Beryllium software replacements/additions

johnraff · 2021-10-26 02:44:36

Nothing earthshaking here, but a few suggestions have come up on the forum (I'll post the link if I have it) and a couple of small things I'd personally like to add. (Sentences in quotes are quoted from the original source and aren't necessarily my opinion.)

hw-probe
(but some may see privacy implications)
https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic … 88#p112688

colordiff
small package that colorizes the output of diff, nice for bl-user-settings and bl-obthemes

dmidecode
https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic … 37#p117337

mdadm?
Utility for managing multiple disks. Forget where the idea came from but I guess this is the sort of thing it's good to have on the iso.

isenkram? or isenkram-cli?
This is a new package that checks a system for needed firmware and prompts to install. Adds necessary apt "non-free" repos too. But I haven't tested it on real hardware so can't comment on how well it works. It did seem to do a good job on a new Bullseye install on my Thinkpad. If it does the job,sounds like I think it would be a good prompt to add to bl-welcome.

gnome-calculator instead of galculator?
Again, forget where this came from but g-c is clearly a more sophisticated app.

xfce4-appfinder
Popular with some people (@Has?) Small app we could put in the menu, but for some reason it seems to keep running even after the window is closed (at least on Buster).

simplescreenrecorder - to replace gtk-recordmydesktop (no longer in debian)
"or vokoscreen-ng - another screen recorder worthy to replace gtk-recordmydesktop?"
(vokoscreen uses ffmpeg, vokoscreen-ng uses gstreamer)

firmware-sof-signed
alsa-ucm-conf
(from Rooster on ArchLabs)
"@johnraff just a heads up since your wanting to cross-pollinate ideas,
you’ll need to add firmware-sof-signed and alsa-ucm-conf packages
to bunsen-meta-all for newer computer’s sound"

---
(for live-build, not the metapackage)
squashfs-tools
Head_on_a_Stick August 15, 2021, 3:29pm #92
"I seem to need squashfs-tools in config/package-lists/live.list.chroot
for the bullseye SharpBang image to build without error."

Please, any protests, high-fives etc...

Last edited by johnraff (2021-11-20 09:20:16)

rbh · 2021-10-26 11:25:08

johnraff wrote:

(Sentences in quotes are quoted from the original source and aren't necessarily my opinion.)
hw-probe
(but some may see privacy implications)
https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic … 88#p112688

originally I proposed to add as choise for additional install in BL-Wellcome. Later I proposed to add to the menu, both in standard install and in live cd/dvd.
If you don't share scan url, there is nothing at all to worry about. You can easy share just the information you want... More usefull information than just inxi. Most sensitive info (like ip and mac-adress) is filtered out.

mdadm?
Utility for managing multiple disks. Forget where the idea came from but I guess this is the sort of thing it's good to have on the iso.

Last time you listed ToDo-list, You had that info.. Originaly posted here: https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=7037 "Add mdadm to Live DVD". If you can squeze it into the cd, I have no objetctions.
It is "Tool to administer Linux MD arrays (software RAID)". As I wrote, I can not use BL live iso for my server or desktop, as they both has software raid.

isenkram? or isenkram-cli?

Yes. A long time ago, there was such a utility in debian, forgot the name...

gnome-calculator instead of galculator?
Again, forget where this came from but g-c is clearly a more sophisticated app.

I vote no. Yes, it is more sophisticated but has more dependencies.
I have been thinking of writing a list of installed packages/programmes and alternative packages/programes. List pro's and con's.

xfce4-appfinder
Popular with some people (@Has?)

It was I who suggested it. Nowadays I don't use it so often, but it still happens I don't recal the exact command to put in terminal or jgmenu-run or gmrun. For 20 years ago I could not do without it. Think it is usefull for many newbies and some more trained users.

for some reason it seems to keep running even after the window is closed

User setting if you prefer it to run in the background or not.

simplescreenrecorder - to replace gtk-recordmydesktop (no longer in debian)
"or vokoscreen-ng - another screen recorder worthy to replace gtk-recordmydesktop?"

