General Observations

[statmonkey]

Firstly just an outstanding job overall.  Fairly amazing that I was feeling like I just wanted to have a Sid setup that had all the things I wanted right off the bat.  Started reading about Vsido, downloaded, installed, played with it, loved it and then came on the boards and saw that VastOne was behind it all.  I should have known   As a former #!er I appreciate how well thought out and simple it all is.

My initial install was pretty flawless once I got over a small issue that has nothing to do with Vsido.  My box is a dual UEFI/Legacy box and I was using a GPT partition prior to this.  The install kept failing on the swap partition.  After running around for a while I finally "got it" and reformatted the boot and swap partition to msdos.  After that it skipped through the install like magic, so fast I think it broke my old aptosid install to working system record.

The next issue I came across was the GMB-git setup did not like my customized/bastardized VastOne layouts and profile.  I was forced to change over to the standard GMB obviously this took only seconds.  I doubt anyone has the same sort of music goofiness I have so not to worry.  I also found that all of my devices barring a bluetooth driver were all set up.  I only had to add the bluetooth driver and of course switch over to HDMI sound and I had a fully running layout without all the cruft to remove as in other distro's.  Having spacefm and geany right there are great.

I only now have a couple of annoying things.  One is that my root mail is set to root@VastOne.  Nothing personal but I would rather not be reminded of your awesomeness everytime I get a system mail.  I once knew how to fix that but have long since forgotten.  Still researching that one.

Also, I guess I have a question.  How are you doing upgrades.  My first Sid distro was Aptosid as mentioned above and I got in the habit of going to init3, shutting down the X environ and running dist-upgrade.  This is the first time I have really run smxi and not sure of the steps or consequences of upgrading the kernel as part of the upgrade.  Researching this now sure that google will be my friend.

Overall impressions.  Wow, just what it needs to be.  Great install process, nice looking kit, everything included that I would install on my own.  Not much to add after initial boot, etc.  I'm sold. As usual VastOne, stellar performance.  Thank you for making this available.

[VastOne]

Welcome to VSIDO statmonkey, we are glad to have you! 

I really appreciate the kind words

Incredible write up on your first post... this is the kind I really hope to get... real time feed back and suggestions

There have been several people with UEFI questions, it might be a good idea to write a small tutorial on exactly what you did

I was not aware that root mail is set to root@VastOne... I will correct it and it will not be there on the next ISO release

smxi is an awesome tool that once you get the hang of, you will really like and use.  If you use it for Debian kernels, it will revert you back to Dbian's latest stable.  VSIDO uses the latest releases kernel from Experimental and those are updated via dist-upgrade, or...

Which leads me to your next question about updates... If there is a major kernel change... say from 3.7 to 3.8 etc etc, then the ISO is updated... VSIDO is a pure rolling release and I like to keep the ISO's only as much as 2 weeks old and no more... usually, every other Sunday I release a new ISO with the lates SID code. For anyone who already has VSIDO installed, they just need to keep current with a dist-upgrade, which I recommend to do daily.  In the event there is new kernels or new software, I will release how I did it or what is needed in the ChangeBlog

Again, thanks for the excellent feedback and I am really glad to see you here

[statmonkey]

Writing something up on the UEFI now. I am not really sure what the overall benefits of UEFI are, will probably need John Raff to explain that but I know that the Semplice guys have a UEFI boot tutorial and I had moderate success using it.  The problem with their process is that if you have a legacy/UEFI bios like mine the bios doesn't recognize the UEFI partition automatically.  In the end I found it much easier to go through my steps.

Thanks for explaining something I didn't mention.  I did use smxi to update to it's latest kernel, which of course (now I know) borked my grub by putting me back to the latest stable kernel.  I just reinstalled and forgot about it.  Now at least I understand what happened.  Good info.  Also thanks for giving me some insight on the way the releases work. The term "rolling release" has been co-opted by so many distro's with many of them taking liberties with how the term is used.  I believe that your interpretation is the correct one, glad to hear this is a "true" rolling release.

FWIW I keep pretty extensive notes on what I do after each install and it is interesting to look back.  I started with Mandrake and that is about 10 pages, Ubuntu was about the same.  Debian Sid was also pretty extensive by it's nature.  Aptosid required a lot for me because I am an openbox/spacefm/geany user.  Crunchbang was the shortest prior to this but still required quite a bit of tweaking.  For Vsido, barely a page.  A few things are unavoidable but for the most part it's all here to begin with Conky, smxi, udevil etc.  All I added was Gnucash, some yad tweaks I use, printers, java7, bluetooth drivers, changed the sound to hdmi, calibre, avidemux, some mac libraries, set up my vpn, sqlite, the spacefm plugins and then drug over my openbox, bash, tint2, cron scripts and a theme I like and I was done.  In my world that is pretty awesome.

Thanks for the warm welcome, its great to have a "here" to come to.  I am a bit of a lurker but if I feel I can contribute something of value to I will chime in.  It seems you have some knowledgeable folks here so I am sure I will learn some things as I read my way through the forums.  Really appreciate all your hard work, it shows in the release from top to bottom.

[blaze]

Thanks for the explanation of the release strategy VastOne, had been thinking to ask about it.