doesn't try to interfere with other DEs so you might have to set up this integration yourself. I figured out Qt integration in MATE, but then I stopped before I had figured it out for root users. When I say figure out I mean getting it to work. To do it properly you need knowledge about freedesktop specs and maybe even Debian specifics or even MX specifics. To do a nice unofficial respin with a non-official MX DE requires some Linux userland knowledge.

One thing to remember is that it is difficult to make a respin with two DEs that are completely separate. You need to be able to set preferences on a per DE level so that Thunar doesn't launch when you click File Manager in MATE for example. On the other hand you want Thunar to launch when you click File Manager in Xfce. This might not be as simple as selecting the chosen file manager in the Preferred Applications GUI and some work with files might be needed (or commands if you like that).

If you stick with one DE and use one of the default MX DEs: MX Fluxbox, KDE or Xfce then a lot of work has already been done for you and making a customized respin for distribution shouldn't be that hard. The crucial step is successful transfer of your settings from home to /etc/skel/. And this step might involve cleaning of username from file content (I have never done this step because I have never made a customized respin for distribution).

I tried to do a MATE spin for distribution, but I got tired because MATE 1.20 isn't better than Xfce 4.14 and I had a few things I needed to figure out. If you try to make a respin with a non-official DE you will appreciate all the work that went into the official MX DEs.

Thanks for the load of info so far, atleast the discussion has started with points to think about and wonder... great!

I'm planning two respins and I mean to maintain them. (yes, I have spare time) Naming isn't final though: MX-Retro (for so the called potato boxes and "ye olde" hardware, ) and MX-OfficeDesk (general office, clerical work oriented). I'm playing with ICEWM for the former (will post a thread later for help on hiccups encountered) and for the latter, I wish to wait for the bullseye based MX with debian LXQT 0.16.

Your MX Retro idea, while a good one, might be redundant. MX-19 already comes with MX Fluxbox pre-installed which is a pretty decent lightweight tiling (I think) window manager, and it has the advantage of being officially supported. I haven't fired it up for almost a year but I have an old 32-bit netbook with an Atom processor and 2GB of DDR2 RAM, and with Fluxbox I'm actually still able to use the netbook. Not for much, but there was a period of several weeks in 2019 where it was my "daily driver" due to a motherboard failure on the old desktop PC I had at the time as it was the only working computer I had. I was still able to access the forum and attempt to help people at least, and even watch YouTube videos with smtube.

Yeah, that's why I tend to keep the HP ThinClient box (as in my sig.) as a backup. It is considerably better than most Atoms, but apps seem to lag a bit on XFCE than on lighter DMs like ICE and LXDE. Personally, I don't like Fluxbox much and want to explore possibilites (ICEWM is just an option, so is LXDE but they are a bit old tech as I call them). Considerably higher specced hardware than those mentioned will become too old retro in coming years and months (people might even tag a dual core intel 4th. gen as trash soon), so let's see what I can do with better "new" light DEs like LXQT...

I think Manyroads may have already made an IceWM respin. You might want to PM him or search this subforum for posts by him. He or his posts could probably give you some tricks and pointers. I know he enjoys playing around with various tiling window managers in MX.