.
Using MX-14.4 as a LiveUSB on 16 Gb Cruzer USB 3.0 Ultra Fit on
a Dell 1545 Inspiron Win7 computer with 2 cpus & 4 Gb ram.
MX-14's most remarkable feature in my estimation is its built-in
persistence and remastering capability; however it has many other
fine features. See http://www.mepiscommunity.org/features for a
description of all the new features in MX-14.4.
The specific MX-14.4 version I chose has a 32-bit i686 linux 3.14
pae mode kernel. My MX-14.4 set-up has 845 M squashfs compacted linuxfs,
75 M of ext4 rootfs and 48 M of ext4 homefs. This represents a full
rolling release update of all Debian, Xfce, LibreOffice, Iceweasel,
etc elements plus my own tweaks and comfort programs.
It boots to wifi online in 30 sec; shuts-down in only 6 sec.
I needed three work-arounds to enable my MX-14.4 to perform as I like.
Two are hold-overs from 14.3, which were discussed at length previously
on the MX forum. All are minor and inconsequential, once discovered and
adjusted-for.
One previously reported flaw, possibly unique to LiveUSB application
is an initial absence of a directory /var/tmp. Its absence makes the
apt-upgrade process break down due to an 'initramfs update' difficulty.
As in 14.3 an adequate work-around is to add /var/tmp via /etc/rc.local.
A second previously reported flaw, not of consequence to most MX users
apparently, is a missing helper program to display the actual choices
of a remastering exploration menu. As with 14.3, one helper that works
is rox-filer, easily added via Synaptic.
The third flaw is, for me anyway, unique to 14.4. This is an impediment
to the legacy boot process, that makes finding persistence files fail.
The work-around here is to add the cheat-code 'load=all'. I do this
once and add a 'custom boot' option to the usual boot menu choices.
It may be noted that I had no problem at all with booting a Win8 machine
with the new uefi boot option.
My thanks to BitJam and Anti' (principals in the MX world and active
on antiX & MX fora) for suggesting the work-arounds.
DELL PowerEdge R730XD 24x 2.5" Server Dual 750W Dual Heatsink - BareBones TESTED
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Supermicro 4U 36 Bay Storage Server 2.4Ghz 8-C 128GB 1x1280W Rails TrueNAS ZFS
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CSE-118 Supermicro 1U 3x GPU Server 2.6Ghz 20-C 128GB CX353A 2x1600W PSU Rails
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Dell PowerEdge R730 8 SFF 2x E5-2660 v4 28 Cores 128/256GB 0/3x 900GB 6Gbps H730
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Intel Xeon E5-2697A V4 2.6GHz CPU Processor 16-Core Socket LGA2011 SR2K1
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Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 2.4GHz 35MB 14-Core 120W LGA2011-3 SR2N7
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Intel Xeon Gold 6140 SR3AX 2.3GHz 18-Core Processor CPU
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Intel Xeon E5-2699v4 SR2JS 2.2GHz 22-Core 55MB 145W Server Processor CPU
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HP Workstation Z640 2x Xeon E5-2623V4 32GB Ram Dual 256GB SSD K420 Linux GA
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Rare WaterCooled HP Z800 Workstation Dual Xeon X5680 16GB RAM 120GB SSD Nvidia
$279.56