Vuu-do / Blog: Recent posts

8-17-2025

New version 1.0-7 of the Vuu-do App Info program uploaded. Added a button to re-scan the system and re-build
the database after adding new apps. This app is definitely growing on me, I had added some programs a couple weeks ago
that I forgot about, lol, mostly just testing new things. re-discovered them today while updating the VAI database. ;)

8-12-2025

Pulled the mate-mini, some flaws in it, and some flaws in my logic and testing.
Nothing catastrophic, I made some incorrect assumptions about sound and didn't test fully.

I was going to update it as it's been a while, and found my mistake and some behavior in
Mate that I didn't know about and don't like. Maintaining all these things is a lot for a one-man-show,
so i'm going to just focus on Openbox going forward, at least for Vuu-do.

8-11-2025

Newest version, this is updated to today and post-excalibur-release. Some 100+
updates and a new kernel. I am still listing this in Testing as it is non-official
and probably still needs lots of testing. Things to keep in mind:

This is not an official Devuan release, nor a Vuu-do release. This is a user re-spin
of Devuan 6 (excalibur), updated completely as of 8/11/2025 with the Mate desktop environment.... read more

8-11-2025

New versions of the OB Z's uploaded and some app updates.
EDIT: Forgot to mention I added Metaview to the max. Metaview is a new right-click context menu option for
audio/video files that offers to show you the metadata in those files using ffprobe and exiftool.

Updates of some important packages including the usual Chromium update. I have added the Vuu-do Manual app
that takes the place of all the manual stuff that was previously shoved into the release notes! It has an updated Vuu-do App Info
as well and an updated ScrotShot too. Devuan and Debian are moving to the next version very soon, and this version of Devuan
(Daedalus) will move to old-stable from current stable. Support will continue for many years though, and i'll personally be
using it myself for a long time to come, it is now very mature and wonderfully stable. I will make a Vuu-do 6 at some point,
but with so many changes in the new versions of Devuan and Debian, i'll be waiting a while until it settles down some, I expect
from the get-go it will have some issues to be worked out.

7-31-2025

Had a bug in the third option that left scrot and scrotshot running in the background after
it finished with the shot. Fixed! (And tested for a week before I uploaded it). ;)

7-22-2025

vai12_1.0-6_amd64.deb

I am constantly amazed at my capability to blithely ignore things that are right in my face.
The Vuu-do App Info app works great, but for some reason I had the scraper script set to
alphabetize by package name rather then the Name field in the .desktops, so the order was
off in the gui. Have fixed the script and now all apps should display in proper order from A-Z.

7-18-2025

New version 5 for the VAI app, a rename of the package itself to avoid confusion with some other apps out there,
and I expanded the search function to include descriptions in addition to title. And squashed one tiny bug that
didn't affect function and didn't even manifest in any way, just a tiny bit of CSS that didn't need to be in there.

7-13-2025

new version, over 300 updates, ready for testing! Passwords:
User = devuan, password= devuan
Root = root
Happy testing!

7-13-2025

The apps mentioned in my last post that are in the new versions of the OB-z's, are now available
as .debs in the Miscellaneous/apps/ section! Hope folks enjoy them, they were a lot of work for
this ol' cowboy. ;)

~greenjeans

7-12-2005

Lots of updates in important packages, new kernel too. Removed some gnome apps, disk-utility, chess, and mahjongg.
replaced the disk utility with Fatstick that works hand-in-hand after using Mintstick to create a liveUSB, Fatstick will
create a secondary data partition in FAT32 on the stick and label it "DATA". Installed a different mahjongg game and a solitaire game.

Also included some more new apps i've been working on, Vuu-do App Info which gives simple info about installed applications,
Alsatune which is a complete GUI frontend to control the alsa mixer and EQ and also allows for saving EQ pre-sets, and
ScrotShot which is a GUI for the scrot screenshot utility and takes the place of the 3 previous menu entries, the 3 choices are;
Desktop (entire)
Desktop (5 second delay)
Select area with the mouse
Note that the last option has two functions, when you select it and your cursor changes to a crosshair, you can left-click
and hold to draw a selection, or if you just want to grab a specific window you can just left-click once on the window itself.... read more

7-9-2025

No bugs, just moved some files around to comply with Debian's FHS policy,
added a readme in /usr/share/vai with some info, and cleaned up some superfluous code
in the postisnt script in the .deb package. Looking great!

7-8-2025

Almost ready to upload pending some further testing, this is AlsaTune! A GUI app to control the alsa mixer and EQ, with a function to create and save EQ pre-sets. No Pulse, no Pipe, just good ol' ALSA. For the hardcore alsa-purists like me. Vuu-do runs pure alsa for sound, with terminal versions of the EQ and mixer, this puts them together in a simple and easy to use GUI using the existing backend.... read more

EDIT 7-7-2025: Pic added to this post! Version 3 created, this fixes a bug I found that was throwing some
leftover de-bugging content into ~/.xsession-errors, bloating it up with some content
that didn't need to be in there, and also confusing my text-editor (Pluma) into thinking
the file was binary due to some special characters that got thrown in there. I also added
a window icon to the GUI to match the menu entry and other dialogs, and changed the
formatting of the description to make it read and render better, will upload here in a few.... read more

