32-bit fork of OXT Lite 1.03

[richmond62]

Sorry, I didn't pry and ask if the laptop belonged to anyone alive or dead.

Pry away; after all when I was running a load of Beta tests of software of mine (a thing to digitise Glagolitic texts) I found out ALL the specs of the hardware and the software of all the Beta testers: and did REJECT a woman who, while being a dab hand at Staroslavianski Ezik was running Windows XP on a machine designed to cope with Windows 95.

The laptop in question, belonged to my father, but as it would not fit in the coffin it is now mine, and is used more than anything as a sort of toy for amusing myself when the cat is not available. I am currently alive, although after 3 days of shovelling soil I feel half dead.

What I will consider doing is running your live-disk image on a far more up-to-date machine:

Dell Optiplex 3050-Micro with 8 GB RAM and a i3-6100T-3.2 GHz/3 MB/2 C/4T processor and a iB250 chipset.

(I hope you understand some of those 'magic' numbers: but it is 'somewhat' faster than father's laptop).

[richmond62]

I would suggest that, should you issue a 32-bit Linux ISO (with an admin account), you might consider attaching a list of minimum specifications.

It was just ranting

Please be so kind as to watch the following film:

https://youtu.be/xUezfuy8Qpc

[tperry2x]

..there is no enabled user account, been mentioned...

There is an enabled user account - it should login automatically. Open a terminal and type 'who'.
Should be 'user'.

[richmond62]

And does it have a password that can be used with sudo?

Part of 'my problem' is a feeling of under-documentation.

[tperry2x]

(I hope you understand some of those 'magic' numbers: but it is 'somewhat' faster than father's laptop).

An i3 processor with 8gb of ram should be more than capable of running all that. You don't mention it it's using an SSD or an older spinning HDD. If it's using a spinning hard drive, then it'll be sluggish. But that's not the fault of the processor or anything else you mention above.

[tperry2x]

And does it have a password that can be used with sudo?
Part of 'my problem' is a feeling of under-documentation.

Well, as I mentioned - it wasn't the intention to install it.
There's not really any documentation necessary.
Aside from the os, it's just OXT Lite (which you already know) - I've also deliberately not included an office suite, to keep the size down (was trying to get the iso to be under 2gb), but it's just over that at 2.25gb. I could do more pruning though.

Since you ask, the user password is 2097 - that's the automatic login for the user account.
The root password is: 1234

This can be changed easily with "sudo passwd root" in a terminal.
Likewise, you can change the user password with "sudo passwd user" or by using the MX Tools > MX user manager

This distro is all updated for security patches, and was current as of the beginning of April.

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Really, it was just intended for someone to either burn to a cd / write to a usb stick, and allow them to test drive OXT lite on 32-bit hardware without affecting their already installed os.

And if I'm feeling even more pedantic, this is why I didn't supply any passwords - so someone couldn't open something like gparted and wipe out their already installed OS.

[richmond62]

It'll be Tuesday as am a busy, busy person until then.

It has a 500 GB SSD so there should be no "bangs and crashes" at all.

[tperry2x]

Something else that boggles my noggin: why install this 32-bit distro on that machine, when it's got a 64-bit i3 processor? It'll feel slow (or plain just won't work) as the architecture is wrong.

If all you are doing is testing it, you'd be better off creating a 32-bit virtual machine in something like VirtualBox or QEMU.

[richmond62]

Something else that boggles my noggin:

Well, boggling noggins or not: that is a machine that is, quite literally, lying around among my piles of other crap and has a blank disk because a bloke who suffers from 2 problems:

1. He has been supplying my ESL school for about 18 years with new-fer-you machines at knockdown prices.

2. His son is currently going through the "Richmond 9 year torture process" to get him up to near fluency in English (I mean, do you want to learn Bulgarian?).

Lobbed it at me for NIX because he had got hold of a lorry-load of the things and fobbed about 500 of them off on a factory owner (who then had the dubious pleasure of me instructing one of their, frankly goofy, tech people on how to install Kubuntu + WINE), and was feeling as high as a kite (a 300% profit will do that to quite a few people).

