 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 605, 13 April 2015 |
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Welcome to this year's 15th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Open source distributions are constantly evolving and improving and we often do not think about the work involved or the people who put our operating systems together. This week we talk a bit about code, tools for collaboration and the people who create our operating systems. In our Questions and Answers column we discuss the closing of Google Code and why the free collaboration service is being discontinued. In our Ask-A-Leader column debut we hear from Vince Pooley, the man behind the Chapeau distribution, as he talks about how Chapeau came about and the work which goes into making a distribution. Our main feature this week is a review of SuperX, a project which combines Ubuntu packages with the KDE desktop. In our News section this week we discuss work being done on DragonFly BSD's advanced HAMMER2 file system, new features coming to openSUSE and the recent trouble Manjaro had with their website security certificate. Plus we celebrate the arrival of version 4.0 of the Linux kernel. In our Torrent Corner we share the open source torrents we are seeding and then we cover the distributions released last week. Plus we welcome Bella OS as the most recent addition to our distribution database. We wish you all a terrific week and happy reading!
Content:
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Exploring SuperX 3.0
The SuperX distribution began as a one-person project and was first put together by a developer in India. However, the distribution grew and is now maintained by Libresoft Technology. The latest release of SuperX, version 3.0 "Grace", offers users the KDE 4 desktop and ships with a number of features designed to make the desktop operating system more responsive. As the project's website states, "Grace gives more priority to application responsiveness; you will feel it right from the start -- a fast, smooth, responsive system. Grace, by default, compresses unused memory pages within RAM rather than swapping out to the swap partition, making it responsive even when the system memory is low. Commonly used applications are preloaded and cached in memory for faster start-up of your favourite applications." SuperX provides users with multimedia support out of the box and a useful collection of desktop applications.
Version 3.0 of SuperX can be downloaded as a 1.6GB ISO file. There are two builds available, one for 32-bit and another for 64-bit machines. Booting from the live media brings up the KDE desktop environment. The desktop's wallpaper is soft blue. On the desktop we find a single icon for launching the distribution's system installer. At the bottom of the screen we find the application menu, task switcher and system tray. Clicking the application menu button brings up a full screen application menu with large, colourful icons. I want to talk about the application menu more, but first let's briefly talk about SuperX's system installer.
The SuperX system installer is a graphical application which appears to be borrowed from the Kubuntu project. The installer has a nice, friendly interface that is easy to navigate. We are first shown the distribution's license agreement. From there we are guided through selecting our preferred language, partitioning the computer's hard drive, selecting our time zone from a map of the world and confirming our keyboard's layout. We conclude by creating a user account for ourselves and then we wait while the installer copies its files to our computer's drive and configures the operating system. The process is fairly quick and I especially like how the partition manager is set up. Manual partitioning is quite straight forward and there is an automated partitioning option for people who want to let the installer decide what partition layout will work best.
SuperX 3.0 -- Visiting the SuperX website
(full image size: 283kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
When we boot into our new copy of SuperX we are brought to a graphical login screen. Signing into the account we created during the installation process brings us back to the KDE 4.13 desktop. I experimented with running SuperX in two test environments, a VirtualBox virtual machine and a desktop computer. When I was running the distribution on physical hardware everything worked as expected. My display was set to my monitor's maximum resolution, networking and sound worked automatically and the desktop was very responsive. When I ran SuperX in a VirtualBox virtual machine the experience was similar. Once again the distribution performed quickly and everything worked, but my screen was set to a very low resolution (640x480 pixels). Once I had installed the VirtualBox guest packages from SuperX's software repositories I was able to visit the distribution's control centre and increase my desktop's resolution. In both environments the distribution required approximately 370MB of memory to log into the KDE desktop.
Earlier I mentioned SuperX offers users a full screen application menu with large icons. This menu is divided into three screens or tabs. The first tab displays commonly used applications and documents we have accessed recently. We can add or remove program launchers from this first screen by right-clicking on them. There is also a button to wipe our document history if we wish to unclutter the screen. The second tab displays all available desktop applications installed on the operating system. Applications are separated into categories, making it easier to find what we need. The third tab provides us with shutdown, reboot and logoff options. In the upper-right corner of the menu we find a search box we can use to locate applications by their name or description.
SuperX 3.0 -- The Home tab of the application menu
(full image size: 125kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
One aspect of the application menu I appreciate is that programs are usually labelled based on what they do rather than their official name. For example, LibreOffice's Writer program is labelled "Word Processor". The GNU Image Manipulation Program is simply called "Image Editor". This approach to naming menu entries is especially beneficial for KDE applications since KDE program names tend to be spelled with extra "k"s. For instance the Okular document viewer is labelled "PDF Viewer" and Kamerka is simply called "Webcam".
After using SuperX for a while I realized the system had not notified me of any available security updates. I found the Software Updates program in the application menu and launched it. The update manager displays a list of software upgrades available in the project's repositories. Each new package is listed with its name and size. We can check which items we want to install and then the update manager goes to work. The first day I ran SuperX there were several updates (I did not get an exact count) and these updated packages totalled 41MB in size. The Software Updates application downloaded and installed all available upgrades without any problem.
SuperX 3.0 -- The App Center and desktop settings panel
(full image size: 396kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
On the subject of package management, SuperX provides us with two graphical package managers. The first one is labelled "SuperX Apps Center" and appears to be a re-branded copy of Linux Mint's mintInstall. The Apps Center shows us categories of software where categories and individual applications are represented by large, colourful icons. Each application is listed with the program's name, an icon, a brief description and user rating. Clicking on an application brings up a full page description with a screen shot and reviews supplied by other users. We can install or remove an application with the click of a button. The App Center performs its actions in the background, leaving us to browse for more software while it works. The second package manager is called Muon. This package manager deals with individual packages rather than just desktop applications. Muon displays a simple list of packages in alphabetical order. We can filter items based on categories. To install or remove an application we right-click on the package. The Muon package manager processes its actions in batches, locking the program's interface while it works. I noticed Muon reported there were 71,599 packages available in the SuperX repositories, a surprisingly large number. The distribution maintains its own package repositories with most packages being pulled from SuperX servers. A few packages are provided by VideoLAN.org servers.
