Well I am whacking it and if it all blows up .... I am coming to find you on the golf course Thanks for the feedback if anything untoward happens will let you kn ...........

Sorry for the double post but ...

What about the live directory in lib?  I mean what is it's purpose and does it need to be there?  If so what is it doing? This is not urgent just curious.  At the end of my dist upgrade  I always see this and it is bugging me.  Yes, yes google is my friend but I am being lazy so feel free to ignore me. 
live-boot: core filesystems devices utils memdisk udev wget blockdev ftpfs.


lol, enjoy the golf.

I think we all have our things we like and what is "best" changes daily.  For example I am bound to geany, terminator, mpd etc.  They may not be the best and may require things that others consider cruft but I am going to have them regardless of what I run.

I have been running Vsido for a couple of months now and overall consider it the best distro experience I have ever had.  For me it is a perfect blend of what I want with a few things in or out I would like to have.  Instead of making base changes to my system it really has been a case of tweaking a little here and there.  I don't know of anything that could be done that could make that any better.  There will always be things here or there that could or could not be included.  Overall though what matters to me is I can go from an empty box to my setup in far less time than I have ever been able to do with any set up.  Once again, great job VastOne and all, I really appreciate all the work that has gone into this.

Count me in on the fluxbox thing.  I did dive into it with the encouragement from all (thank you again) and would agree with a post I read somewhere on here that it seems considerably easier to monkey with than ob once you get the hang of it.  Well worth the little effort it took to get there.  I am currently (personally debating what to do with the XFCE stuff and thunar) it's not like they really are hurting anything there on my box and with 10 TB of combined space and 32 GB of ram I really don't need to remove much of anything (except the need to be compulsive).

FWIW

My helpers are just all set to mpd and the platform is just set to unix-mpc. 

I had the same issue with plaiter by the way.  I could get it to play one song (no sound iirc) and then it would stop.

For me I have run mpd for a long time and have lots of support scripts so it just makes the most sense for me to go that way.  Once you pointed me in the right direction it was incidental to return the now playing info for use elsewhere and then I just threw a little zenity script together giving me the option of hitting a key combo to change my plait if I don't like what is coming up.  Like ...
mpc clear
ENTRY=`zenity --entry --text "Please enter search term" --entry-text "Search for" --title "Enter your search"`
if [ $? == 0 ]
then
plait "$ENTRY"
fi
mpc play
exit

I let mpc worry about randomizing the list. I also cobbled together another one that offers me the option of selecting from my saved playlists and I am good to go. Now that through all the good info on this site I have figured out fluxbox I can really do all I want with plait from the keyboard.  I do get some errors with that script by the way, I think it has something to do with the rough and hacky way I moved from plait  1.6.2 to 1.6.3.  They are not mortal and all works as it should or at least well enough for my needs.  I will figure out the errors at some point I am sure.  Just really glad you started this thread and got me looking at this.  Plait has raised my personal music enjoyment level quite a bit.  It's nerdy goodness is so much fun.  Thanks again.

Digit.  Thank you my good man.  That last post of yours saved me a ton of time and effort, I had already started a trial and error process for conky vars and using different players.  Just curious are you playing through plaiter or using another player as I am?  I think plaiter is trying but still not getting sound output when I run with it in the config and just calling plaiter.  I have some other ?'s but think I will start here.  I have been going through the readme's line by line with limited success.

Well, I will just add on to this since I solved my issues and probably not the best way to do this but perhaps it will help someone save some time or there is a guru here that can come up with a better way.

I wanted to use plait with my previously set up mpd system and it would not work.  After some google fu I came across a patch for plait that was supposed to make it work with mpd.  Unfortunately I could not get it to play nice on my system.  Further research led me back to http://sourceforge.net/p/plait/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/ and after downloading and reading what was in there I re-installed plait and support files from this page, specifically plait version 1.6.3 which is http://sourceforge.net/p/plait/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/plait.

I did have to download each of the supporting files separately but I am guessing that if you already had plait they are pretty much the same.

I then changed the platform to unix-mpc and the helpers to point to mpd.  I will continue tweaking but it works quite well. The only issue I am getting is a couple of error: Not found statements.  I am not sure if this is from the plait itself or something mis-directing in the supporting awk scripts, I suspect the latter.  Admittedly I know little of awk so there is that to learn.  BTW it set up everything for plait in my $USER directory which is nice and plait just automagically adjusted itself to my mpd path settings for my library.  I could not find an installer package for this trunk by the way. 

