--I could launch the live XFCE, finally, from Ventoy, by doing something unusual: enabling "Legacy and UEFI" in bios instead of my default setting "UEFI Only." Perplexing. I guess it needed to see the non-fat Ventoy stick as it appeared in boot menu.

--I elected to install next to Endeavor on a 2nd disk. I chose 'Alongside of' and made Calmares resize the 300GB partition the Endeavour filesystem sat on. Calmares was stuck at 1% for 20 minutes into re-size and I aborted the install.
.........is shrinking a companion partition something I should of have handled in Gparted first?
.......or was I impatient?

---Calmares has no straight up UEFI or GRUB option...so I assume it will pick for me?

---In other distros the only thing keeping me from using XFCE (over Budgie, for instance) was the big "loosey-goosey" scattered, conceptually unfocused aspect of XFCE. Like Mate. Solus really tightened this aspect up as I perused through windows and menus. In many ways a better/more inviting XFCE experience than I am used to. I like Thunar better than Caja by a mile but not better than Nemo. But it's just as sharp.

--I really really love the round icons and other thematic decisions Solus made. Settings are more simplified than other XFCE's i.e. the panel settings, displays, system, right-click menus. It is a re-imagining and rebirth of this Brand. Solus acted as artist and architect here. Well done. I can't wait to install it!!

--But where do I install it? Do I shrink Endeavour filesystem and make the partitions for Calmares (manual). Or shrink the filesystem in Gparted then pick 'Alongside of'? I am genuinely confused.

---Or can Solus play nice with Solus? Any drawbacks to installing 'alongside of' Budgie other than shrinking Budgie's filesyste? (if so what is the best method?). I don't play the shared /home game so no hangups there.

--Right now I feel like I had more freedom in Solus's old installer. I can't make the Calmares installer work (re-size) without more guidance.

  • WetGeek and [deleted] replied to this.
  • elfprince likes this.
  • I faced the same issue. Firstly thought it's Ventoy problem, then I write the USB again directly from ISO file. It hangs again at 1% when Calmares trying to create or write file to selected partion (alongside option). Then I decided to try with manual option. Something I did:

    • Use GParted to shink existing partition and create new one, format as ext4.
    • Start Installer and select manual option.
    • Map new partition and map to root (/), and the boot partition to /boot
    • Then you could continue and finish it. Once it's done, just reboot.

    NOTE: this way it kills my existing Solus from boot menu, the only XFCE available to select. I have to find a way to add it back now

    For what it's worth, I have an XFCE installation now on what was initially a Budgie install. Haven't noticed any issues.

    I faced the same issue. Firstly thought it's Ventoy problem, then I write the USB again directly from ISO file. It hangs again at 1% when Calmares trying to create or write file to selected partion (alongside option). Then I decided to try with manual option. Something I did:

    • Use GParted to shink existing partition and create new one, format as ext4.
    • Start Installer and select manual option.
    • Map new partition and map to root (/), and the boot partition to /boot
    • Then you could continue and finish it. Once it's done, just reboot.

    NOTE: this way it kills my existing Solus from boot menu, the only XFCE available to select. I have to find a way to add it back now

      brent --Right now I feel like I had more freedom in Solus's old installer. I can't make the Calmares installer work (re-size) without more guidance.

      Brent, you have a knack for making simple things incredibly complicated. I can easily understand wanting to investigate other distros, and I have a history of doing so dozens of times, but I've almost always done that using virtual machines, not a single disk with multiple distros on multiple partitions. I tried that once, and it quickly became so much of a cluster-fsck, I never wanted to try that again.

      Calamares is a breath of fresh air compared to our previous installer, but you're asking it to do complex things, and as the old saying goes, "you get what you ask for." Installing a single distro on a disk or ssd, as most users will want to do, is simplicity itself. Calamares does a commendable job of respecting your options, such as to enable swap, and make the swap partition a suitable size to allow hibernating.

