linux distributions

ZevenOS - Does it recapture the flavor of BeOS?

Michael Reed — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:28:22 +0000

BeOS was a much loved and highly advanced desktop operating system that ceased active development in 2001. ZevenOS is a Ubuntu 11.10 based system (with a bit of help from Xubuntu) that attempts to recapture some of the BeOS look and feel.

The GUI of ZevenOS is based on a custom theme for the Xfce DE. I have a little experience with BeOS and some of its clones, and I confirm that, from the outset, it does look quite like BeOS. Naturally, the most famous element of the BeOS user interface, the small yellow title bar, has been retained. As with the original BeOS, the dock is located in the top right hand side of the screen and expands vertically. You bring it to the front by touching the right hand corner of screen, and when clicked on, it pops up an application launcher.

ZevenOS recreates the BeOS dock.

ZevenOS comes with some software that has been specially written for it. Magi and Magi 2 are, respectively, system information and configuration tools that are unique to ZevenOS. Beyond that, the default application choice, like parent distro Xubuntu, tends towards lighter weight options such as Abiword and Gnumeric. Naturally, you can add any applications that you could add to any other Ubuntu system.

The custom settings and system info apps are quite impressive.

There is also another variation called ZevenOS-Neptune that uses Debian Testing with a more recent kernel and KDE4 as the front end.

When summing up, I'm a little bit torn. The cosmetic and user interface differences do evoke some of the feel of a mid-90s OS that looks like BeOS. Whether you like it or not will probably come down to your personal tastes. I've seen a lot of attempts to re-implement earlier operating systems come and go over the years, and one of the main problems was that the developers expended resources recreating components that already existed in the free software world, such as the kernel. It's admirable that ZevenOS tries to offer up some of the BeOS feel while reusing the Linux infrastructure wherever possible. Being a Linux distro also means that it has a complete set of well-maintained applications available to it.

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Linux Mint 12 Offers a Traditional Gnome Feel

Michael Reed — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:46:24 +0000

by Michael Reed

The recently released Linux Mint 12 offers a two pronged approach to supporting those who prefer the traditional Gnome desktop. Firstly, the Mint Gnome Shell Extensions (MGSE) transform Gnome 3 into something resembling Gnome 2. Secondly it ships with Mate, the Gnome 2.0 fork project.

The latest version of Mint channels Gnome 2.0 goodness via two different approaches: Firstly, Mint Gnome Shell Extensions add Gnome 2.0 features to the Gnome 3.0 shell. Secondly, Mint now ships with Mate, a maintenance fork of Gnome 2.0 that can co-exist with a Gnome 3.0 installation.

MGSE

The extensions enable some Gnome 2 features to exist on the Gnome 3 desktop. Sure enough, the end result is desktop that contains aspects of both desktops. However, this recreates the layout of a default Gnome 2 desktop and doesn't seem to have much scope for customization.

It's worth noting that although some have criticized the overall direction that Gnome 3 has taken so far, this custom feature has been made possible by extensions facility of Gnome 3. All of the extensions can be toggled on or off.

The main extensions are:

• Menu Extension - This adds something closer to the traditional Mint application launcher from previous versions. The icon is placed on the far left of the bottom bar.

• Media Player - Allows control of supported media players (such as Rhythmbox) from an icon on the top bar

• Monitor Status - Display settings.

• Bottom Panel Extension - Adds a traditional bottom panel to the desktop

• noa11y Extension - Hides the accessibility icon that is normally part of the top panel

• Alt Tab Extension - Traditional alt tab switcher. This allows you to switch between windows rather than applications.

• Notifications Extension - Adds system notifications to the top pannel

• Shutdown Extension - Restores the Gnome 2 shutdown options

• Window List Extension - This is the task list that sits on the bottom bar

Mate

Mate is a fork of Gnome 2, and it's selectable on the login page in Mint 12. This is more information about it on this Arch Linux wiki page and this forum thread.

A full summary of the new features on the Linux Mint website.

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CrunchBang 10 “Statler” refresh R20111125

Michael Reed — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:22:56 +0000

by Michael Reed

Although officially a version 10 refresh and still under the “Statler” moniker, the latest Crunchbang release constitutes some notable changes.

I first covered CrunchBang back in March. In brief, it's a lightweight desktop OS that uses Debian Stable 6.0 as its base. The biggest change in the latest refresh is that the developer has jettisoned the Xfce version in order to become a pure Openbox distro. I'm a fan of Xfce, but I welcome the decision of developer Philip Newborough aka corenominal. The truth is that there are other Xfce based distros to choose from such as my personal current favorite, Xubuntu. One of the biggest challenges for a smaller Linux distro is to carve a useful niche for itself, and if this helps him to hone the Openbox experience, all the better.