For giggles I wrote a little random word grepping script that runs on startup, grabs a word from my library list and plugs it into a plait command,  So on boot I get a truly random playlist every time.  Completely stupid, inane and fun. Plus with mpd I can still have my music at the login screen.

Thanks guys I will stop playing with plait to read up on fluxbox.  Yes bonus points to PackRat it was the great urukrama blog that got my feet wet in OB (how could I have forgotten at one point I lived there for days), you should have taken the bet I will reread the fluxbox wiki HowTo and check out Arch and CB forums.  Appreciate the leads.

Good stuff. Thanks for posting this.  For my system I did have to use mplayer and modify my config and helpers to use it instead of the defaults.  I use hdmi sound and for that reason the defaults resulted in the command "plait genre" returning ... crickets. 

Now I have a fun new toy to play with.  It is pretty amazing, I had toyed with plait some time ago and for some odd reason forgot how wondrous it was.

VastOne - since you are the guru on this.  I am wondering if I can get the now playing info for my conky.  It seems that the actual info is coming from plait and not whatever player I am using.  For example if I am using deadbeef and I try to get the output to conky normally I would use ${execi 10 deadbeef --nowplaying '%a - %t'} but this results in "nothing".  I am really open to any player but it drives me nuts not to be able to look up and see the what song is now playing.

Just wanted say thanks to all. Nice catch!

I don't use medit much but I am pretty sure they both work the same way Geany is IMHO a little clumsier and more cumbersome.  Medit creates a section from a line ending where Geany is a set frame size regardless of the line endings.  But ctl+shift+mouse select work in both.

Now lets go easy on my Geany guys.  I think it is just what you get used to, I was a huge gedit guy at one time.  Got tired of all the crap you had to put with it and switched.  I can see the same argument with geany and probably will learn to love medit ... but for now

Some good stuff in here.  I had noticed the live stuff but wasn't sure if I could whack it.  Thanks for letting me know.  I also have been running the new build and very nice, fast, clean and lean ... that said I would be hard pressed to move away from OB for now.  I am sure flux can do a lot of great things but not sure I feel like learning a new DM all over again and the little I looked at I was lost from the start.  I remember I learned OB from some blog somewhere (can't remember the guy's name but it was the go to resource for OB newbies at one time). If there is anything out there like that for flux I would be interested.

As always VastOne great job and great information.  This is another excellent thread and appreciate all the contributions.

Sorry for the double post.  I was thinking about your question and not sure you are still interested but here are some of the commands/tools I am using with SpaceFM:
Copy to panel x with a pop up that asks what panel using the command script and yad
Move to my dropbox pub folder (have this as both a tool command and right click)
Send by mail using mutt

Scripts
I have a redeye script (I have SpaceFM open all the time)
Change song in GMB as well as start, add to menu, etc.
Splitflac file
Bulk rename
my own convert script for pdf to mobi or epub

A couple of command line things like df du etc.
Obviously there is a lot more.  I don't specifically know how to set up paste here but because of the dual pane not sure I would ever use it.  Hope this is more what you are after.

Just my 2 FWIW. I agree with surio that my whole point for running Vsido is SID.  I think you have the right idea with fluxbox but I really am an OB user and while there are stable OB distro's there is not much that I can think of that is a solid SID distro with OB (maybe Semplice? can't remember and it's been a while since I looked at it).  I really haven't used fluxbox much but sure I could get over that hump and if you want OB there is not much to put it in.

SID from the start is the critical issue for me.  I wanted something that would save me the time and effort of going through a full Debian install and give me a basic working environment quickly with at least most of the things I want. At the moment, Vsido gives me exactly what I want.  Not saying that change is not a good thing.  For me anyway having SpaceFM and Udevil there are important since both installs still require some handwork otherwise and see that as kind of a good rule of thumb.  There are several things (pulseaudio would be one) that installing is rather laborious and I would think most people do end up adding them. 

While going to the most bare bones possible sounds good there is a risk of going too far the other way, if it becomes too bare bones I might as well be installing Deb SID.  I would guess you aren't talking that bare bones.

