Sparky is my new Puppy!

[linuxdawg]

I just discovered Sparky Linux several days ago, and I am very pleased with it: most impressive, and snappy on my old X60s Thinkpad (using xfce desktop)! Some glitches, but they're minor and I can easily deal with that. I would've used a Puppy distro, except it doesn't do dual monitors, and Sparky does. I was running Linux Mint 19.2 on it, and it ran just fine...however, I wanted to try out  a slmmer distro. Here are some glitches I've stumbled upon:

Long password that can't be changed to a short one: I'm the only one using it, so I prefer my password to be just 4 characters. When I attempted to change my password to one that short, Sparky wouldn't let me.

Lost my start menu. So now I can't add any more programs to the panel. I added the applications menu to the panel, but that leaves some things to be desired, such as a favorites list, and search.

Screensaver still loaded, even though I disabled it in the settings: since I don't have much RAM, I like to have the screensaver disabled. But even though I did that, the screensaver kicked in anyway, and froze the system. Well, not quite froze it, but turned everything so sluggish as to be unusable. So I uninstalled xscreensaver.

Lowered my screen resolution down two notches, and everything runs fine again: my second monitor is almost twice the size of my thinkpad's. Running it at the highest resolution slowed things down considerably. Lowering the resolution by three notches took care of that. Plus, I no longer need to magnify parts of the screen in order to see its contents clearly, especially text. With Mint 20, I could use the highest resolution without a hitch, and ALT-mousescroll to enlarge the screen.

I just installed luckybackup from APTus, but when I load it, it asks for root password...but nothing happens after that.

Mouse cursor size doesn't stick upon reboot: I have to go into the mouse settings to change it back to my preferred size. Don't know if this is a new glitch, since Sparky just updated today.

Otherwise, Sparky runs seamlessly. Makes a great backup system to my not-quite-so-old X230 Thinkpad, which dual boots Windows 10 and Linux Mint 20. Sparky is an excellent distro for ancient systems. I really don't miss my X230 when I'm running Sparky, it just handles everything so well. Thank you immensely, to the creator(s) of this distro. Long live 32 bit!

[bin]

Lost my start menu. So now I can't add any more programs to the panel. I added the applications menu to the panel, but that leaves some things to be desired, such as a favorites list, and search.

.....Long live 32 bit!

Hi

It sounds like you've lost the Whisker menu. Right click on panel>add new items>whisker menu should do it. Or Applications Menu if you prfer old school xfce like wot I do.

[linuxdawg]

No whisker menu listed in the panel "add items" section. As I already stated in my OP, I did add "applications" as a less desired solution. Curious that it has the whisker logo, though. Thanks!

[lami07]

xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin provides whisker menu on Debian. Make sure you have it installed on your system.

[linuxdawg]

xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin provides whisker menu on Debian. Make sure you have it installed on your system.

Excellent! Installed via Synaptics, now it's an option in the panel. Thanks! Luckybackup now works, too.