I have tested most screen recording apps. settled for simplescreenrecorder. As the name suggests, it is simple to use, but have the functionality you need.

firmware-sof-signed

"Intel SOF audio firmware"

alsa-ucm-conf packages

"ALSA Use Case Manager configuration of audio input/output names and routing for specific audio hardware. They can be used with the alsaucm tool."

(from Rooster on ArchLabs)
"@johnraff just a heads up since your wanting to cross-pollinate ideas,
you’ll need to add firmware-sof-signed and alsa-ucm-conf packages
to bunsen-meta-all for newer computer’s sound"

Yes.

Last edited by rbh (2021-10-26 11:26:49)

rbh · 2021-10-26 11:33:41

And I still think Midnight Commander (mc) to be a good addition, both to live session and standard installation. (Or other competent curser based twin panel file manager.)

No need for flame-war now as last I proposed it. Just yes or no's now.

Sector11 · 2021-10-26 15:26:01

gnome-calculator instead of galculator

Isn't x11-apps installed by default in BL?

I've been using "xcalc" for what seems like; forever

[Alt]+[F2]+[xcalc]
Works for me.

EDIT: and bc

To slightly misquote rbh:

No need for flame-war, just yes or no's now.

Last edited by Sector11 (2021-10-26 15:27:36)

johnraff · 2021-10-27 00:50:37

rbh wrote:

And I still think Midnight Commander (mc) to be a good addition, both to live session and standard installation.
No need for flame-war now as last I proposed it. Just yes or no's now.

My vote is no.
( Happy to give uninflammable reasons if asked. )

johnraff · 2021-10-27 01:13:26

rbh wrote:

johnraff wrote:
gnome-calculator instead of galculator?
Again, forget where this came from but g-c is clearly a more sophisticated app.
I vote no. Yes, it is more sophisticated but has more dependencies.

I have no strong opinions on this as I very seldom use a calculator on the computer.
But when I installed gnome-calculator yesterday it brought in rather few dependencies, and nothing huge.

gnome-calculator wrote:

Depends: libatk1.0-0 (>= 1.12.4), libc6 (>= 2.14), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.40.0), libgtk-3-0 (>= 3.19.12), libgtksourceview-3.0-1 (>= 3.23.90), libmpc3, libmpfr6 (>= 3.1.3), libsoup2.4-1 (>= 2.42), libxml2 (>= 2.7.4), dconf-gsettings-backend | gsettings-backend
Recommends: yelp, gvfs

Maybe it's because I already had the non-standard libraries installed. Anyway, others might want to give it a try, it's quite a small install IMO.

It was a commenter (on a youtube BL review) who brought it up:

someone on the internet wrote:

please use gnome-calculator instead of galculator.
Anyone who needs to do anything serious with a calculator can't use galculator.
The difference in file-size is negligible (few MB) and even
for antique computers the required resources are trivial.
I use the calculator a lot (mathematics, physics), I thoroughly hate galculator
(I also hate the KDE one) and gnome-calculator is my favorite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a51O9ep … 8jF4AaABAg
Of course, as in all these cases, the preferred app is only an apt-get away. We have to consider if there are reasons why it's better to have it installed out of the box.

For that matter, we could drop galculator too and just rely on xcalc!
(Let's do that on the CD iso anyway, that is if it turns out even to be possible to get Beryllium-lite down to 700MB.)

damo · 2021-10-27 07:16:58

Not much wrong with xcalc, even if it looks very 1980's

nobody · 2021-10-27 11:47:19

Personally, I would go with gnome-calculator.

- xcalc does not follow desktop theming but will always be white (unless styled through an elaborate set of Xresources).
- xcalc does not follow desktop font face and font size settings, or desktop scaling settings.
- copy&paste does not work nicely (ctrl+c, ctrl+v) (at least for me under KDE X11).
- xcalc does not seem to follow numeric locale (decimal/thousands separator based on locale)

In short, xcalc behaves differently from any other GTK program and lacks obvioius functionality which should simply be there.