So, as it has been lying on one of our spare beds winking coyly at me like a neglected tart (and, being happily married, I neglect tarts), it was obviously about time to tickle its transistors. AND, I'll tell you 'WOT', if that machine doesn't cope with your modded MX you will have no excuse but to go very red in the face.

[richmond62]

the architecture is wrong

Dunno about that; for a whie, owing to a major mental blip on my part, I was running a 32-bit distro on a 64-bit machine, and it ran extremely fast and extremely smoothly.

No, Ha, Ha, Ha: try getting a 64-bit distro onto a 32-bit machine.

Oh, and just to 'up the kinkiness', I have a 24-bit RISC machine "holidaying" (19 years and counting) in my attic in my house in St. Andrews . . . something to get down and dirty with in my retirement when my leopardskin thong slips too much for me to go to those 'whips-n-chains' clubs they have all over Scotland.

[tperry2x]

if that machine doesn't cope with your modded MX you will have no excuse but to go very red in the face.

You are missing the point here, now that we've got to the point.

It's the wrong architecture. It's like expecting an ARM program to run on intel x64 hardware. It won't do it. And it's not due to anything I would have done, thanks very much, so I won't have a red face (just probably a smug one).

Why not run an x64 intel build of oxt lite on this, as that's what that machine's processor is built for? I mean, for a start, you'll only be able to use 4gb of that 8gb of memory with a 32bit OS.

You might be lucky and that particular chip might contain a abstraction layer to translate 32 bit code into a x64bit instruction set, but not all do. I can't remember, but it's not a given that all i3 chips include it.

[richmond62]

It won't do it.

Are you sure?

3 years ago I DID run a 32-bit distro on a 64-bit machine . . . what am I either missing or forgetting?

ANYWAY: at the risk of my going red in the face (and that won't be the first time) I'll have a go on Tuesday afternoon.

[tperry2x]

I have updated my answer, as I remembered about the abstraction layer. Like having a translator between you speaking Bulgarian and someone speaking Welsh - the translator does the job, but there's a delay in communication.

Some distros tried to do this in software too. Windows still does as its capable of running 32bit programs on x64bit hardware, but it contains the wow64 layer (native) and a x86-32 abstraction layer if not supported in hardware on the chip.

But point is, if you wanted a distro capable of doing both, it wouldn't be around the 2gb in size for an updated current one. A bit like a macOS fat binary - that's what you kind of have here, it needs to call the right instruction set.

[richmond62]

particular chip might contain a abstraction layer

I wish I had one of those: tried shopping in a Latvian supermarket: and as (as a result of the Soviet occupation) most people understand Russian: spoke Bulgarian with an exaggerated Scots accent: got slapped in the face and called a bloody Russian . . .

. . . in May (when I'll be in Riga again as my son and daughter-in-law stay there) I'll have to knock together a few vaguely passable phrases in Latvian as no-one seems to speak English, Scots, French, Dutch, Arabic, Hebrew, or Hindi: which is as far as I go (and, as my older son, who speaks 10 languages very well indeed, says, is frankly pathetic).

AND, for some unknown reason no-one else seems particularly interested in trying out your live linux 32-bit distro: and this is a great pity as, for an educational point of view, and empowering schools and school-kids in third-world countries this is fudging marvellous.

[tperry2x]

It might be that most schools frown on anything 32-bit and want it out of the door.

It would probably be better to make a raspberry pi compatible build if I wanted to appeal to programming classes at schools.

[richmond62]

It might be that most schools frown on anything 32-bit and want it out of the door.

In sub-Saharan Africa, frown as much as they like, but an awful lot of countries just don't have the money needed to invest in education, and as we in a the richer countries seem to be dropping a lot of our 'crap' on them (and I am using 'crap' in quotes just because 32-bit computers are far from crap), they are far better to utilise 32-bit machines than none at all.

My younger son was recently over in Malawi and was impressed to see a lot of Pentium II machines running FreeDOS with the GEM GUI being put to good use.

https://www.opendawn.com/opengem/

I used just that combination about 15 years ago to help my older son get his head round PASCAL V, as that was what the Bulgarian government in its 'wisdom' determined that high school children should study in 2008 (I studied PASCAL V at Durham in 1983), but had forgotten to train any teachers or provide any machines with the language installed.