The distribution ships with a good deal of desktop software. Looking through the application menu we find the Firefox and Chromium web browsers. Flash is installed for us and works in both web browsers. SuperX also ships with the Thunderbird e-mail client, the Filezilla file transfer program, Telegram and the Konversation IRC client. KTorrent is available for downloading and sharing torrents. SuperX provides users with the VLC multimedia player, the OpenShot video editor, the K3b disc burning software and Sound Recorder. The Musique audio player is available as is the Minitube YouTube client. The distribution ships with multimedia codecs installed, allowing us to play a wide range of media files. The LibreOffice productivity suite is provided along with the Okular document viewer and the Gwenview image viewer. A few games ship with SuperX. Users are given the GNU Image Manipulation Program, the KolourPaint drawing application, an archive manager, text editor and calculator. The distribution provides us with a hardware information browser, the KDE System Settings panel (labelled Control Panel in the application menu) and the KDE Partition Manager. The KGpg application allows us to work with security keys and encryption. To help us get on-line SuperX offers Network Manager and a USB modem/3G manager. In the background we find Java, the GNU Compiler Collection and the Linux kernel, version 3.13.
SuperX 3.0 -- Watching videos with Minitube
(full image size: 446kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
The SuperX distribution worked well for me. The system was always responsive and the applications provided worked as expected. I was especially happy to find the dial-up networking application with support for 3G modems in the application menu. Sometimes connectivity is hard to come by and it is nice when distributions include plenty of options to help us access the Internet.
Perhaps the only aspect of SuperX I did not like was of minor concern. I found I was able to add different application menus to the KDE panel which offered more traditional approaches to launching programs. However, I was unable to remove the SuperX menu button from the panel. It's not a serious issue as there is a lot of space on the panel, but I found it interesting I could add/remove other launch buttons, but not the default one. Perhaps there is done as a safety measure to prevent people from disabling the application menu by accident.
Conclusions
I enjoyed my time with SuperX. The distribution performs quickly, the application menu is easy to navigate and the system installer is very friendly. The operating system ships with two friendly package managers (one for desktop software and one for lower-level package operations) and we have multimedia support out of the box. All of my hardware was handled properly and the KDE desktop is wonderfully flexible.
In the past I have sometimes found KDE could be distracting, showing the user lots of notifications. SuperX seems to have done away with most notifications and the desktop remains pleasantly calm. Actually, I might have preferred it if SuperX had been more aggressive in letting me know when software updates were available, but checking for updates manually is easy as the Software Updates application is present in the Home menu.
I did not find any special features that set SuperX apart from other polished KDE distributions, but I do feel SuperX is indeed very polished. Working with this operating system was a smooth and trouble-free experience. I definitely think people who try this distribution will enjoy it.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications:
- Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU
- Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive
- Memory: 6GB of RAM
- Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card
- Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Details on DragonFly BSD's HAMMER2 file system, new features in openSUSE's Tumbleweed, Manjaro's security certificate expired and Linux reaches 4.0
DragonFly BSD is mostly known for its performance enhancing design and its HAMMER file system. The latter has been gaining attention recently, especially with HAMMER version 2 under development. The HAMMER2 design document has been updated and presents readers with a list of changes and improvements over the original HAMMER design. Some of the more interesting advancements coming to HAMMER2 include writing to file system snapshots (the original HAMMER file system used read-only snapshots), a low memory footprint, support for multiple compression algorithms, deduplication, whole disk encryption and support for massively large file systems. "A single physical disk from H2's point of view can be sized up to 2^56 which is 64 Petabytes, and the total file system size can be up to 16 Exabytes." Further details on the design of HAMMER2 and how it differs from the original HAMMER file system can be found in the design document.
* * * * *
The openSUSE developers continue to roll out new and appealing features to the Tumbleweed rolling release repository. In a blog post the team unveiled plans to include Appstream application data in their package manager. They also revealed an upgrade of the Firefox package to version 37 will be coming soon. "What is really cool about this snapshot is Appstream meta-data being published in Tumbleweed repos. On the client side, GNOME Software uses that information to display software in a more user friendly way and the availability of this meta-data is likely to influence other developments and projects. Everyone is encouraged to fix packages that provide no or incomplete Appstream meta-data since this is a major improvement." The blog post goes on to warn that a bug in Tumbleweed may cause the operating system to lock-up after a crash if openSUSE is running on the Btrfs file system.
* * * * *
Philip Müller, a member of the Manjaro development team reported last week that the project's security certificate expired before the team was able to get a replacement. This resulted in web browsers showing security warnings when visiting the Manjaro website and support forums. The developers originally suggested some workarounds and later posted an update letting everyone know the issue was resolved. "We will soon replace our current broken web server, holding our forums, wiki, mailing list and merge to a new one. We plan to provide a packaging service for packages and ISO images soon. Regarding the expired SSL certificate: Roland got a reminder on Mon, 23 Mar 2015 18:14:37 +0900 (JST) from GlobalSign. He also replied in time for extension. Sadly we got no response from GlobalSign back then. Luckily today, I got mail with a new certificate code from GlobalSign. They will sponsor us a Wildcard SSL from now on. Also, we want to thank all our community members who donated so far. These donations will finance us for another half year." It is nice to see the situation handled transparently and hopefully the Manjaro project will continue to receive funds from happy users so they can keep their infrastructure running.
* * * * *
The Linux kernel has reached a new milestone. On April 12th, Linus Torvalds updated the kernel's version number to 4.0. Despite the increase of the kernel's major version number, the new release of the kernel appears to carry relatively few changes. In a mailing list post Torvalds wrote, "Linux 4.0 was a pretty small release both in linux-next and in final size, although obviously 'small' is all relative. It's still over 10k non-merge commits. But we've definitely had bigger releases (and judging by linux-next v4.1 is going to be one of the bigger ones). Which is all good. It definitely matches the 'v4.0 is supposed to be a stable release', and very much not about new experimental features etc. I'm personally so much happier with time-based releases than the bad old days when we had feature-based releases."
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
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Google Code closing and social media
Curious-concerning-Code asks:
Not being a developer, I was still very interested to read about Google Code's closure and the success of GitHub. Can you explain what GitHub is and how it serves developers in a way non-developers can understand? What Google Code didn't offer, and why it's closing down?
