AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

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AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

Post by J0J0 »

The topic tells it all: I have just booted AVL MXE 2020-12-07 iso. I want to install to harddisk. I can't find the MX-Installer application that is talked about in the docs, the website.
thanks for any hints.
best Jojo
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Re: AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

Post by J0J0 »

There is no Installer on the desktop, nor one in the application menus, nor is there a command starting with mx- that is an installer.

What am I missing? I read this doc. On page 11 it states that there is an installer, but it isn't: http://bandshed.net/pdf/AVL-MXE-User-Manual.pdf

It would help if someone who is using it could just tell me what the "real command name" on the shell would be for this installer application. Thanks in advance!
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Re: AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

Post by nikgnomicradio »

This was posted on MX forum recently by the MX developer:
https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php ... 78#p625578

I broke the desktop icon. I just pushed a change, but for now use

Code: Select all

sudo minstall 
to launch installer.
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Re: AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

Post by GMaq »

The 32bit version uses Openbox so no Desktop icons, simply right-click on the desktop and the Installer is at the top of the menu.. I believe that info is in the User Manual and was in the release announcement.

Also... there is an Ooops in the 32bit version which will be fixed in the next ISO update, you need to install 'a2jmidid' and 'pulseaudio-module-jack' to have PulseAudio and JACK work seamlessly together as intended
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Re: AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

Post by J0J0 »

Hi @GMaq , thanks a lot for getting back to me. Yes I did read your announcements and also found the info about where to find the installer in the Openbox menu.

Unfortunately the installer entry is missing in the menu. Maybe something happened when you packaged this 32bit version? (Dec. 2020).

Thanks a lot for the hint about the oops, I will take it into account!

Also I have some more feedback that might be of interest to you. When are you planning on packaging the next iso?
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Re: AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

Post by J0J0 »

Hi again @GMaq ,
the intention of my question about when you gonna package the next version of AVLinux was actually about "how much time do I have until I should write to you with some feedback" :-) I'll try to do this now and hope it is useful.

First of all: thanks a lot for bringing out an amazingly useful Linux distribution. I use Linux on my jobs with bare metal and virtualized servers since ages but I gave up on Linux on Desktops years ago (well at work I do use Linux Mint on my Desktop). I use a 10 years old macbook but now wanted to give Linux for my private needs, which mostly is coding python, arduinos and making music, a chance again (and a little Blender here and there ;-). After a lot of research I decided that AVLinux sounded the most promising.

I just watched your video from November where you are talking about why you think 32bit is still worth the hassle. I am one of those people who you are doing it for and I feel the same about the shitload of old computers that are rendered useless just because there is no hardware support anymore. Thanks!!! Appreciated, and that's one reason why I gave up on Ubuntu Studio. Also you did a good job on trying to get the themes of QT5, XFCE and Openbox to look pretty similar. But still I am missing a cohesive look and feel - but that's certainly not your fault! I was looking on macs for 15 years now and it's really hard for me to get used to the look and feel of anything else. But I will manage to get used to it. What concernes me the most is that with Linux there is different looks and feels in one operating system. One tool is QT5, the next is GTK and another one has it's own kind of look. Especially the look of QT based tools have a very clumsy appearance to my eyes which I tried to fix by playing around with fonts and stuff but still not satisfied entirely. I do like the Earth themes a lot, please continue work on them, they are beautiful! But I think I missed a QT5 version of it that's why I went back to using the ... FIXME ... theme, well one of the Arc Materia themes I think..... Also the contrast between the text and the background in the Earth themes felt a little hard for my eyes (Wearing pretty strong glasses and am not satisfied easily with screen/look/feel settings easily as you might have noticed already ;-)

Anyway some thoughts I had initially when I installed AVLinux the first time - The main reason for a lot of confusion was that when googling about AVLinux you get a lot of outdated things about how AVLinux used to work, old passwords and stuff. It took me ages to find out that things change a lot with your distro and I should always _only_ look on the newest documentation. But as said: It was not too obvious on first sight and I have to admit I was having a hard time to figure out very basic stuff....Ok so that was my thoughts back then:

- There is only live boot available, no install option as stated in the manual (later on I found out that I had an old manual and with this version it's ment to be installed using the desktop/openbox menu entry - but it wasn't there - that also was pretty annoying and not amusing to me but luckily we figured this out further above in this thread already)
- password is 32bit root root, demo demo, not isotester avl32, avl32admin
- later I found the correct passwords on www.bandshed.net/avlinux
- I felt that changing default passwords in a distro is more confusing than helping anyone. Sorry, my bad but it took me literally days to figure out that I just have to _only_ have to read your latest posts on your website and shouldn't trust any other sources.

- clicking on the mx-linux manual in the xfce menu loads with inkscape - as much as I love inkscape, it is not a good program for "just reading" manuals - you might want to consider changing that default behaviour
- stating that ctrl-f is used to search in a pds is rather opinionated, it won't work with every program - as far as I remember it doesn't with inkscape
- ctrl home doesn't work either
- on your website on the download link for the 32bit version: AVL-MXE-2020.12.03-openbox-i386 is stated but the image you get downloaded is 2020.12.07

- Installing to hard disk partitions directly is the only option - I never install things like that - it feels wrong to me since LVM is just one of the best options to manage harddisk space. I don't understand why installing directly to disks is the default option in other distros as well.
- I get that this probably is a thing with MX Linux not having this option in the installers
- I tediously copied my AVLinux partition over to LVM partitions manually - I wanted to write a tutorial about it but my documentation about it got lost since I thought my Live Linux AVLinux stick's data is kept after a reboot - well, my bad and now I lost interest to do it again since I am happy that finally I got this OS to halfway run as I want it to.
- Anyway I wanted to ask: Where is the MX installer sources, and the best place in the MX forums to talk about it - Maybe I can try to help getting LVM installations into it

Rambled enough - thanks Greg - hope that helps and please get back to me with your thoughts! All the best for now and I'll stick with AVLinux and hopefully even at some point will hopefully really contribute something.
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Re: AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

Post by J0J0 »

Well, update on theme usage: When I just bootet in to AVLinux I realized that I just don't like the Materia Die Hard Theme - and that was the first reason why I even started to fiddle around with desktop settings.