Per the comments regarding pulseaudio, I agree that would be a good addition as a complement to alsa.  I have already personally gone that direction.  I never look at the XFCE stuff, don't remove it but never open any of it that I know of so losing that would just mean less weight from the start in my book.  There are lots of things I never touch or bother to remove like synaptic or thunar or medit for that matter.  I hold Geany in pretty high regard (due to plugins, templates and scripts I wrote for it) though it would be no issue to swap things out if you go that direction.  That said, as apprentice points out we all have our little favorites and that just goes with being a 'nix user. 

I really like what you have done so far though and the only deal breaker for me would be dropping SID (or if you decided you wanted to run Gnome or KDE).  Almost forgot.  I have become a huge umplayer fan thanks to Vsido.  Really a nice little tool to have around.

I think you want the command menu.  You can use it to set up scripts, commands, tasks, etc. similar to Custom Actions in Thunar but kind of on steroids.  I am no guru at but can give you an example.  I have a script I wrote that splits ape files.  Rather than go to the effort of writing a plug in I just right clicked on the menu I wanted it in, right clicked on the pull down menu and this gives you a very complete set of things you can do, easiest if you just follow along in SpaceFM.  For my example I created a new command, followed the steps on the screen and in the command line area made sure it explicitly pointed to the script I wanted to run.  There are tons and tons of hacks you can do and things you can create.  I would recommend you just start with a simple script that you have that has no parameters, play with it until it works and I think the light will come on.  Also read http://ignorantguru.github.io/spacefm/spacefm-manual-en.html#designmode-command-line if you haven't already.  If you have specific ?'s post them here and I would be happy to help as I can.  I will promise you that if you can think of it, you can probably get SpaceFM to do it.  If I get a moment I will see if I can get the paste here running and post back.

My previous OS used an UEFI boot and a gpt partition table but my mobo bios allows for both UEFI and legacy bios boot.  I really hadn't paid much attention to this until I went to install Vsido and it failed. 

It was failing at the step where the install was asking the user to select the swap partition.  This was even though I had set up a swap partition in gparted.  After repeatedly reformatting the partitions to have larger swap partitions it finally dawned on me that perhaps I needed to try another method.  What follows is what eventually worked for me.

This should work on any setup that offers UEFI and boot bios legacy.  If you are on a pure UEFI system you will have to create a UEFI mbr as http://semplice-linux.org/doku/semplice:users:uefi  (ps good luck with that I got it to work on one box but it required a lot of TLC, also see this thread http://vsido.org/index.php/topic,322.0.html )  But most people should be able to use the following.

Notice: This solution expects that the drive you are planning on using for the install has been properly backed up.  Following this procedure will delete all data on the device.  REPEAT this will remove all that is on the drive.  If you haven't backed it up do so before proceeding.

Issue:

During the install when it comes to setting up the disks the Vsido installer does not see the swap partition even though it has been created in gparted, the result being the install screen will keep sending you back to set up a proper swap partition.  In this case a proper swap partition is one that isn't part of a gpt partition table.

Solution:

Change to a msdos partition table. 

• To do so move through the install as normal until you get to the drive selection steps.
•   Select the drive you want to install Vsido on, gparted will open to that drive.  Now we just have to create a new partition table
• You should still be in gparted, select the drive that you want to use and highlight it. (It's probably already selected)
• Then select Device from the gparted menu pulldown and select "Create Partition Table"
• Gparted will prompt you with a "WARNING: This will ERASE ALL DATA on the ENTIRE DISK /dev/sdX" and "Default is to create an MS-DOS partition table" pop up.  This is exactly what we want.  In the lower corner select apply and the device will now show as a single drive unallocated in the gparted screen.

     At this point you no longer have a gpt partition table (which is what UEFI uses) and our problem is pretty much solved. 
The rest of the steps are as normal. 

• Select Partition and create your new root and swap, plus home and whatever other partitions you want and then when you have it like you want select Apply.
• Before closing gparted I always right click on my root partition and select "manage flags" and make sure that the system has a check in "boot" so it knows what that partition is for.
•   Then close gparted when you are satisfied.  The Live Installer will pop up and this time present you with the partition that you set as swap.  Just select it and press OK.
•   From there move on to complete the install.

I am not sure whether there are better ways to do this or not.  I did wrestle with the UEFI direct boot method but ran into two problems. 1. Any changes to grub at all resulted in the flashing cursor of death in the boot process. 2. The only way I could get it to boot was to write a script that I put in the UEFI mbr telling it where to look and what to do and when I started thinking about rewriting the bios to see that script automatically I realized what a black hole I was headed into.  But I did think about it .... that's crazy.

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.

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.