DistroWatch answers:
Why don't we start with what GitHub and Google Code are. According to GitHub, the website provides a place for "powerful collaboration, code review, and code management." Perhaps the easiest way to think about services like GitHub is to regard them as a place where developers can store and share code. I like to think of GitHub as a big pot where developers can ladle out portions of code and contribute back their own personal modifications.
A more simplified way of looking at Google Code and GitHub is to think of them as places where developers can post code for people to copy. Sometimes other developers offer their own pieces of code back in the hope of fixing bugs or adding features. GitHub is a sort of software bazaar.
As to why Google Code is closing down, according to Google, other code hosting services were better: "We've seen a wide variety of better project hosting services such as GitHub and Bitbucket bloom. Many projects moved away from Google Code to those other systems. To meet developers where they are, we ourselves migrated nearly a thousand of our own open source projects from Google Code to GitHub."
Personally, I have never used Google Code so I cannot comment on what they did or did not have as far as features go. I can say that GitHub is fairly flexible, has a good deal of documentation that is pretty easy to follow and they have a number of free and commercial solutions to match what developers need. Perhaps just as importantly, GitHub seems to have gained a good deal of mind share. GitHub, for many people, has become the default place to work. I sometimes hear from developers asking why a project is hosted with Company A, rather than GitHub, or if a project will consider moving to GitHub to follow the crowd of developers already working there. I suppose you could say GitHub has become to open source development what Google Search has become to finding things on the Web.
* * * * *
Some people have asked if DistroWatch has any presence on social media and the answer is a bit mixed. As you can see, we do not clutter up DistroWatch with social media buttons. We don't think they look good and we know some people are concerned about their web browsing habits being tracked by "share" buttons. With this in mind, we try to keep the DistroWatch website a social media free zone. For that matter, we do not have the time to interact with people on social media. People are welcome to contact us through e-mail or discuss topics in our comments section, but we don't hang out on social networks.
However, we do acknowledge there are people who like to follow (and share) news through social media. To that end we (along with others) have set up news streams that allow people to find, share and discuss material published on DistroWatch. People who are on Facebook can get the latest news and distribution release announcements from facebook.com/distrowatchnews. People with Google+ accounts can keep up with DistroWatch announcements at the +DistroWatch page and readers can get DistroWatch announcements from Twitter by following @DistroWatch.
We do not maintain these pages, post personally or check their mailboxes. The accounts are all automated or maintained by people not working directly on DistroWatch. Still, if you want to have announcements of new releases and articles come to you via social media, the above pages will act as social media news feeds.
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| Ask A Leader |
Vince Pooley from the Chapeau project
Chapeau is a remix of the GNU/Linux distribution Fedora Workstation with the GNOME desktop environment and this article gives an insight into the motivation and work behind Chapeau. The following column was written by Vince Pooley, the man who created (and maintains) the Chapeau distribution.
I am the creator and maintainer of Chapeau, I live in the South of England and I've tinkered with and played video games on personal computers & consoles since I was a little lad with a VIC20. I've worked in IT professionally for almost two decades, GNU/Linux has been my primary platform of choice for the past eleven years and I've been a system analyst and system administrator of enterprise Unix & Linux based systems for about nine years. Fedora was my preferred desktop/laptop distro since about 2005 until Chapeau was a thing, but I still use various distributions, for example Ubuntu LTS runs my media centre & NAS, Raspbian on my Raspberry Pis and I currently admin HP-UX, RHEL & OEL servers at my day job, now Chapeau powers my desktops & laptops used for work and play.
What lead to the creation of Chapeau?
To summarize the motivations that led to the creation of Chapeau: I often carry around with me a pendrive with a live bootable GNU/Linux installation which comes in handy fairly often, it's a habit I've had for years. This can be used to boot up Linux on most PCs and use it how I want without affecting the installed OS.
Also, as any IT professional can tell you, family and friends will often think you can help them out when they have computer issues, even if you have nothing to do with PC maintenance in your work life. For those you don't mind helping it is handy having a bootable toolkit OS that you can use to fix file systems, scan viruses, take backups etc. These two requirements are often mutually exclusive when you're using live bootable Linux distributions. You can't boot up an Ubuntu or Fedora live session and change an NT user account password on a Windows installation, scan for offline viruses or recover a missing partition, nor can you boot up GParted Live, System Rescue CD or other toolkit distros and use them like a normal desktop OS to watch BBC iPlayer, edit photos, listen to music etc.
Chapeau covers those use cases and is installable as a complete daily-driver operating system that newbies could use, something that just works without extra faff.
Chapeau is simply what I wanted from a GNU/Linux distribution but could not find, it runs on my laptops & desktops and it's on that USB stick I carry around. It's designed so I'm never without the best that open-source currently has to offer. Because it's based on Fedora, the software is as up to date as you could possibly want without being unstable and it is running the toolset of the sysadmin's favourite Linux platform, Red Hat.
Motivation
Chapeau has been and continues to be a personal technical exercise, something to tinker with, creating and learning along the way using skills that add to my professional portfolio. I saw what Ian Firns & Chris Smart are doing with Korora and liked their take on Fedora although it didn't tick all my boxes as described above, I thought "Can it be that hard to do my own?"
I began not knowing where to start and overcame each hurdle as they arose. There is no rebranding guide for Fedora & there's next to no themeing documentation for Plymouth, for example, so starting something like this is not all just reading the appropriate manuals.
I'm not a software developer so packaging, releasing and version control were also new to me and the project turned out to be more involved than I thought it could be. Chapeau is a motivator for me to keep learning new things. It's not just putting an ISO image together, that's the easiest bit. It's everything involved in making it a solid, releasable thing for others to use and putting together the infrastructure to distribute and maintain it, that's where it gets interesting. From using livecd-creator & creating RPM packages to managing YUM repos, learning Git and thinking about how to create a community (which is yet to happen) many of these things I have learned from scratch for this project.
It's another hobby when I'm away from work and when off my bikes and whilst it hasn't built a huge following of its own, if it does it may have an influence on what I choose to do next in my career and what my opportunities might be. In the meantime I'm enjoying it and giving something back to others in a way I know how which is all good for the karma bank.
How is Chapeau built?