As before, when you first run a new installation of CrunchBang you are prompted to answer a series of questions about additional components such as the development tools and LibreOffice. By default, as ever, the theme is a dark one, but you can easily change this if it's not to your taste. I'm not going get into a drawn-out argument in the comments (see last time), but the window decorations have been changed, and I for one prefer the new design. Overall, the user interface feels fast and minimalist without feeling compromised. However, it isn't a clone of, say, Gnome, and I would advise anyone to have a play around with the Live CD before committing to an installation.

It's simple to enable compositing courtesy of either Xcompmgr or Cairo Composite Manager for fancy screen effects.

Other changes include:

• Firefox rather than Chrome
• LibreOffice rather than OpenOffice.org
• SLiM rather than GDM as the login manager.
• Programmer friendly Geany rather than Gedit
• Gigolo and Thunar are set up and ready to go and this means that network resources are can be easily browsed from the GUI.

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Tiny Core 4.0 Put Together Your Own Desktop

Michael Reed — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:02:54 +0000

by Michael Reed

The traditions of small size and speedy operation that were established in previous versions of this distro have been upheld in the new release, and believe it or not, improved upon. I’m not exaggerating when I say that you could be staring at a fully loaded desktop ten seconds after you boot from the 12MB ISO image.

We’ve covered Tiny Core a couple of times in the past, and in use, this new version runs along much the same lines. As it's so similar to previous versions in concept and execution, I'm just going to give an overview of what's changed rather than a full distro review. Check out the previous coverage if you've not encountered Tiny Core before.

As before, you begin with a largely blank desktop and then add applications via the package manager. The end result is almost a kiosk style Linux desktop that is simple to use, conservative on the resource usage and super fast. Although it looks very similar to older versions, 4.0 been updated under the hood. For example, it now includes version 3.0.3 of the Linux kernel and Firefox 7.

A nice fresh desktop. Time to start cluttering it up...

The package manager has been improved and can now search based on partial names, and you can also search for keywords associated with packages. This makes it possible to, for example, find all of the web browsers on the system.

One thing that disappoints me about Tiny Core 4.0 is that the devs have made the decision to remove the installer from the ISO image. The reason given on the forum was that some files had to be pulled from the repository before an installation could proceed anyway. Unfortunately this means that you have to have some past experience with Tiny Core in order to know how to go about installing it. It doesn’t help that the instructions on the website have now fallen out of date.

tip: Incidentally, the installer can be located using the package manager (AppBrowser). The package is called “tc-installer”. Once that is installed, the instructions from the website can be followed.

Time for a fork?

As with previous versions of Tiny Core, I find myself being dragged in two different directions when trying to assess it. On the one hand, I love the underlying technology and the user interface. On the other, I feel that the potential of this system, to create slick, Linux-powered desktop appliances, just isn’t the primary focus of the developers. Sure, you can use it that way, but the difficulty of accomplishing it just doesn’t scream “turnkey”.

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The Tails Project's The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails)

James Gray — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 15:29:22 +0000

by James Gray

Making delirious dictators worldwide quake in their boots, the Tails Project recently announced numerous improvements to its anonymity-obsessed Linux distro, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, aka Tails. Now in version 0.7, Tails is the spiritual successor of the well-known Incognito Live System and is developed with the support of the Tor Project, an onion routing project originally developed to protect US military communications. The live distro, which runs on any PC powerful enough to run Windows XP, is based on Debian Live and runs directly from CD and/or USB Flash memory. No trace is left after using Tails, thanks to many features, such as independent operation of all software and all hardware drivers from the PC's operating system, no permanent data storage and all the channeling of all Internet connections through the Tor anonymization network. "With Tails", say the distro developers, "we provide a tongue and a pen protected by state-of-the-art cryptography to guarantee...basic human rights and allow journalists worldwide to work and communicate freely and without fear of reprisal." The journalists of these pages humbly salute the valiant effort.

https://tails.boum.org

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andLinux: Seamlessly Run Linux Applications on Windows

Michael Reed — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

andLinux is a Linux distro with a difference. It’s based on a port of the the Linux kernel to Windows coupled with an X server and other software. In short, it allows you to run Linux software seamlessly on the Windows desktop without recompiling it or using a virtual machine.