I think I successfully guaranteed that my son would have no interest in Computer programming even if he did end up being the only kid in his class to get anything but a FAIL in the exam.

[tperry2x]

Yeah, I'm not saying I agree with that necessarily.
32-bit stuff doesn't necessarily have to gather dust or be thrown out, if you can update the software and keep it in use.

However there are practical issues with doing that, and you have to adjust your expectations respectively.

As I mention, a 32-bit os can only access a maximum of 4gb of memory, so running anything that needs more than 4gb of ram is out. Even if you had 8gb or more, it just won't use it.

Many operating systems aren't getting updated for 32bit machines now, so unless you put an old distro on there, or an old version of windows - you are a bit limited on what you can run.

But then you run into silly issues that we take for granted these days, such as very iffy trim support for SSDs (meaning data could be overwritten and corrupted on old os versions before SSDs became commonplace).

You can also run into unsupported hardware quite easily, as companies aren't keeping their 32-bit archives online anymore.

Take Toshiba for example. I had 50+ Toshiba laptops at work, but Toshiba have been snapped up by DynaBook and are no more. They dropped their support section for old laptops, so no video drivers were available, no networking support, or no way to get it to be aware of SSDs as it was HDDs or nothing.

That's my other reason for picking mx-linux, as it's one of the few still being updated for 32bit os.

[tperry2x]

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You can see what I was on about here with the abstraction layer for 32-bit machines (LC mention it here in the release notes for older versions). Although they call it a 'compatibility layer' - it's one and the same thing.

Why was I poking around in these older versions? Just to see at what point platform support was dropped.

If you wanted a 32-bit mac build of OXT Lite, it seems I'd have to go back to v8.1.9 of LCC
(That seems to be the last version to still support MacOS 10.6 Snow Leopard).

I was also trying to find out what version might actually run on a raspberry PI (if that's a thing that exists).

[richmond62]

If you wanted a 32-bit mac build of OXT Lite

Well: on an iMac that I have that runs 10.6I run some ancient versio0n(s) of LC (honestly cannot remember which ones at the moment): but as I use that machine mainly for several 3D modelling programs for which I have licences (and won't work on 10.7 upwards), from my point of view at least, I wouldn't bother.

The reason I use my 32-bit iMac is just about the only reason that I can see anyone wanting to use it: the web-browsers just cannot cope with the modern interweb.

I suppose for a bit of word-processing and listening to CDs.

After all, pick up a second-hand PC that was made within the last 20 years, bung Linux on it, and a 'world' of FREE software is open to you which will make a 2007 Mac look like a heap of junk to the vast majority of people.

[tperry2x]

...from my point of view at least, I wouldn't bother.

Well, not doing it would save a lot of work, if you don't think there's any need for it.

The reason I use my 32-bit iMac is just about the only reason that I can see anyone wanting to use it: the web-browsers just cannot cope with the modern interweb.

Very true. I mean, there's things like waterfox - but even these have their limitations (github pages as one example won't show anything but a spinner instead of the releases to download). There's loads more that is broken in practical terms too. Web standards move on so fast these days, which means it's standards are continuously evolving - but it also does not seem to retain compatibility as a result.

After all, pick up a second-hand PC that was made within the last 20 years, bung Linux on it, and a 'world' of FREE software is open to you which will make a 2007 Mac look like a heap of junk to the vast majority of people.

That's part of the ecosystem lock in with Apple, and Microsoft Windows too. The difference being it can be hard to replace a PPC / non EFI mac's system with anything else than Mac OS X. With a generic PC, you can almost take your pick of alternative OS to use.

I was just musing what other stuff might be used in schools elsewhere. I know in mine, it's pretty much Windows or nothing (that's not by choice, that gets dictated down from above), but we don't get a say on if we are retaining 32-bit computers. It's a solid 'no' and they have all been sent off to recycling with their hard drives removed by yours-truly, (hopefully being made use of in somewhere not as fortunate that are crying out for computers). I know raspberry PI was a thing in schools elsewhere, but this seems to have fizzled out a bit as far as I can tell. As you can pick up a cheap x64-intel PC for next to nothing, whack any distro on it and you are good to go - then we are probably covered in what platforms we need to support for OXT lite in an education setting?

(I guess I should really move this to the education section).