The Chapeau live image is built using the livecd-creator tool available from Fedora's repositories which reads in kickstart files, builds a chrooted live system and writes it to a bootable ISO image. I don't just run livecd-creator directly as I have a script that automates this and other related tasks that the build process depends on. This script is one of a collection of scripts and files that make up Chapeau's 'build-kit' which is available on GitHub
To prepare for each major Chapeau release I'll start by reviewing a new set of kickstarts and I'll create a dedicated build and testing environment in a KVM virtual machine running Fedora (the same release as the Chapeau release being built), all the VMs running on my fairly well-specced workstation are currently running Chapeau 21. The project data is on my file server & the hypervisor's storage pools are all local storage either on SSD or spinning disk depending on the VM. This system builds a bootable image in about 25 minutes or so which is fast, my previous Core 2 based system I used during the Chapeau 20 release cycle would take over 2 hours to build an image.
Whilst the workstation hosts the virtual machines the hypervisor can be accessed over the network so l don't actually have to be at my desk to work on Chapeau but it's nicer to do so.
These build environment virtual machines are quickly setup with various dependencies for the job using a setup script (also in the build-kit) and these VMs are used to build and test Chapeau's packages, generate the package repos and build the ISO images. The ISOs are tested for functionality in fresh VMs to make sure they boot & install as expected, customizations & package defaults have applied and, of course, to see how it runs. If all's good then it'll be installed on bare-metal systems for further testing.
Hardware testing
Onto the bare-metal testing, after the installation to a secondary or removable disk the rest is usually done simply by using it on a day to day basis and see how it performs or if it breaks when installing drivers, installing/updating/removing software, gaming, usual stuff. Chapeau includes Valve's Steam client for Linux, the hardware detection/driver installation tool Pharlap created by Ian Firns & Chris Smart for Korora and PlayOnLinux for running Windows software, these at least warrant some additional bare-metal testing of driver installation and the performance of native Linux games & Windows games with WINE.
Chapeau is Fedora and so there is already a solid base of structured testing already carried out before I can complete a Chapeau build so once I'm happy that I haven't introduced any problems with my changes then it usually good to go.
Being the only maintainer there is a limit to the amount of systems I can test this on before release and I welcome any feedback or problem reports from users. Thankfully Chapeau 21 has been as stable as a Fedora install which is pretty stable nowadays.
The hardware that I regularly run & test Chapeau on are:
| System |
Workstation |
Desktop B |
Laptop A |
Laptop B |
Laptop C |
| Vendor |
Custom |
Custom |
Acer V7 Ultrabook |
Dell Inspiron |
Lenovo Thinkpad T440 |
| Processor |
Intel Core i5 4690K 4.5GHz |
Intel Core 2 Duo 3GHz |
Intel Core i7 3.1GHz |
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1GHz |
Intel Core i5 2.6GHz |
| GPU |
Nvidia GTX 970 4GB |
Nvidia GTS 450 1GB |
Intel HD 4000 + Nvidia GTX 720M |
Intel 965 GM |
Intel HD 4600 |
| RAM |
16GB 2500MHz DDR3 |
8GB 800MHz DDR3 |
12GB 1600MHz DDR3 |
2GB DDR3 |
8GB 1600MHz DDR3 |
| Storage |
Samsung EVO 840 SSD + WD Black HDDs |
Seagate HDD |
Kingston SSD + Seagate HDD |
Hitachi HDD |
500GB HDD |
| Screen |
1920x1080 |
1920x1080 |
1366x768 Touchscreen |
1280x800 |
1600 x 900 Touchscreen |
These are an adequate representation of 64-bit systems out there and Chapeau flies along on all of them. I don't have any systems with AMD GPUs so I'm not experienced with using their drivers, they haven't had a good history on Linux which is why I haven't bought any system with ATI/AMD graphics for over a decade but I hear their open source driver is getting better. I'll get a cheap AMD GPU to test eventually, funds permitting. After November a Steam Machine PC would be a good addition to these, again, funds permitting.
Release schedule
Chapeau follows Fedora's major release schedule and I aim to have the Chapeau remix of the latest Fedora ready within a month of Fedora's release date. The third party software repositories are a dependency of getting out a new major release so, for example, I couldn't release Chapeau 22 Alpha right now as the RPMFusion & VirtualBox repos are not available for Fedora 22 yet.
Because Fedora's packages can be so close to the upstream projects', such a fast moving set of packages means lots of updates. Fedora is renowned for pulling in a huge amount of package updates immediately after install and during the support cycle, it's just a symptom of being cutting-edge. This is lessened when installing Chapeau as I push out interim releases in between the major release cycles that include updates so the latest live image also moves along during the support cycle.
What's next for Chapeau?
I have a growing list of to-do items for Chapeau. I'm just about to release the next and final point release of Chapeau 21 then there's the next major release, based on Fedora 22, which is well on schedule to have a timely release very soon after the Fedora 22's release. After that there are these things to work on...
Desktop
I feel a unique identity for Chapeau's desktop environment is the next bit to tackle on the technical side. I think GNOME is the best DE there is and I'm looking at including some more desktop customization on Chapeau 22 without ruining GNOME's core work flow and I'm interested in continuing this progression to Chapeau 23 & GNOME 3.18. Right now I'm intending on changing the default icons to the Moka icon set which is a start, unique GNOME-shell & GTK themes would be the next step after that.
Repo mirrors
These are needed so I can rehost my web server if I had to do so as currently the repo is on the same server as the web site.
Community
I've only recently pushed the project out beyond the website and onto social media so there's plenty of improvement needed on that side to build a community around Chapeau.
Collaboration
One thing I had been putting off for too long is proper version control and recently got to grips with Git and pushed all the historic versions of Chapeau's scripts and sources to GitHub. The reason I did this was to promote collaboration as GitHub makes it so easy. So if anyone reading has ideas, or has a skill they can offer they are welcome to get in touch.
Finally
Thanks to Jesse Smith at DistroWatch for inviting me to tell you about myself and Chapeau. Grab yourself a copy over at the Chapeau website.
- Vince Pooley
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
Bittorrent is a great way to transfer large files, particularly open source operating system images, from one place to another. Most bittorrent clients recover from dropped connections automatically, check the integrity of files and can re-download corrupted bits of data without starting a download over from scratch. These characteristics make bittorrent well suited for distributing open source operating systems, particularly to regions where Internet connections are slow or unstable.