      After reading what you want to do, I'd suggest that your idea to use gparted to set up your disk prior to squeezing yet another distro onto it is a great idea. But beware - there be dragons there. Keep good backups available.

        minh NOTE: this way it kills my existing Solus from boot menu, the only XFCE available to select. I have to find a way to add it back now

        thanks I'm glad this is your experience too. I will be mindful of the boot menu. I will try again to install next to Endeavour and do the dirty work in Gparted first. I will unplug my Budgie disk during this so I can keep that boot menu. I have no idea, now that you mention it, if the Endeavour entry will survive but if I get a clean XFCE I will go from there. Appreciate that.

        WetGeek After reading what you want to do, I'd suggest that your idea to use gparted to set up your disk prior to squeezing yet another distro onto it is a great idea. But beware - there be dragons there. Keep good backups available.

        WetGeek Calamares is a breath of fresh air compared to our previous installer, but you're asking it to do complex things, and as the old saying goes, "you get what you ask for."

        I don't know. Why would calmares offer to install alongside of and resize in the first place if these were overly complex tasks, as you state? Why not just not offer then at all?

        In the same breath, you are likely right, and I should be trying to make things easy for Calmares by making my partitions in Gparted first. I'm used to that method even though the original Solus installer (I still like it better) did what it thought was best.

        I'm in love with this implementation of XFCE but no love yet at for this implementation of Calmares. But it's wa-a-a-a-a-y early in the game and opinions (especially mine) shift as I go. Thanks, I agree with you, Going back to Gparted in earnest.

          When do mapping /boot, I selected to "Keep" so the partition is there. Just the old boot entries are replaced. I have to manually create one for existing solution partition now. I know it's not the best, but just want to put the old Solus back to the boot menu.

          In the entries folder, you could clone to a new file and update root=PARTUUID to your old Solus partuuid, find it by this command sudo blkid

          brent I should be trying to make things easy for Calmares by making my partitions in Gparted first.

          Good idea, indeed. And at a risk of beating that dead horse yet one more time, I can't overstate how much using virtual machines could simplify your life. And I risk saying that as a friend.

          Currently, this laptop that I'm using to write this message is able to run Solus 4.5 Plasma, Solus 4.5 Xfce, Solus 4.5 GNOME, Solus 4.5 Budgie, Solus 4.4 MATE, Windows 10, and Sparky Linux, without rebooting at all. And without resizing any partitions (not always an easy task). And without any conflicts in booting. And I haven't even wasted your time by listing in detail all the many other advantages of VMs.

          • [deleted]

          • Edited

          brent

          Calmares was stuck at 1% for 20 minutes into re-size and I aborted the install

          It can take long if it is a traditional HDD and the partition has got a lot of stuff. The program has to shift all the data to the beginning of the partition first.

            I have installed Solus Xfce on an old laptop with i3 cpu, so far i cant see anything wrong.
            But there is one thing that is annoying, i have click buttons under the touchpad but there is no place i can find to enable tap to click. I have tried Budgie earlier and there i had tap to click.

            [deleted] with apologies of sorts to you and @WetGeek , you were both correct. Calmares not the problem here it was me: impatient. Shrinking 300GB by 50% is taking over 20 minutes in Gparted in the XFCE Live right now. It was on the trajectory to be the same in Calmares as I imagine parted is built into Calmares.

            Either way when that operation finishes I can move on to bare metal install. Would like to make this solved tonight. In the free time I am exploring this solus XFCE and it's pretty bitchin'.

              brent Calmares not the problem

              No apology needed for me, and I'm glad you have it figured out. (Did you tell Calamares you're sorry?) I'm sure you're gonna love Solus Xfce. I installed it on my #2 laptop so I could test its changes during development, and I haven't felt any inclination to replace it there with anything else.

              A couple of minor niggles have just been fixed, and will be in the next sync. Although it's called a beta, it's in better shape than many released distros I've evaluated.

                WetGeek

                WetGeek A couple of minor niggles have just been fixed, and will be in the next sync. Although it's called a beta, it's in better shape than many released distros I've evaluated.

                I haven't spoken to Calmares privately yet🙂. Well underway. I agree it's polished as h-e-doublematchsticks for a Beta. Reboot time!

                  brent Well underway.

