Old Curmudgeon seeks long term relationship with LiveCD

[Webtest]

Esteemed Forum Participants and Lurkers:
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Please indulge me while I explain my situation. I am a retired engineer and so am pitifully anal retentive. I also am my mother's son, which explains why I am so opinionated ... but then "opinions are like noses ... everybody's got one". I am also paranoidly conservative in all matters financial. Finally, I suffer from what is called in Spanish "una problema medico ... Cerebro Viejo".

Cupid came in the form of this article on ZD Net:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/time-to-ditch-windows-for-online-banking-and-shopping-updated/5813
"Time to ditch Windows for online banking and shopping" blog by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes October 13, 2009

Now in the autumn of my years I have fallen in love with a young beautiful distro ... Helena !!! Although she is not so young as when I first met her and others have written her off, she is the true love of my life and I will not lightly abandon her. I confess I have dallied with even younger distros ... Isadora (she wouldn't even give me the boot), Julia (whom I loved for 'entertainment value' but has defiled the tradition of <Alt><PrintScr>), I hardly even remember Katya, then Lisa, who although she appeared to be a wholesome lass, was unfortunately visually flawed, then Maya (who promises to be faithful for years, but unfortunately is a twin to Lisa's visual flaws), and now along has come flirty Nadia, who, though attractive, I fear is only a fleeting romance.




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Thanks ... now for the real post:
At the time I discovered Linux Mint I was angrily struggling with AVG antivirus on XP, and the ZDnet article proposed a blessed relief ... a ROM OS! Even though the boot time from a CD was sufferable, I really appreciated Mint 8 as an ultra-secure (i.e. ROM media) tool for web work. I found some minor irritants in the details, but the functionality was without fault. Since then, I have been watching conscientiously for "that PERFECT distro" with great disappointment ...

Mint 9 wouldn't boot at all on my machine. Mint 10, with the added video codecs, was a sweet addition to my toolbox, but was incredibly slow to boot from a CD and ruined the <Alt><PrintScr> window capture. With the help of the Newbie board I learned how to burn Mint to a lockable SD card, which totally alleviated the slow boot problem. Mint 12 and 13 have problems with the video driver that fouls up Google Maps, so I wrote those off ... I had such high hopes for 13 because of the long term support. And now there is Mint 14.1, which seems to have a reliable video driver and has also fixed the <Alt><PrintScr> annoyance. However, I have found that Mint 8 and 10 are the ONLY Mint distros that boot through (on my machine) to the desktop without operator intervention.

All the while I have been promising to learn how to remaster my own distro to actually implement my 15 item bucket list of enhancements to Linux LiveCD/DVD. My plaintive cries to the forum and elsewhere have fallen by the wayside, but I have brave new hopes since I found and purchased a copy of "Live Linux CDs: Building and Customizing Bootables" (2006) by Christopher Negus.

Things I HAVE accomplished:
* Found and started using Kanguru USB thumb drives that electronically lock the data (SD cards present a switch contact to the OS, but rely on the OS to honor the lock request; some port expanders IGNORE the lock switch!).
* Ferreted out solutions for nearly all of the aggravations I have been dealing with.
* Learned how to spin down, offline, and delete the driver for my hard drive (did I mention I was paranoid?)
* Learned how to dynamically add a sata hard drive to my system
* Put all user data for Thunderbird email on a R/W CF flash memory card for use on ROM Mint 8
* Installed (alas, only temporarily) from a local copy of a repository handbrake, avra, and quite a few other aps for things I needed to do

Things I have NOT accomplished ... yet!:
* Compiling a package from source code
* Remastering Linux LiveCD

Help Please! What I want to do toward my own distro ... Add numlockx to Mint 8
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I know, Mint 8 is obsolete and totally unsupported. I've found that repositories are totally distro-specific and can mysteriously disappear months before the distro is scheduled to die. However, in the case of numlockx, there are a number of files and a couple of versions in the Ubuntu archive http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu/ubuntu/pool/main/n/numlockx/ What I can't figure out is "How can I map the available versions of numlockx to versions of Mint/Ubuntu/Debian (Mint 8 Helena < Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala)". Also, if I can build numlockx from whatever is in the archive, can I build it for Mint 8, and how do I determine any dependencies?

I am sorry this has been so long winded, but I have spent nearly 4 years getting to this point, and now that I am so hopeful of rolling my own distro, I need to figure out how to resolve these few deeper tasks.

Thank you for your gracious suggestions, comments, and assistance in this really interesting challenge. I promise I will continue post tutorial-level info on the forum for everything that I learn.

Blessings in abundance, all the best, & ENJOY!
Art in Carlisle, PA USA

[viking777]

I don't really see why the version of numlockx is so important to you, historical accuracy perhaps? Anyway, not my business. I can only work round this problem in a very roundabout way which could be inaccurate I don't know. First reading from this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Li ... t_releases

You see that Helena was first released in November 2009.