Many Linux and BSD projects offer bittorrent as a download option, partly for the reasons listed above and partly because bittorrent's peer-to-peer nature takes some of the strain off the project's servers. However, some projects do not offer bittorrent as a download option. There can be several reasons for excluding bittorrent as an option. Some projects do not have enough time or volunteers, some may be restricted by their web host provider's terms of service. Whatever the reason, the lack of a bittorrent option puts more strain on a distribution's bandwidth and may prevent some people from downloading their preferred open source operating system.
With this in mind, DistroWatch plans to give back to the open source community by hosting and seeding bittorrent files for distributions that do not offer a bittorrent option themselves. This is a feature we are experimenting with and we are open to feedback on how to improve upon the idea.
For now, we are hosting a small number of distribution torrents, listed below. The list of torrents offered will be updated each week and we invite readers to e-mail us with suggestions as to which distributions we should be hosting. When you message us, please place the word "Torrent" in the subject line, make sure to include a link to the ISO file you want us to seed and please make sure the project you are recommending does not already host its own torrents. We want to primarily help distributions and users who do not already have a torrent option. To help us maintain and grow this free service, please consider making a donation.
The table below provides a list of torrents we currently host. If you do not currently have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found here. All torrents we make available here are also listed on the very useful Linux Tracker website. Thanks to Linux Tracker we are able to share the following torrent statistics.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 47
- Total downloads completed: 23,692
- Total data uploaded: 4.7TB
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| Released Last Week |
Kwort Linux 4.2
David Cortarello has announced the release of Kwort Linux 4.2, a new version of the project's lightweight distribution with Openbox, no systemd, and a custom package manager called kpkg - all based on CRUX: "As the title says, Kwort Linux 4.2 is out there in the wild. This new version is fast, stable and simple as always and a little bit smaller. Everything has been built from scratch in a clean way from a new toolchain to every X.Org package. Most significant technical aspects are: Linux kernel 3.19.2; Chromium 41.0.2272.76; as usual our system remains light and clean as Kwort users like it; new and improved GUI aspect. As usual, a big thanks to the CRUX people for developing it, as it is the system Kwort is based on; even though Kwort 4.2 isn't based on a CRUX release, their ports system was a key component to build this release. The eudev folks for supporting and approving our patch to make /run to be configurable (Kwort uses /var/run). And of course, the people who develop every project Kwort makes use of." Visit the distribution's home page to read the full release announcement.
SalentOS 14.04.2
Gabriele Martina has announced the release of SalentOS 14.04.2. Along with an updated set of core packages, the latest version of SalentOS features a number of visible changes. These changes include a new Control Center, a new Update Center for handling package upgrades, a new software repository and Firefox is now the default web browser. "The Full version is complete with all the software available so can be used right now to surf the web, enjoy multimedia content and work. The live ISO weighs around 850MB, it is installable and can be burned to DVD or used to create a bootable USB device. The Light version is planned to use alternative software and programs according to the tastes and preferences of each user. It contains the base system and has only web browser and text editor installed. The live ISO image weighs around 550MB and can be burned to a CD or used to create a bootable USB device." A full list of changes in the new version can be found in the project's release announcement.
SalentOS 14.04.2 -- Default desktop and application menu
(full image size: 1.3MB, 1280x1024 pixels)
Semplice Linux 7
Eugenio Paolantonio has announced the release of Semplice Linux 7, a lightweight, Debian-based distribution that comes with a custom GTK+ 3-based desktop environment called "vera": "It's my pleasure to announce the release of Semplice 7, code-named 'Comfortably Numb'. Functionally and aesthetically-wise, you won't find that many differences from Semplice 6. But under the hood there are plenty. Openbox became a component of the desktop environment and not the desktop environment itself. This distinction will help me introduce vera, a plugin-based GTK+ 3 desktop environment, made from scratch by us. Currently Openbox and tint2 run as plugins, but they will eventually get replaced by our own ones. We are not fans of the NIH thing, but personally I feel that this is the right step to make in order to get things up and running on Wayland. Wayland is the future and it's actually already production-ready (I, for example, already run it in my phone, and it's pretty damn exciting)." Continue to the release announcement for more information, with additional details provided in the release notes.
Bella OS 2.2
Bella OS is a user-friendly Linux distribution based on the latest Xubuntu LTS release with a highly customised Xfce desktop that combines the best features of several popular operating systems. Bella OS 2.2, released yesterday, is the project's current stable release: "Launch release version 2.2 is now live! Fully functional live CD, or install to hard drive or virtual machine; comes complete with a curated suite of high-quality web, office and entertainment applications; takes design queues from several modern operating systems; declutters and beautifies the desktop; built from Xubuntu LTS and Debian GNU/Linux; large community support and software compatibility. The top Linux applications for work and play are already installed and configured with the most popular options: Firefox web browser, Shotwell photo album, Banshee music player, VLC media player, GIMP image editor, LibreOffice office suite, Brasero CD burner, KeePassX password manager, Ubuntu Software Center..." The brief release announcement is provided on the project's SourceForge page, but visit also the distribution's website at BellaOS.org for more information.
Linux Mint 2 "LMDE"
Clement Lefebvre has announced the launch of Linux Mint "Debian Edition", version 2. The new release, code named "Betsy", is available in two variants (Cinnamon and MATE) and is based on packages provided by Debian "Jessie". There are separate release announcements for Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 Cinnamon edition and for the MATE edition. Both announcements discuss the features of the new release and how it differs from Linux Mint's other products: "LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is a very exciting distribution, targeted at experienced users, which provides the same environment as Linux Mint but uses Debian as its package base, instead of Ubuntu. LMDE is less mainstream than Linux Mint, it has a much smaller user base, it is not compatible with PPAs, and it lacks a few features. That makes it a bit harder to use and harder to find help for, so it is not recommended for novice users. LMDE is however slightly faster than Linux Mint and it runs newer packages. Life on the LMDE side can be exciting. There are no point releases in LMDE 2, except for bug fixes and security fixes base packages stay the same, but Mint and desktop components are updated continuously." More information and workarounds for known problems can be found in the release notes.
Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 -- Cinnamon desktop
(full image size: 333kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Slackel 6.0.3 "Openbox"
Slackel, a distribution based on Slackware and Salix, has launched a new release, version 6.0.3 "Live Openbox". The new release provides a lightweight desktop environment with useful, yet efficient, desktop applications. The new Slackel supports UEFI and ships with Midori as the default web browser and AbiWord for word processing. "This release is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures with both fitting comfortably within the size of a single CD. ISO images are isohybrid. The 64-bit ISO supports booting on UEFI systems. Secure Boot is however not supported. The 32-bit flavor is also the first live release that supports both i686 PAE SMP and i486, non-PAE capable systems. The focus of this release has been to provide a lightweight and fast system and also to be easy for all users. The default web browser included in this release is Midori, while the default e-mail client is Claws-mail. The Internet/network applications also include the Pidgin instant messaging application, the Transmission torrent client, the gFTP for connecting to (S)FTP servers, the Wicd Network Manager for connecting to wireless and wired networks and Sakis3g for connecting to 3G mobile networks." More information can be found in the project's release announcement.
HandyLinux 1.9
The developers behind HandyLinux, a beginner friendly distribution, have announced the availability of HandyLinux 1.9. The new release is based on Debian Wheezy and mostly focuses on minor improvements and bug fixes over the 1.8 release. The 486 and 686 builds have been merged, removing the necessity of selecting the correct ISO image for one's 32-bit architecture. Installing the Skype VoIP client should now be easier. Plus an upgrade path from HandyLinux 1.8 to 1.9 has been introduced and most users should be able to upgrade using a simple graphical utility. The new release also features a new tool for changing the desktop interface. Further information on the new version of Handy Linux, along with screen shots, can be found in the release announcement (the release announcement is in French).
elementary OS 0.3
The developers of elementary OS have announced the launch of a new stable release, code name "Freya". The new release features UEFI support, improved interactive notifications, a new firewall utility, designed administrative utilities and a unified login/lock screen. "elementary is proud to announce the stable release of elementary OS Freya. After a year and a half of development, over a thousand bug fixes, and countless lines of code, we can finally say it's here. Freya is the latest version of elementary OS, a design-oriented and open source Linux-based operating system for desktops and laptops. It succeeds Luna which was released in August of 2013." The new release offers Google Calendar support, improved network share support through Samba and more flexible search tools. More information on the new release can be found in the distribution's release announcement.
elementary OS 0.3 (Freya) -- Desktop and application menu
(full image size: 1.6MB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Antergos 2015.04.12
Dustin Falgout has announced the release of a new version of the Antergos distribution. The new release, version 2015.04.12, offers an updated system installer and the GNOME 3.16 desktop environment. The distribution can be downloaded as one of two images, a Full edition and a Minimal edition. The Minimal ISO has been reduced in size and is now just 437MB. "We've updated our installation media to include all of the latest packages available in the Arch Repos. The most notable updates are our installer, Cnchi v.0.8.0 (released earlier today) and GNOME 3.16. Our Live Install Image includes a fully working GNOME 3.16 environment that you can use before making any changes to your system. Our Minimal Install Image includes only what is required to run our installer and thus offers a much smaller initial download." Further information on the new build of Antergos can be found in the project's release announcement.
* * * * *
Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| DistroWatch.com News |
Distributions added to the database
Bella OS
Bella OS is a beginner-friendly Linux distribution based on Xubuntu's latest LTS (long-term support) release and featuring a customised Xfce desktop. The project's primary goal is to provide a curated suite of high-quality web, office and entertainment applications on top of a desktop that combines some of the best features from several popular operating systems.
Bella OS 2.2 -- Default desktop interface
(full image size: 1.3MB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
* * * * *
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 20 April 2015. To contact the authors please send email to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, suggestions and corrections: news, donations, distribution submissions, comments)
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • bella (by erinis on 2015-04-13 00:41:42 GMT from North America)
I don't know about you guy's but have run Bella through the ringer for the last 3 days and have decided we are going to get along fine along with Elementary for a long time. My 5 cents for now. ( PS have tried all 100 OS since 1999 )
2 • Manjaro (by jim on 2015-04-13 00:54:24 GMT from North America)
I have used it from the start and it is one of best distros out there. I also run Mint on wifes computer and vector on spare computer. Lots of choice nowadays.
3 • HAMMER file system (by Will B on 2015-04-13 01:21:28 GMT from North America)
Can't wait to see HAMMER2 come out. I really like trying out all of the BSDs, but haven't seen a need to move away from FreeBSD...yet. ;-) DragonFly is one of those BSDs that haven't yet worked right on my hardware, so here's to hoping...
4 • Bella (by Dennis on 2015-04-13 01:43:30 GMT from North America)
I like the look. But to set themselves apart as just another Xubuntu respin...I think they should not be an app curation distro. It would be more effective if they only included the bare essentials (text editor, web browser, archive manager, screen shot tool, image viewer).
Then, focus on a top notch app store/software center to allow users to quickly and easily pull down the software they. Also, if you felt the need to particular apps, then you could host various software packs for a one-click download.
Just a thought.
5 • jim (by freya'd not on 2015-04-13 03:48:10 GMT from Oceania)
Anyone not using eOS anymore after the kerfuffle with getting people to pay etc?
I had a sour taste in my mouth after they renamed isis to freya.
Personally I'd prefer a distro that isn't prone to developer hysterics.
Looks like it's still you freebsd!
6 • Chapeau 21.2.1 Live DVD (by cykodrone on 2015-04-13 07:20:10 GMT from North America)
I downloaded, I burned, I booted. I was very impressed it booted without having to add iommu=soft (the AMD 900 series chipset curse) to the boot line. The session started out like a house on fire, I used the tweak tool to get it to look and feel like Gnome 2.x/MATE, which actually worked quite well (but wow do you really have to know your way around to expose menus and options, Gnome 3.x insanity). My printer (Brother HL-1435) was setup and working quickly and seamlessly (it printed from gedit), same with my webcam, working OOTB. But then the party started getting weird, I opened Yumex, installed a few things for schizz n giggles, like Thunderbird, GKrellM, Pysolfc and DeVeDe, mostly just to see if they would install while live, which they did. I opened Pysolfc, it started, but as soon as the cards were dealt, crash, it disappears, after that other things refused to open, like Firefox. This is not meant to be flame bait but maybe systemd is not really ready for prime time, the session started degrading fast, it wouldn't even shutdown, even after selecting shutdown by power button (previously), nothing, I had to press and hold the power button for 4 seconds, aka forced shutdown, this was after my drives wouldn't unmount, that scared me. One thing that did annoy me quite a bit, I have a storage HDD (my install lives on an SSD), it was mounted and I did access a few files (test OpenOffice, which looked horrible without tweaking the view, and test the pdf reader, which didn't open), when I closed the file manager, I could hear, yes, HEAR the drive head parking and thrashing, that was bizarre, it doesn't normally do that. Anyway, aside from the live session degradation, the distro works, it's pretty and it has plenty of tools and apps to make one's self at home. You have the right idea Monsieur Pooley, maybe your just using the wrong base distro, lol, or maybe I do need to add the AMD bootline curse, I'll give it another spin but I won't hold my breath. Machine=FX-8350, Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 (rev. 4.0), 120GB Intel '520' SSD, 1TB Seagate storage HDD, 2x8GB Kingston HyperX Fury DDR3 (1866), Asus Radeon R7 250, Lite-On 16x DVD Writer, etc.
