Hey Droechai

How about trying Sparklinux

They have stable, oldstable and oldoldstable images.

based on debian.

I use sparky on both my raspberry pi 3B’s.

Sparky 7 still supports i686 architecture (32 bit).

ISO MinimalGUI i686 (32 bit)

https://sparkylinux.org/iso-minimalgui-i686/

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=sparky

Thank you cravl

Much appreciated

He probbaly didn’t realise the committment involved.

Sitting in someones front garden, on the edge of a pond with a red pointy hat, with a fishing rod, for days on end, can be very tiring.

Then you got the cats pissing on you and the birds landing on your head.

Its no fun, I can tell you.

Its tough being a gnome

my raspberry pi and some arduino swag

I got used typing “sudo service --status-all”

then got used to typing “sudo systemctl list-unit-files --type=service”

now a new one to learn “sudo nitroctl list”

looks simpler

That can only be a good thing for my gnarly arthritis fingers.

Hey SteveTech

I dont use internal or external SSD’s.

It maybe because I am an old greybeard, but I prefer to suffer the slight loss in speed of a HDD, so I can dd/erase/wipe them and reuse them again and again.

Though I have been using “disktest” to erase SSD’s and HDD’s recently and it has been working great. Much faster than zeroing with dd /dev/zero, shred or wipe.

https://crates.io/crates/disktest

https://github.com/mbuesch/disktest

However, I digress, I had not heard of f2fs before.

Ive been having an intersting read online.

It appears that it is a default for android phones.

I do have a few SSD’s laying around from when I replace them with HDD’s. So I will test f2fs on one of those.

Thank you

Hey pitiable_sandwich540

Thank you

I dont know why I have been so focussed and stuck on exFAT for all these years.

It must have been something I read somewhere that led me to it.

from all the decent feedback i have gotten on here, ext4 seems the best way to go.

I should have known this being a linux user for over 20 years.

Hey IanTwenty

Thank you

ext4 seems the way to go for me

Thank you Eideen

I have never used any back up programs, Maybe I should consider it.

Both Borg and Pike-backup are in the offical repos (extra).

I shall check them out

Thank you nyan

I will look into the dmask and fmask mount options.

Definitely a no! in regards to attaching my drives to any windows machine.

The last windows machine I turned on was a Windows 95 machine when they first came out.

I thank god, That I wouldnt even know how to turn on a windows 10 or 11 surveillance machine.

Thank you Hack3900

Thank you SavvyWolf

This is particularly annoying when I have to upgrade my distro and all my files have to be moved to an external drive.

Unfortunately some of my files are up to 10Gb. thats why I stayed with exFAT.

I will certainly try Ext4 on my external drives.

Thank you Eugenia

Compressisng the files sounds a great idea.

I have in fact compressed a 12Gb file that I split into 10Gb chunks that still decompresses without problems.

This is particularly annoying when I have to upgrade my distro and all my files have to be moved to an external drive.

Unfortunately some of my files are up to 10Gb. thats why I stayed with exFAT.

I will certainly try Ext4 on my external drives. I will test it this week

Hey arsus5478

There are instructions to install with wget on the git page as you mention and you seem to have folowed that guide, but the easiest way is to use APT.

For debian I would add the PPA repo:

There are clear instruction on the git page to install from apt.

About half way down the page you will see APT.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Installation

APT

You can download and install yt-dlp for recent Ubuntu and other related Debian-based distributions by adding this PPA

Add ppa repo to apt

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tomtomtom/yt-dlp

Update package list

sudo apt update

Install yt-dlp

sudo apt install yt-dlp

Your system’s package manager will now automatically download the correct dependencies and keep the package updated with the rest of your system whenever you update:

Done

this is a good introduction to adding an external PPA repo to apt and getting to know debian

Hey Novocirab

Thank you

Thank you

I shall update the post to title to [Solved]

new user learning

Thank you Björn

I knew someone more technically gifted in the community would have a good answer as to why this happened.

Hey BCsven

We definitely do.

“Some people go their entire lives without hearing news that good” – Neo

I install a full MX-Linux distro on an old 32Gb usb drive.

Particularly helpful when family or friends have IT problems.

I install the latest downloaded distro on a usb with dd:

sudo fdisk -l

sudo dd if=MX-23.5_x64.iso of=/dev/sdX status=progress

The /dev/sdX could be sdb, sdc, sdd, or microsd /dev/nvme0n1

boot into the live distro F12,

fully update the live disk.

set it up as you would your new linux device. network manager, web browser, text editor, email, VPN, etc and any tools you want.

whatever you change here goes into your new usb distro settings

once complete, install and run bleachbit as user and as root to clear all the caches and install data.

install another blank usb into the laptop

Open MX-Linux tools to create a snapshot

select Snapshot.

select a different snapshot directory. use the blank usb you just inserted,

usually: /dev/sdb

rename the snapshot to a name of choice.

once the creation of the snapshot is complete, safely remove the usb drive and shut down the live distro.

boot into your daily driver.

Insert the usb drive with the MX-Linux snapshot, and transfer it to a new folder/directory.

insert the 32Gb usb. format it with gparted, fat32 is fine

open the folder/directory with the snapshot.iso

open a terminal

then install the snapshot onto the usb with dd.

sudo fdisk -l

sudo dd if=snapshot.iso of=/dev/sdX status=progress

The /dev/sdX could be sdb, sdc, sdd, or microsd /dev/nvme0n1

always double check with:

sudo fdisk -l

I am sure it will creep back up once the MX 25 has been released with Debian 13 on 9th August.

https://mxlinux.org/blog/changes-coming-with-mx-25/

Optional distro downloads for Systemd or sysVinit.

use Mx-Linux on my old T450 laptop.

works great for my needs.