Then going to this page:

http://snapshot.debian.org/package/numlockx

and looking at various versions you see that numlockx 1.1.10 appeared in Debian (and maybe therefore Ubuntu/Mint - this is the really inaccurate part) in May 2009. The next release of this program did not appear until October 2010 so in all likelihood 1.1.10 would be the version that you would have installed on Helena.

Now using a combination of this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Li ... t_releases

and this page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubuntu_releases

You can work out that Helena was based on Ubuntu Lucid.

Then by going to this page:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/numlockx

You can read what its dependencies are.

Simple concern for my fellow man requires me to tell you that Helena (beautiful though she was) is dead and you should move on and stop grieving, but I know my words would be wasted, so I won't say that after all

[thegreatgazoo]

I can help you with the remastering.
I have made my own remaster just because I want an always up to date live USB stick that is set up just the way I like.

Anywho, I made myself a few notes that I update as needed. Here is the link to them:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SyfVq7e5nw9BqOhzQ8piB9jK43ieubkFFOOY-4DGuv8/edit

These notes make sense to me, but if you need any help or clarification just email me and I'd be glad to help you on your remaster.

I'd appreciate feedback on my remaster too. If anyone wants to give it a spin, here's the dropbox link: http://db.tt/TjSVLOoE

Good luck

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

[Webtest]

Viking ...
First of all, thank you very much for your gracious assistance and comments. I hadn't thought about using date windows to correlate ap versions with distro versions.

I don't really see why the version of numlockx is so important to you, historical accuracy perhaps?

It's not that the version of the ap is so important ... it is the problem that Synaptic won't install a package if it isn't the one for the running version of Mint. So, I want to be able to find the appropriate deb file(s) and dependencies that will install the ap on whatever Mint "n" distro.

I've been to the Wikipedia Mint Releases page you referenced numerous times. The Debian reference http://snapshot.debian.org/package/numlockx yields a "404 Not Found" error, but a little surfing revealed http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20090522T034508Z/pool/main/n/numlockx/ which accomplishes the same thing. I downloaded numlockx_1.1-10_i386.deb and will try to install it in Mint 8 (if I can remember how to redirect Synaptic to a local saved repository!). That will totally accomplish the general objective if it works. I'm sure I will still eventually need to learn how to rebuild packages from source code.

Now using a combination of this page: (Wikipedia Linux Mint Releases) and this page (List_of_Ubuntu_releases) You can work out that Helena was based on Ubuntu Lucid.

Oops! You might be off by one, but who's counting? (Mint 8 > Helena > Ubuntu 9.10 > Karmic Koala) Your link to http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/numlockx should work for Mint 9 Isadora, but changing "lucid" to "karmic" does not work ... it seems that only Long Term Support versions are archived in http://packages.ubuntu.com/, which unfortunately does not include Helena. The dependencies for Isadora are probably at least a clue for Helena which may be of some help.

I have a vague recollection of an article about being able to outsmart Synaptic into trying to do "something" (I said 'vague', right?) with multiple, or at least different distro repository packages. Whether it was 'finding' them or 'installing' them ... ??? As I said, "Cerebro Viejo". It was something involving a list of distros rather than a single distro. So does Synaptic find the proper ap version and dependencies by virtue of a built-in table (ooh! can I print it?) or by the distro version being embedded in the deb file, or does it find the proper ap version by looking in a distro specific repository folder? Could it be possible that a particular deb file(s) could be loaded into any of multiple Mint versions?

Simple concern for my fellow man requires me to tell you that Helena (beautiful though she was) is dead and you should move on and stop grieving, but I know my words would be wasted, so I won't say that after all :wink:

Wink all you want ... she is not dead. I bask in her warm embrace on my desktop every day! At this very moment she is laughing at you as together, we salute you and toast to your health. We can even survive having to hit the NumLock key when I need the numeric keypad.

Thanks ever so much for humoring me with your immensely appreciated assistance. Even if I never am able to change Helena, I continue to learn a lot about Linux. You're a valued and friendly guru, Viking!

Blessings in abundance, all the best, & ENJOY!
Art in Carlisle, PA USA

[Webtest]

GreatGazoo:
Thanks for the assistance ... I made a first pass through my book, and before I do anything else I am going to read it again making notes and digging deeper this time, and trying to follow the significant examples. I sent you a PM regarding the difficulties I had printing your tutorial from your google page, but I think that had something to do with the fact that I was booting from an SD card (UNlocked) 14.1 32-bit Mate with persistent storage. I did print the doc, but haven't played with it since then. I wasn't able to successfully burn your ISO image, but I only tried once ... haven't had time to try your PM suggestions. I don't normally have problems burning ISOs and have burned several without problems since I tried yours. Thanks!

Viking:
I was able to download and install numlockx successfully ... thank you very much. See http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=116017 for my post regarding this effort.