Korora 20 acted the same way a while back, the longer it was up, the worse it got, and I really liked it too, there's a pattern here, you're both using the same base OS. Maybe it's Yumex, maybe it's not meant to be used live (or just no good live). I tried Chapeau because it was compared to Korora, I just had to see...
I like your website Mr. Pooley, it's clean and modern looking, I especially like the thorough set of screenshots (they were part of the reason I had to see it in 'action'). I have an idea for your logo, same like RH's but use a pretty girl wearing a beret. ;D Maybe not, RH might not like that, make the girl in a beret green instead of red?
7 • Chapeau article. (by Antony on 2015-04-13 09:07:50 GMT from Europe)
Thanks DW, and thanks to Vince Pooley for the excellent article on Chapeau. Good luck to the project. Reading the article, I was very impressed with Vince's approach and detail. I shall definitely give Chapeau a try and keep a close eye on the project.
Btw, have been using openSUSE Tumbleweed for quite a while, and it works really well for me: circa 330MB RAM and negligible CPU usage at idle on an old-ish (Athlon 4800+) 64 bit with KDE. A very pleasant experience overall.
Thanks again, for a great read this morning.
8 • Google Code (by Teresa e Junior on 2015-04-13 09:52:44 GMT from Planet Mars)
I have been using Google Code since around 2010, and they have only dropped features since then. When Google stops adding features to some project, it means it will eventually die.
9 • Google Code (by Sitwon on 2015-04-13 12:00:03 GMT from North America)
One nail in Google Code's coffin was that despite a huge amount of demand, they were very late to provide support for Git repositories. And once they finally did, most of the developers who would have used it were already happily using GitHub.
Another key difference is that Google Code acted as a gatekeeper for projects and, much like SouceForge, had an ideology of one "official" page per project that everyone contributes to. That kind of hub and spoke model of development is quickly becoming outdated and outmoded in the FOSS community. Rather than each project having a readily identifiable project manager, many newer and smaller projects are a loose collaboration of individuals who each work on their own fork of the code and occasionally share improvements with each other. GitHub fosters this more decentralized model much better than Google Code or SourceForge.
10 • Distrowatch & Social Media (by Jim on 2015-04-13 13:47:16 GMT from North America)
It is often said that the "squeaky well gets the grease." Unfortunately, I have found this to be a truism over the years. In that spirit, I'd like to squeak a little...
KUDOS on your social media policies...I LOVE IT! I HATE websites that are so cluttered with share/like/send buttons that I have to sift through the cruft to find the content. To me, it feels as if the primary purpose of information/education has been hijacked so that the creator can continuously beg for attention..."please LIKE me, please LIKE what I'm doing, please get others to do the same." The constant bombardment of begging has made me numb and, unfortunately, a little jaded to the content. I often read articles that I think are worthy of sharing with others, but I'll typically e-mail a link to the party I think would be interested (a targeted approach), rather than a "mass grenade" of notification that most recipients could care less about.
I personally feel that if you provide unique, insightful, and useful commentary (or products) that users will seek you out...not the other way around. I think Distrowatch does an excellent job of this. I know not everyone sees it the same way as me, but your approach certainly allows those who prefer their social media communiques to do so, while accommodating users like me who only want to read & be educated without the begging to be liked.
Inasmuch as I tend to stay away from sites that beg for likes/shares/acceptance, I consider Distrowatch to be a central part of my daily education. I just wanted to let you know that I LIKE your approach and I sometimes SHARE with others that I think would enjoy your articles. I think you have the perfect mix of social media availability and an uncluttered yet informative site. I can only hope you continue your current policies. I LOVE your site! Sincere THANKS...the "squeaky wheel" has spoken!
11 • antergos (by marco on 2015-04-13 14:25:35 GMT from Europe)
I love the concepts from ANTERGOS:
1> one ISO for six desktops.
2> an opt-in panel for FIREFOX, LIBREOFFICE, CUPS, SAMBA, ... that lets me customize my apps from the start, no need for uninstalling software I did not ask for.
Other distros did not even reply to me when I suggested this behaviour.
12 • @11 (by jaws222 on 2015-04-13 14:31:09 GMT from North America)
I know it is good. Too bad the cnichi installer has bugs. I tried to install it in virtualbox but it kept getting errors. They know about the bug and hopefully get it fixed up
13 • Chapeau (by linuxista on 2015-04-13 14:33:24 GMT from North America)
I've been using Knoppix for years to cover the use case scenarios set out by Mr. Pooley. I'm not sure what it would be missing that Chapeau brings to the table.
14 • SuperX and Inage Checksums (by Rev_Don on 2015-04-13 15:41:12 GMT from North America)
Nice to see that you were able to find a distro that played well with your hardware this week Jesse. SuperX looked interesting so I decided to give it a try. I ran into a problem right out of the gate though, couldn't find the image checksums to verify the iso downloads. It's not the first time I've run into this and I find it appalling that so many distros are so inconsiderate about this.
I made the decision several years ago to not bother downloading, evaluating, or using any distro that doesn't provide these image checksums readily available. I think you should start including how easy it was to get the checksums in your reviews. You also might want to include how readily available the recommended and/or minimum hardware specs are in reviews. You wouldn't need to include the specs or the checksums in the reviews, only if they were or were not readily available on the download page. Just a thought.