Sector11 · 2021-10-27 14:46:27

Well, if x11-apps is installed by default for other reasons, xcalc is already installed.

Why not just add a calculator section to the Welcome Script?
gnome-calculator
galculator

after all, a calculator is only an "apt install" away.

I'm like johnraff actually - rarely use a calc on my computer and when I do it's usually something simple like "c"; a bash script for bc.

 27 Oct 21 @ 11:40:05 ~
   $ c 2976.47/234.69
12.682
 
 27 Oct 21 @ 11:40:16 ~
   $

↑↑↑ that's a real example by the way

#!/bin/bash
#
bc -l << END
scale=3
$1
END

damo · 2021-10-27 14:58:04

Sector11 wrote:

...
Why not just add a calculator section to the Welcome Script?
gnome-calculator
galculator
after all, a calculator is only an "apt install" away.
...

Seems like overkill for a utility application. I say go with twoion's reasoning.

hhh · 2021-10-27 23:53:27

These are trivialities left to the user.

sudo apt install mc

Done.

Calculator. Calculator????? You have one on your phone, on your watch, on your Peleton that you don't use anymore because they started charging for software updates or something.

One program per purpose, as much as possible, is what we do. VLC and mpv, sure. Firefox and Chromium, er... Thunar and Dolphin, are you fucking out of your mind?

johnraff · 2021-10-28 08:03:23

Let's just drop galculator and let users install whatever they want.

They'll have xcalc anyway from x11-apps but hardly anyone uses those x apps these days. The package just comes as an X dependency, probably not worth removing.

rbh · 2021-10-28 10:57:10

hhh wrote:

These are trivialities left to the user.
sudo apt install mc
Done.

Yes, I know that and does it most often when I boot BL live session. I have not taken time to get persisten working, so I have to do it every time I want it in live session.
I think that adding mc, gives extra value to not so skilled users. There is lot of trivialities, we try to make it easier for users to handle. It takes only about 8 MB extra disk space. I do noit understand this aversion of mc. If you don't want to use it, you do not have to.
We don't have any ncursers based, twin panel filemanager.

Many other popular debian derivates has it: MX-Linux, Antix, Kali Linux, Devuan, Linuxfx, Nitrux and Parrot. Of other popular dists, we can mention: CentOS, Gentoo, Mageia, openSUSE, PCLinuxOS and Slackware.

Calculator. Calculator????? You have one on your phone, on your watch, on your Peleton that you don't use anymore because they started charging for software updates or something.

No, I do not own an Peleton. My watch does not have calculator installed. It is for checking my healt, to avoid another severe heart attack (got three new new blood vessels in a big bypass operation. Two of them collapsed after operation.I could walk 59 min, after wich I had to stop and rest. Refused new operation and after a year of training new blood vessels had grown and I could again climb the mountin top I see from my south windowStor-Skorvliden, without heart pain).

Yes, I have a calculator on my phone, but fatfingers and old tired eyes, make me avoid that calculator if I have a computer at hand. When working at the computer, and needing to do a calculation, it is very handy to just copy numbers from document I work on, paste in calculator, process and then copy back the result.

One program per purpose, as much as possible, is what we do. VLC and mpv, sure.

But vlc is added to 64 bit iso and mpv to 32 bit cd...

Firefox and Chromium, er...

Yes? Only firefox is installed to 64 bit.

Thunar and Dolphin, are you fucking out of your mind?

Thunar is installed, but Dolphin?

Are you just having a bad day or are you realy questioning the sanity of...who?

hhh · 2021-10-28 20:23:10

Sorry for the hyperbole and histrionics. I should have just said that we've been through the default app discussion a LOT and, while it's always worth reviewing, there's not much we haven't discussed already.

johnraff · 2021-10-29 02:10:46

^Right.
Let's just keep this simple.

Default Out Of The Box apps (if small) can be good to have on the iso to help people get their system working. Especially for anything that might affect networking of course.