                  When that's all the way installed, I'll have some suggestions for you. But it'll be tomorrow, probably, 'cause I'm about 15 minutes away from bed right now. Did you choose a swap partition and hibernate in Calamares? Those options made this the slickest Solus installer I've seen to date. I've totaly stopped preparing partitions in advance.

                  @minh /root and /boot were not intuitive or easy to format after the ext4 part but I did it. your instructions were invaluable and I gave you Best Answer and Solved.

                  I got out of my own way and 3 operating systems across 2 HDDs all boot fine and are in boot menu. The fact I did not screw up feels like a Haley's comet occurrence.

                  Pissed I can't post a pic since XFCE screenshot snaps and saves a pic way too big (2.6MB) for forum. Budgie and Gnome screenshots default to sensible small .pngs for posting. Have to play with that in xfce whatever the screenshot app is. You just can't waste a Tullamore wallpaper for God's sake😉.

                  Dear Solus: this XFCE is sleek, sexy, and uncluttered. On the whole, much more sensible than xfce's sampled in the past. Customization settings make a lot more sense here. You've exceeded Mate that way. This version is not phoned in. Celtic Magic I'm certain.
                  SOLVED.

                    brent XFCE screenshot snaps and saves a pic way too big (2.6MB) for forum

                    You might be surprised. The pictures I've posted in the forum from my Xfce laptop are taken of a 1920x1080 HD screen, and not resized. I'm not sure how I figured out that I no longer needed to resize them, but I think it was probably by accident. I was probably busy with something else, and simply forgot to do it one time.

                    As promised, here are some suggestions you might like, but to be sure, they're only suggestions. I won't be a bit offended if you choose to have it your way. Burger King sure got that one right. But I'm going to change to my Xfce laptop now, in case I want to illustrate anything.


                    Okay, I'm here now. First of all, this is an image I've posted before, but I want to point out what I mentioned a few minutes ago. This is a full HD 1920x1080 .png from Xfce's Screenshot utility, and posted to the forum without any resizing needed. Obviously, Flarum does its own resizing now, which makes a lot of sense. It's an easy thing to code.

                    First of all, the background image was my idea. When I first started to submit bug reports the team had used the picture of two bicycles from the GNOME edition as the background for Xfce. I almost threw up. I wanted to show them something nicer, and they liked the idea. For some reason, they didn't go for the Plank dock, probably because they were trying to appeal to MATE users, who were soon to be asked to change to Xfce.

                    Xfce's bottom panel starts out with four workspaces, which will probably be perfect for a lot of people. My first change to that panel was to add a spacer on either side of the Workspace Switcher, to more-or-less center it in the panel. There's one more change to the panel I should mention. That imitation Icon-only Task Manager at the left end of the panel isn't really what it looks like. It's simply a few application launchers that are mounted on the panel and moved over to the left. They're in no way connected to the applications that are launched from the menu, as we're used to with other Solus DEs.

                    But that's alright. Plank is a perfect replacement for a task manager, and it does sync with applications you've launched, as you know. Since I wanted to use Plank anyway, I simply removed those launchers from the panel, and have never regretted doing that. It makes the panel cleaner looking. The Whisker menu stays, of course.

                    With the Plank dock on the bottom, I needed to move the panel to the top to keep those two from conflicting, and there's a trick to doing so that you might be aware of already, but I'll mention it here, just in case. If you right-click on the panel, the context menu lets you unlock it. When you do that, two little "handles" appear on the far left end and the far right end of the panel. You just grab one of those with the mouse, and drag the panel to wherever you might want it. The arrangement I use for Xfce matches the arrangement I use for Plasma, only with Plank instead of Latte.

                    There are a couple of rather inconcequential bugs (for most folks) that remain to be fixed, and you might never even run into them. The one I mentioned about not being able to use a Bluetooth keyboard is one that affects me the most, as I normally use a laptop on a stand that's made for the purpose, and placed in front of my chair in the living room. I'm constantly getting up during the day, and I don't need to find a place to put the laptop when I do that. But that makes it very uncomfortable to type for any length of time on the laptop's keyboard. So I use a small Arteck keyboard I can place on my lap, and easily set aside when I need to get up.