6-30-2025

Vuu-do App Info
This app is for viewing info about installed applications on your system. It
scrapes your file system for applications, their description, and icon. It includes
a nice search function. This is mainly a simple niche app for new Linux users to
quickly get oriented to apps that may be new to them. Although i've made a lot of
scripts and program-lets and use them in Vuu-do, this is the first standalone app
with a real GUI that i've made and packaged. ... read more

5-16-2025

New versions of the ob-max and mini, updated packages and a lot of work. Added
support for flac to the max, added support for thumbnailing, caching, and viewing
JPEG-XL (.jxl) image files to both with some updated packages from the libjxl
author on github, these are much newer than the old libjxl that's in daedalus,
but still made specifically for this version. Can't add them to the right-click
image re-sizing and rotating scripts as the version 6 of Imagemagick that's onboard
doesn't support the format, that will come in version 7 (excalibur-trixie).... read more

5-09-2025

A number of package upgrades including Chromium and network-manager and more. I
changed up some colors to better match the theme, mainly the panel background to
bring all versions up to date with the same colors. Fixed some late-night fat-fingering
I did when upgrading some of the extensions for PcmanFM, and added support for the
archive manager (engrampa) to extract .rar archives. And some general housekeeping,
deleted some superfluous things and fixed a duplicate menu entry.... read more

5-05-2025

Nice new Mate mini uploaded, this updates Mate to the new artwork, and fixes a lot
of minor issues, a locale problem and some theme issues plus a lot more.

Mate still has some issues specifically in Caja to do with the newer glib package, it doesn't
affect function but does throw up some errors in xsession-errors, these I think are fixed
in the next version available in Excalibur, at some point i'll see about back-porting the newer
version into 5.03. This is a nice mini, even a little smaller than the last one.... read more

5-03-2025

New Openbox versions of Vuu-do uploaded, Just some package updates, a new kernel,
more cosmetic fixes in several programs, and an upgraded thumbnail-cacher script that
adds parallel-processing of thumbnails, got a nice 35% boost in speed from that, also has
some better error handling and optimization. In practice this works great, I can zip through
folders with tons of images and videos now with no long wait times. Am starting to work
towards getting the underlying issue with PcmanFM fixed, trying to track down what went
wrong in the source code so I can submit a better bug report and hopefully get it dealt with.... read more

4-27-2025

Work continues on the thumbnail-cacher, been at it a couple days now and have since
added support for .xcf files which is GIMP's native format it saves in. This was a lot harder
than it sounds, turns out the only way to do it, is to use gimp itself running in the background
in non-interactive mode, so while thumbnailing of non-xcf files is lightning fast, generating
them for .xcf files is much slower. But in practice running it once at boot time only thumbnails/caches
files that don't already have one, so you never really notice. ... read more

4-25-2025

Like the title says, new Devuan 6 testing iso uploaded, some 124 updates including
a new kernel, but the biggest update was upgraded Caja packages that fixed the previous
version's .xsession-errors bug. It's working great again. Many thanks to the folks at Mate
and the maintainers for pushing those fixes through lickety-split!

Again, this is testing, so there are likely more bugs to be found, that's what this iso is for.
And remember, this is NOT an official Devuan iso, it's a user snapshot of the current state
of Excalibur with a few packages I threw in extra for convenience.... read more

4-22-2025

Tons of tiny fixes, the theme change left some things undone. Added a lot of bug
and error fixes plus updated functionality quite a bit, support is extended for
newer image formats, and the biggest change is the addition of the thumbnail-cacher
script which assists PcmanFM in creating and caching thumbnails properly. This has
greatly speeded up image-heavy folder loading. Check the menu for the entry to
update the cache during sesssion if you add a lot of images or video.... read more

Update 4-18-2025 Ob-mini-z uploaded now too.
Update 4-16-2025

Major updates to artwork, all new original stuff, wallpaper & login background,
grub splash, lock screen, user avatar etc. Lots of package updates including a new
kernel and security updates. New menu entry to configure keyboard and much nicer
gui for that and also for changing tzdata via right-click on the panel clock, and
many other small tweaks. Ob-max is first up, will get a new mini up here soon.... read more

4-15-2025

Mostly just some regular and security updates, plus a new kernel and some further
tweaking and small fixes. Updating all 5.03's this week, Mate went last in the last update
cycle, so it gets done first this time.

Update 4-13-2025: The new caja package is now in sid (unstable) along with some of the
other dependencies, really awesome work by the Debian-Mate team, big thanks to them!
Still is going to take a while, but i'll be keeping an eye out and when they hit testing i'll be
happily squashing up a new version to try out.

Update 4-12-2025: Bug report filed and Debian responded, the 1.26.4 caja package has
the bug fixed, and is in the pipeline to be added to the Debian repo, hopefully sooner than later.... read more

4-10-2025

Updated: 4-10-2025 , over 400 updates overall including some new packages. Still
getting some error messages during boot, still have an Alsa issue with 90-alsa-restore.rules,
the usual wdat_wdt error, and a long pause of 25 seconds right after:
"Waiting for /dev to be fully populated...". And some of that is actually the alsa
error repeating again as there's some problem with the file, you can actually make
it stop by replacing that file with the one from daedalus if I remember correctly.... read more