I opened up mc yesterday and didn't know what to do... No doubt the learning curve is fairly gentle, but open a GUI file manager and the newest newbie knows what to do, just from their experience with Mac or Windows. Do we really need an ncursers based, twin panel filemanager installed by default?

---
But, some of these borderline add-it-or-not apps could be handled another way: agreed endless bl-welcome pages for installing this or that app would be way overkill, but there's also the System > "Install Selected Packages" (maybe to become "Install Favourite Packages") menu item. It would be easy to add another "Utilities" submenu there for things like mc or gnome-calculator.

New users might well feel overwhelmed by the thousands of packages available in Debian. Some of them are very advanced and difficult to use, and some of them are just very old and not so useful. A submenu with a few apps that we are familiar with and can recommend might be good. Apps that didn't quite make it into the default install.

hhh · 2021-10-29 02:27:34

I'm for this even if I think it's a bit redundant. There are literally hundreds of articles on app alternatives in Linux and in Debian Linux...

https://alternativeto.net/platform/linux/

https://computingforgeeks.com/best-linu … u-can-use/

https://itsfoss.com/linux-terminal-emulators/

https://itsfoss.com/video-players-linux/

https://www.tecmint.com/best-music-play … inux-mint/

https://phoenixnap.com/kb/best-linux-te … for-coding

Etc...

rbh · 2021-10-29 08:19:25

johnraff wrote:

Default Out Of The Box apps (if small) can be good to have on the iso to help people get their system working.
I opened up mc yesterday and didn't know what to do... No doubt the learning curve is fairly gentle, but open a GUI file manager and the newest newbie knows what to do, just from their experience with Mac or Windows.

All them who started to use Norton Commander (NC) in the mid 80's, have no problem start use MC. Neither those used to Dos Navigator from 1991. Or Volkov Commander or...

Do we really need an ncursers based, twin panel filemanager installed by default?

Many other dists add it, not because it is necessary but because it is good to have. If only necessary packages should be added, the size of the iso could be reduced considerable.
Adding MC takes only 8 MB disk.
As i wrote long ago, MC has a quite high rank on popcon.

Right now I can not recal any spezialised live rescue iso, that do not include mc. So, if we want users to use the live iso as rescue tool, mc should be included in the live session.

johnraff · 2021-10-29 09:19:56

Take a vote on mc?
Any opinions?

malm · 2021-10-29 15:17:19

No from me.

I love mc and use it regularly, BUT for a live CD I’m quite happy to use ls, cp, tar, etc

I prefer not to get drawn into discussions on default apps
Just personal choice re what I spend time on. Don’t mind what others do.

hhh · 2021-10-30 02:05:13

malm wrote:

I prefer not to get drawn into discussions on default apps
Just personal choice re what I spend time on. Don’t mind what others do.

I swap vlc for smplayer/mpv, I add Audacious, I switch Geany for gedit, I use Nautilus as well as Thunar, I still use gnome-terminal even though I pushed for our Lithium switch to lxterminal over terminator (due to start-up time)...

It's Linux, customization is it's forte.

#1 2021-10-26 02:44:36

Beryllium software replacements/additions

#2 2021-10-26 11:25:08

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#3 2021-10-26 11:33:41

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#4 2021-10-26 15:26:01

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#5 2021-10-27 00:50:37

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#6 2021-10-27 01:13:26

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#7 2021-10-27 07:16:58

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#8 2021-10-27 11:47:19

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#9 2021-10-27 14:46:27

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#10 2021-10-27 14:58:04

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#11 2021-10-27 23:53:27

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#12 2021-10-28 08:03:23

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#13 2021-10-28 10:57:10

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#14 2021-10-28 20:23:10

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#15 2021-10-29 02:10:46

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#16 2021-10-29 02:27:34

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#17 2021-10-29 08:19:25

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#18 2021-10-29 09:19:56

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#19 2021-10-29 15:17:19

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

#20 2021-10-30 02:05:13

Re: Beryllium software replacements/additions

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