                    As it happens, that keyboard and my Logitech Triathlon mouse both are able to connect with up to three devices using three Bluetooth channels, so I connect them to my laptop, the media computer for the TV, and my smartphone. That normally works out well and simplifies my life considerably. But for some reason the Bluetooth library that Solus added to Xfce doesn't work with any of my keyboards. My mouse pairs, connects, and works fine with it. The keyboards all pair, and connect just fine, but then don't work at all. So I'm waiting for that bug to be fixed before I can substitute this Xfce laptop for my Plasma laptop and give it a good workout as my daily driver.

                    Another bug I ran into and reported is that the delay before taking a screenshot doesn't work when you're taking a selected area. It works fine if you're capturing the whole screen, but simply doesn't delay at all when you want to select an area for the image. That's made it hard for me to capture a context menu, because there's no time to re-open the menu before selecting the area. It's a known bug upstream at Xfce, so I'm hoping that gets fixed soon. I can still capture context menus open on my Xfce VM, using the Plasma's Spectacle tool on the host, so it's not exactly a debilitating bug, but it's annoying and I hope the Xfce team fixes it soon. Other than that, I think Xfce's Screenshot is the slickest utility of its kind I've ever used.

                    There's one more bug that's already been fixed by the Solus team, and will be in the next sync, and I'll mention it now in case you've already noticed it. When you close a laptop lid, the screen doesn't lock and turn off. And if you've chosen to hibernate when the lid is closed (a really great idea), that doesn't happen. But as I mentioned, those will soon be dead bugs. And there's a good work-around for the latter one - just hibernate the system via the menu, and when it shuts down, then close the laptop lid. It's not so convenient, but it works fine.

                    And one last hint. Since Flarum's idea of emojis really sucks, you'll want to know that gnome-characters is the utility that you can use to select them. They're just Unicode characters, after all. That's the icon third from the left in my Plank dock. Second from the left is Screenshot. I use them both often enought that I like to keep them handy.

                    It's even possible that none of the bugs I've mentioned will matter to you at all, depending on your workflow. You are already familiar with Xfce on other distros, so I'm sure you won't have any problems figuring out Solus' version. Enjoy!

                      WetGeek I definitely need to set up shop today in xfce and play. 2.5MB for my first screenshot suggests a setting...if all yours were shoot-and-post then something went sideways.

                      Thanks for all those tips. I personally had never used the bicycles as default so someone on the Dev team has to be MIGHTY fond of that cliched park scene🙂.

                      Now...I plan to use the panel if it's good as budgies and I always wanted to know what the hall those 'handles' were and what they did. Are you saying I can drag the whole panel to the top? Because left-to-right is covered in panel settings. I did not see move-panel-to-top option so I will try with the handles. I am really going to try to go as long as I can without breaking down and using plank.---If I do have to use plank, I will just get rid of the panel altogether.

                      I am unlikely to run into the first bug but I didn't notice the second bug. I set pictures for a 4 second delay so I would never notice that slight stutter you mention. Interesting.

                      Will come to you with more questions when I get there! Thanks for all the tireless debugging work you put in with the devs here to make XFCE palpable for the users. While Mate was bland and reliable, XFCE appears to be interesting and hopefully just as reliable. XFCE has a ceiling like every other DE, but it's a good addition.

                        WetGeek That background image is an excellent choice for the new XFCE edition. It's like a Pavlovian response. That image reminds me of the first time I installed Solus Budgie and how impressed I was, some for years ago. Whenever I see it, I feel home immediately.

                          Sebastian every single word here ^^ except the tullamore pics always bring back that 2017 feeling for moi

                          brent If I do have to use plank, I will just get rid of the panel altogether.

                          i really like what Plank does for me - hiding inteligently and exposing itself when needed - but I'm not sure I'd get rid of the panel. There are a lot of features there that are nice to have available in the system tray. And I'm not sure where I'd put the Whisker menu other than where it is. Or the Workspace Switcher.

                          Are you sure Xfce isn't just a bit too configurable, like Plasm? 🙂 After all, my Xfce laptop is a virtual carbon-copy of my Plasma laptop.