I am back to using Earth Flora (the green one) - and I also found that the QT5 version is definitely existing. I had this wrong in my post above. One thing that I would like to improve is the very hard to read "grayed" out texts - I would like to give a little more contrast to the background.

I am new to theme stuff - Would I do this using Oomox? Maybe a little hint - haven't tried anything yet but before I started searching where to tweek this maybe you/someon would like to point me in the right direction.


and also another question: Somehow the text just doesn't look sharp - no matter what theme I choose - either anything is wrong with my screen settings or with font aliasing settings or it just doesn't get as sharp as I am used to.

thanks!
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Re: AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

Post by GMaq »

Hi!

It's 'Glen' by the way... but I've been called much worse than Greg... :D

Thanks for the feedback! You have some valid points which i will try and answer:

1. The 32bit version is not nearly as thoroughly tested in my limited time and yes indeed there were a few hiccups in the first release..
2. The only reason the password changed is because my entire method of building the ISO files changed with a hardcoded UN/PW of 'demo'
3. The next updated and fixed release will have autologin (I hope).
4. I don't see the problem of the missing installer link here, I just installed AVL-MXE 32bit from the ISO into VMWare and the installer is right at the top of the Openbox menu
5. Fair enough about the theme... themes are like haircuts, not everybody likes the same one..
6. Yep LVM is out of my hands... it's a function of MX's tools. I don't recommend LVM for multimedia systems personally though, I have my reasons but that is just an opinion..

Just so you know a new fresh ISO with bug fixes and some new features will be uploaded sometime around the end of April it is not a 'new version' simply a fresh place to get on the AVL bus with some of the concerns you've mentioned fixed.
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Re: AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

Post by pax-eterna »

@GMaq
Sorry to hijack JUST a tad, but on your webpage you make this statement : A unique selection of Commercial Demos (Can be removed with one click) , however I could not find any instruction on exactly what this one-click was, or even where it is? I did a search in the manual and could find no reference there either.
Could you please advise how I enable this?

Thanks
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Re: AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

Post by sunrat »

pax-eterna wrote: Sat Apr 24, 2021 11:34 pmA unique selection of Commercial Demos (Can be removed with one click) , however I could not find any instruction on exactly what this one-click was, or even where it is? I did a search in the manual and could find no reference there either.
Could you please advise how I enable this?
AVL-MXE Assistant > Misc tab
From page 14 of the manual - http://bandshed.net/pdf/AVL-MXE-User-Manual.pdf
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Re: AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

Post by GMaq »

sunrat wrote: Sun Apr 25, 2021 7:25 am
pax-eterna wrote: Sat Apr 24, 2021 11:34 pmA unique selection of Commercial Demos (Can be removed with one click) , however I could not find any instruction on exactly what this one-click was, or even where it is? I did a search in the manual and could find no reference there either.
Could you please advise how I enable this?
AVL-MXE Assistant > Misc tab
From page 14 of the manual - http://bandshed.net/pdf/AVL-MXE-User-Manual.pdf
Thanks sunrat!

Also explained in more clarity in User Manual page 62, but since we're talking about the 32 bit version in this thread there is significantly less demoware in the 32bit version than the 64bit, If I recall it is limited to Harrison Mixbus and Reaper and no plugins.
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Re: AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

Post by pax-eterna »

Thanks...I wonder why that did no come up in the PDF search engine?? And I looked in that section when I had the portable version loaded, but did not see it :oops:

I'll load it up again and have another go!
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Re: AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

Post by pax-eterna »

ok, found it and used it, but disappointing to see it only removes Reaper and Harrison...there's a whole lot of other stuff there which, as it was not removed, I guess is obviously intrinsic to the distro.

Thanks for the assist, but I might look elsewhere for a Linux distro (maybe Elementary?) that has far less "startup" apps - I thought this would strip it down a lot more.

No dramas though, NOT a criticism, it is what it is and I daresay works for a lot of folks!
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Re: AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

Post by GMaq »

pax-eterna wrote: Sun Apr 25, 2021 7:34 pm ok, found it and used it, but disappointing to see it only removes Reaper and Harrison...there's a whole lot of other stuff there which, as it was not removed, I guess is obviously intrinsic to the distro.

Thanks for the assist, but I might look elsewhere for a Linux distro (maybe Elementary?) that has far less "startup" apps - I thought this would strip it down a lot more.

No dramas though, NOT a criticism, it is what it is and I daresay works for a lot of folks!
Hi,

Well of course there is always the option to uninstall anything you like (or perhaps don't like) using the Synaptic Package Manager as there is on any Debian-based System. It is a targeted product for people to 'Install and Create' so yes a host of popular proven applications are supplied to that end but you can remove whatever you like within reason.
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Re: AVL MXE 32bit - Where is the installer?

Post by pax-eterna »

Fair, thanks. I have mostly read that in Linux one has to be really careful in removing stuff as it can be difficult to find where other apps and systems get broken by said removal. As you wrote though, "within reason".
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