Distro-hoppers anonymous

Colonel Panic · 2026-09-14 10:56:17

Third time lucky today - I had two duds recently with the latest version of Zenwalk (couldn't get the sound working), and Exton OpSys (based on Open SUSE Tumbleweed), when I got into an interminable boot loop which kept on loading and then unloading one of the device drivers. Thankfully Exton Defender (based on Fedora 44) is all working as it should be.

https://defender.exton.se/extondefender … ld-260718/

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2026-09-14 13:08:25)

greenjeans · 2026-09-14 17:32:04

Colonel Panic wrote:

Third time lucky today - I had two duds recently with the latest version of Zenwalk (couldn't get the sound working), and Exton OpSys (based on Open SUSE Tumbleweed), when I got into an interminable boot loop which kept on loading and then unloading one of the device drivers. Thankfully Exton Defender (based on Fedora 44) is all working as it should be.
https://defender.exton.se/extondefender … ld-260718/

Interesting that they did some mods to Refracta-Snapshot, I use it myself and have contributed some minor code bits, it says they made it into a GUI, but it already has a basic GUI version using yad dialogs. Any chance you could take a screenie of that? I'd like to see what they've done.

Colonel Panic · 2026-09-15 23:41:55

greenjeans wrote:

Colonel Panic wrote:
Third time lucky today - I had two duds recently with the latest version of Zenwalk (couldn't get the sound working), and Exton OpSys (based on Open SUSE Tumbleweed), when I got into an interminable boot loop which kept on loading and then unloading one of the device drivers. Thankfully Exton Defender (based on Fedora 44) is all working as it should be.
https://defender.exton.se/extondefender … ld-260718/
Interesting that they did some mods to Refracta-Snapshot, I use it myself and have contributed some minor code bits, it says they made it into a GUI, but it already has a basic GUI version using yad dialogs. Any chance you could take a screenie of that? I'd like to see what they've done.

Thanks for the suggestion. I may do that later; at the moment though I'm trying to get a tiling manager (spectrwm at the moment) working properly again.

[Edit: just getting over a bout of sinusitis, so it will have to wait unfortunately. For now though, I'm sticking with Devubox, which I haven;t had any problems with so far, and a couple of the AntiXes; the latest one (26) and the previous one 23, which still works well). I've also reinstalled Senpai, another antiX-based distro but with LXDE as the desktop manager, and so far the sound is holding up well.]

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2026-09-20 20:20:14)

Colonel Panic · 2026-09-27 20:51:08

Posting from antiX at the moment and am experimenting with loading the whole installation into RAM. It takes longer to load, but once you're over that hurdle applications load much faster (and seem to run faster too).

One downside with doing it that way is that the total size of your installation is limited to the amount of RAM you have (I have 8 GB), but antiX is a small distro anyway so that's not a problem.

Colonel Panic · 2026-10-01 23:48:11

I've just burnt off a snapshot of MX Fluxbox 25.3 to a DVD and am posting from it now. It's much harder getting MX (even the Fluxbox edition) to fit within the 4.7 GB allowed by the blank DVD; I had to uninstall the office suite I had on there and then run Bleachbit both from root and from my user account. Got there in the end though.

Last edited by Colonel Panic (Yesterday 06:32:17)

DeepDayze · Yesterday 02:14:08

Colonel Panic wrote:

I've just burnt off a snapshot of MX Fluxbox 25.3 to a DVD and am posting from it now. It;s much harder getting MX (even the Fluxbox edition) to fit within the 4.7 GB allowed by the blank DVD; I had to uninstall the office suite I had on there and then run Bleachbit both from root and from my user account. Got there in the end though.

Can your system boot from USB? if so, write the ISO image to USB with dd and select the USB device from the boot menu (You can use the Fn key to trigger the boot menu..each machine's BIOS has its own Fkey so check your machine's manual).

cog · Yesterday 05:19:42

DeepDayze wrote:

Colonel Panic wrote:
I've just burnt off a snapshot of MX Fluxbox 25.3 to a DVD and am posting from it now. It;s much harder getting MX (even the Fluxbox edition) to fit within the 4.7 GB allowed by the blank DVD; I had to uninstall the office suite I had on there and then run Bleachbit both from root and from my user account. Got there in the end though.
Can your system boot from USB? if so, write the ISO image to USB with dd and select the USB device from the boot menu (You can use the Fn key to trigger the boot menu..each machine's BIOS has its own Fkey so check your machine's manual).

The optical installation medium was pretty impressive. Can you even buy blank DVDs/Cds anymore? I guess online but I don’t see or probably notice them in stores.

Colonel Panic · Yesterday 06:21:34

DeepDayze wrote:

Colonel Panic wrote:
I've just burnt off a snapshot of MX Fluxbox 25.3 to a DVD and am posting from it now. It;s much harder getting MX (even the Fluxbox edition) to fit within the 4.7 GB allowed by the blank DVD; I had to uninstall the office suite I had on there and then run Bleachbit both from root and from my user account. Got there in the end though.
Can your system boot from USB? if so, write the ISO image to USB with dd and select the USB device from the boot menu (You can use the Fn key to trigger the boot menu..each machine's BIOS has its own Fkey so check your machine's manual).

Thanks for replying. USB pendrives are an alternative, certainly, but an expensive way of doing it - they work as a medium if you only have one or two distros that you want to save, but otherwise you'd need to either have several USBs on hand (at £10 a pop at least for ones big enough to burn a distro off to) or to be forever wiping your one USB pen drive and reinstalling a distro on it, which is very time-consuming.

I've tried using Ventoy, but I found that very hit and miss.

Last edited by Colonel Panic (Yesterday 06:34:01)

Colonel Panic · Yesterday 06:23:09

cog wrote:

DeepDayze wrote:
Colonel Panic wrote:
I've just burnt off a snapshot of MX Fluxbox 25.3 to a DVD and am posting from it now. It;s much harder getting MX (even the Fluxbox edition) to fit within the 4.7 GB allowed by the blank DVD; I had to uninstall the office suite I had on there and then run Bleachbit both from root and from my user account. Got there in the end though.
Can your system boot from USB? if so, write the ISO image to USB with dd and select the USB device from the boot menu (You can use the Fn key to trigger the boot menu..each machine's BIOS has its own Fkey so check your machine's manual).
The optical installation medium was pretty impressive. Can you even buy blank DVDs/Cds anymore? I guess online but I don’t see or probably notice them in stores.

Yes you can - my local computer shop still sells Philips DVD-Rs, and packs of them are also available online, on Amazon (if you can stand that site now) or EBay amongst others. It's getting harder now though to find distros with ISOs that will even fit on a DVD-R; Ubuntu 26 doesn't, for example, and nor does Slackware Current Live.

Last edited by Colonel Panic (Yesterday 06:39:55)

cog · Yesterday 06:52:45

Very cool. Yeah the filesize thing does seem to be the consideration. DVD isos seem to be the pathway to just use a USB in case you can’t fit it.

MarkW · Today 20:16:58

I had a look at Haiku. Does that count as distro hopping?

I thought about installing on a partition, but I couldn't get a wifi connection to search for Haiku/Linux dual boot

PackRat · Today 20:56:38

cog wrote:

Very cool. Yeah the filesize thing does seem to be the consideration. DVD isos seem to be the pathway to just use a USB in case you can’t fit it.

#3021 2026-09-14 10:56:17

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#3022 2026-09-14 17:32:04

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#3023 2026-09-15 23:41:55

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#3024 2026-09-27 20:51:08

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#3025 2026-10-01 23:48:11

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#3026 Yesterday 02:14:08

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#3027 Yesterday 05:19:42

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