For this overview, I choose the minimal/Xfce edition which comes in the form of a 200MB Windows .exe file. The kernel used is from the coLinux project. Apart from that, the bulk of the rest of the system consists of Ubuntu 9.04 coupled with the Xming X server and the PulseAudio audio system. File access is split into three parts: the root partition is stored in a .vdi file and files on the Windows partition can be accessed via either the coLinux filesystem or the Samba file sharing system. Make sure that filesharing is enabled on the Windows machine if you want to use it, by default, it isn't. The installation contains a quite a few options, but I found that I was able to accept all of the defaults.

Installation complete, I was keen to start experiment with this strange system.

During the setup, I had chosen to launch Linux applications by using the small icon in the control panel area of the Windows task bar. By default, this contains icons to launch only the file manager (Thunar), the PulseAudio sound mixer, a terminal, a text editor and the Synaptic package manager. These applications load up remarkable quickly, and their execution speed is excellent. It should be, as they are not running through any layer of emulation or virtualization; they are running natively on the Windows desktop thanks to the X server and the Linux kernel.

It's a weird feeling, using Synaptic on the Windows XP desktop. It ran very well.

It was a slightly surreal experience to watch package management front end Synaptic popping onto the Windows desktop. In operation it worked just like it would on any other Linux distribution. One problem that you’ll run into here is that, as this version of andLinux is based on Ubuntu 9.04, the old Canonical repository is no longer active. However, this problem can be overcome, to an extent, by altering /etc/apt/sources.list to point it to the old release repository [see this forum post]. A full update using the latest package versions in that repository worked as expected.

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Distro Spotlight: Bodhi Linux

Michael Reed — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:34:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

Small, fast, light and easy to customize - we’ve heard it all before - but I’d say that Bodhi Linux has enough individual character to warrant consideration.

Under the hood, Bodhi is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I consider this to be a point in its favor as I am wary of smaller distros that are not connected to a bigger, well supported distro. Bodhi comes with only a few applications, and personally, I like this way of doing things. Give me a web browser, a package manager and a few of the other basic tools and I’ll add things as I need them.

Bodhi uses the Enlightenment window manager. When you log in from live media you are presented with a menu that allows you to choose between a composited or software rendered desktop and a few different themes and layouts. Having carried out a hard disk installation, the first log in repeats the procedure, along with a few other last minute, mostly cosmetic options.

As an aside, does anyone else find it ironic that Enlightenment has transformed from the standard bearer for Linux-powered eye-candy to a window manager favored by those who demand responsiveness and minimalism?

I have to confess that it had been a long time since I last had a play with Enlightenment, and I liked what I saw. Now I’m going to get all subjective, but it offers really great “feel” in terms of responsiveness while looking great and a just a little bit flashy.

The netbook layout.

If I say that I haven’t written a great deal about Bodhi because there isn’t a huge amount to say, don’t take it the wrong way. It doesn’t offer a revolutionary new take on how a Linux distro should work, and it doesn’t try to. Instead, it offers an Enightenment desktop upon a basic Ubuntu base along with a few basic tools to get started.

One misgiving I have about the setup is that it’s based on the (still maintained and patched) Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release. On the plus side, a long term support release means that full system upgrades have to be carried out less often and it should constitute a rock solid base by now. However, it also means that you are limited, in terms of additional software, to whatever would work on an Ubuntu 10.04 setup.

[Update/correction: Looks like I made an oversight here. It seems that Bodhi has its own repositories and does some serious backporting. Note that this won't give you access to all of the up to date software that a more modern base would.

to quote user meanpt:

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Linux Distro: Tails - You Can Never Be Too Paranoid

Michael Reed — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

Tails is a live media Linux distro designed boot into a highly secure desktop environment. You may remember that we looked at a US government distro with similar aims a few months ago, but Tails is different because it is aimed at the privacy conscious “normal user” rather than government workers.

Tails takes the form of a bootable live image that can be used from a CD ROM, a USB stick or via a network boot. Once booted, it executes from RAM, taking care not to make use of a swap partition. The desktop is Gnome 2.0 and the applications are a fairly standard selection. The web browser is an old, but usable, version of Iceweasel 3.5 (Debian Firefox). There are other applications to handle graphics work, audio editing, media playback, text editing, instant messaging and a email client - basically, everything you need when you’re on the run from enemy agents. Extra software can be added via the Synaptic package manager which pulls directly from the Debian repositories. So far, so similar to most other live desktop distros. Security and limited footprint on the the host machine are the areas in which the distro differs from the run of the mill.

All interactions with the Internet are passed through Tor an anonymization system. Using Tor, Tails pipes all Internet traffic emanating from your computer through a constantly shifting set of relays that are operated by a network of volunteers. Consequently, it’s then difficult for anyone to monitor your activity on the web or for web hosts to pinpoint your location. In short, your web activities are anonymous. It’s hardly an exhaustive test, but sure enough, when I visited Google News, it presumed that was located in a different country after each reboot.

The desktop itself is pretty standard fare.

The supplied version of Iceweasel comes with an extension to enable end to end encryption (HTTPS) whenever possible in order to further increase security and another one to switch Tor on and off. Many of the applications that are supplied have been tweaked in this way, to improve security. Tails also wipes the contents of RAM on shutdown, and it has a little onscreen keyboard to bypass hardware key loggers. Note that it isn't loaded down with security tools, such as those for penetration testing, although such tools can be added via the package manager. The aim of the distribution is clearly to provide a secure client and tools rather than to provide a ready-made platform for hacking.

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Spotlight On Linux: wattOS

Michael Reed — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

So many computers head for landfill when they are still able to carry out useful work. However, some organizations and individuals do what they can to put these machines into the hands of people who can use them. Naturally, this is an ideal application for Linux, and having had a quick look at it, I suspect that wattOS would make a good choice for refurbishing older computers.
[Update: Full developer interview on site. ]

wattOS is derived from the current version of Ubuntu, giving it an advantage when it comes to hardware support. Another good thing about being tied to one of the big distributions is that there's less of a chance of being stuck for a application that you need.

It runs as a LiveCD and the hard disk installer is invoked by double clicking on the install icon on the backdrop. The installer itself is from the Ubuntu mold in that user interaction is limited to a few questions at the very beginning. Helpfully, it begins with a prompt to enable the downloading of updates while installing and also the installation of media codecs.

The installation itself is uneventful, and after a reboot, an LXDE desktop pops up. This gives a familiar desktop layout, complete with a start bar, that should be familiar to anyone who's used a computer in the last ten or fifteen years. As you might imagine, things are pretty snappy, speed-wise, thanks to LXDE's focus on efficient use of hardware resources.

The application list strikes the right balance between being resource friendly and well-featured. AbiWord and Gnumeric from the Gnome Office Suite are present instead of the the more common heavyweight Open/LibreOffice, and I'm glad to see them here as they are great applications in their own right. The music player is Foobnix, a library based application. There are also applications for photo editing, torrent downloading, video playback and optical disk burning. The utility suite includes a tool for configuring a wireless network, setting the screen resolution and setting up a printer. The web browser is Firefox, and I'm left wondering if they could have chosen something stripped down that still uses the Gecko engine, or perhaps even Chrome, just to get a bit more performance out of older machines.

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Spotlight On Linux: CrunchBang

Michael Reed — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

CrunchBang is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Debian. It comes in OpenBox and XFCE editions, and a very dark visual theme. It's the OpenBox version that I took a look at.

Being based on Debian is a point is its favor as it means that standard trouble shooting and standard packages work on the system. The documentation on the website assures that CrunchBang is, essentially, a standard Debian installation with a few additional custom packages.

Installation takes a familiar path. It's a usable system when booted from the CD image, and hard disk installation is invoked by running a program from the desktop.

So far, so much the same. So, in what ways does CrunchBang differ from other distros?

When CrunchBang is booted for the first time, the user is presented with an interactive post installation script comprising of 15 questions. These prompts allow the user to further refine and specialize the installation. They allow for the optional installation of various applications such as Open Office, suites of tools such as build tools and conveniences such as popular media codecs and the Sun Java runtime. One option is to install a specialized kernel which is apparently optimized for desktop use. If selected rather than skipped, each installation option takes between a few seconds and several minutes to complete.

The desktop itself has a dark theme consisting of black, white and gray but this can, of course, be changed. On the backdrop there is a system information panel showing free memory and CPU usage amongst other data. Below this area is a reminder of keyboard shortcuts. For example, Windows key + W launches the web browser.

I'd not used OpenBox before, and I can confirm that is has a minimalist appearance along and feels responsive and fast. As standard, the window controls use a series of Braille-like dotted icons. These look cool, but it's impossible to guess the function of each at first glance. The task switcher sits on the bottom of the screen and features a standard status area with a clock. The task switcher is icon-based and also includes a virtual desktop switcher in quite a nice arrangement, although it doesn't automatically stay on top windows, which will perturb some. The application launch menu and system menu is the sort that is invoked by right clicking on on either the backdrop or the task switcher.

Any guesses as to what these dots mean?

The taskbar is also a pager. A nice arrangement.

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