15 • GoogleCode hosting (by gh on 2015-04-13 16:14:16 GMT from North America)
Too often the hosted code was found (by mcAffee, etc) to contain malware. How often is too often? Search query "google code hosting malware" finds 49 million results (comprised of reports, descriptions, discussions, not a count of malware instances though). Seems like the bad actors ruined a good thing. Google probably decided that expending resources toward keeping the googleCode site "clean" was a futile exercise, and closed the site to further uploads in order to avoid further tarnishing their brand reputation.
16 • How about one good solid graphical installer? (by Ben Myers on 2015-04-13 16:24:19 GMT from North America)
Am I daft? Why does almost every distro have its own most wonderful and innovative and often one-of-a-kind graphical installer? Oh, don't flame me about innovation! What's to innovate? Seems simple. Pick a package to install from a list that names the package and gives a brief description of what it does. Click it. Or maybe double-click it? Who cares about the clicks? Bingo! Installed. 'nuf said.
17 • Chapeau 21.2.1 Live DVD test 2 (by cykodrone on 2015-04-13 16:50:04 GMT from North America)
I booted the live DVD again with iommu=soft added to the kernel boot line this time and recreated the previous test as much as possible, it did work somewhat better, I got a little farther but eventually things would stop opening and I couldn't shut down again, at least this time I was able to unmount my drives first. It's still a very nice distro and it could have a bright future (maybe switch to a CentOS base?).
18 • I Vote for these 3 Distros (by Muthu on 2015-04-13 16:56:01 GMT from Asia)
I also tested and used more than 50 distros in the list given by Distrowatch.But, I vote for these 3 distros - 1.Linux Mint 17.1 KDE 2)Manjaro 0.9 XFCE & 3)Korora 21 XFCE. I also have an idea to check Antergos distro one day.
19 • top_quality_freedom_of_LMDE2 (by k on 2015-04-13 17:01:49 GMT from North America)
Not sure why the developers recommended LMDE2 for experienced users more than novices, this is the most richly featured and user-friendly Debian ever. Give it a try, but be aware, you might never need or care to try another. Kudos to the LMDE2 team.
20 • Install image checksum (by Jesse on 2015-04-13 20:17:20 GMT from North America)
@14: I do not think I have seen many distributions where the checksum for a download was hard to find. Distributions almost always put their checksum on the download page or in the directory where the ISO is located. SuperX in particular is fairly straight forward as they use SourceForge to distribute their ISO images. With any SF download you can click the information symbol next to the file you are downloading and it will show you the file's MD5 and SHA1 checksums.
In any event, if you ever have trouble finding a checksum, look up the release announcement on DistroWatch. We put a link to the checksum data at the bottom of the release notice for just this purpose.
Again, using superX as an example, go to the SuperX summary page on DistroWatch, click the link for the latest release. It will bring up the summary for SuperX 3.0. That sumary contains a link to the ISO and a link to the MD5 checksum data. We do this for all publicly available releases.
21 • Installing on a live session (by Vince on 2015-04-13 22:10:19 GMT from Europe)
@cykodrone,
Thanks for your interest cykodrone, the issues you saw with freezing when trying to install software during a live session will happen on any live session distro, not just Chapeau or Fedora.
The filesystem on a live distro is read only and in order to be able to temporarily change this filesystem during a live session any changed blocks are written to a copy-on-write volume stored in RAM during the session, this copy-on-write behaviour is also how storage & filesystem snapshots work.
When "changing" the contents of the read-only filesystem both copies of removed data blocks and the new changed blocks are written to this RAM volume and it fills up quite quickly, when it fills up is when stuff stops working.
You can kinda get around this by creating a bootable USB disk with a persistence image, this image would still be a copy-on-write image rediding on the USB disk instead of RAM and will still become unusable over time, it's just that you can make it bigger than what would fit in your RAM and the changes will persist after a reboot.
There is additional explanation on the Fedora wiki at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB#Data_persistence
If you really want to test out changing the system there's no substitute for installing it on your system either on bare-metal or in a VM.
Hope you continue to enjoy Chapeau!
22 • LMDE 2 is good (by M.Z. on 2015-04-14 00:57:48 GMT from Planet Mars)
@19
From what I've seen LMDE 2 has been great so far, though I'd say that the makers of apps for Gnome 3 have caused some issues with themes in Cinnamon. The calculator, document viewer, & system monitor all have an ugly disjointed feel when you apply anything other than the default theme, & even with the default theme you still notice the Gnome 3.14 style popup menus & over sized title bars on windows. It's a problem for any DE using newer Gnome apps without default Gnome themes I suppose. It is a minor visual issue with a few default apps, though it doesn't look very pretty. It's a problem that almost certainly traces it's roots to the crappy job being done with everything in Gnome 3. I hope the Mint team don't have to start supporting a fork of these apps in addition to the Nemo file manager just to keep things looking decent. I also think Cinnamon still has more tearing on full screen video than KDE, but will need to investigate further. Otherwise LMDE 2 is doing great on my laptop & has some minor hardware issues with an old PC of mine. LMDE 2 is still a very nice distro overall, & will stay on my laptop for some time to come.
23 • @20 • Install image checksum (by Rev_Don on 2015-04-14 02:35:40 GMT from North America)
I went to the SuperX website like a LOT of other people will do. Clicked on THEIR link to download which did NOT take me to ANY page with an Image Checksum. All it did was start the download process. That just isn't right. I was able to eventually get to the Checksums by not starting the download and clicking a dozen times to back track to a SourceForge page with them, but sorry, that is NOT the way it should be handled.
And why should one have to go to the DistroWatch page to find a link to the Image Checksums or to find a link to the downloads? I'm not downloading it from DistrWatch, I'm trying to download it from the developer.That's what the DISTRO'S website is for. Sorry, but that isn't the way things should be done either. It's the DISTRO'S responsibility to provide that information and SuperX, like several other Distro's fail miserably in that regard.
24 • install image (by erinis on 2015-04-14 04:38:06 GMT from North America)
@23 If you have a better way then make it so. I have been coming to this web site for over 10 years and never had a problem or complaint. What amazes me is the number of people who come here and complain about a free ride and want answers to problems they are not willing to research for themselves. If you do not like it then do not use it and go somewhere else. You're criticism was not welcome to me and I have said my PEACE. Thanks and have a good day.
25 • installer (by erinis on 2015-04-14 05:05:46 GMT from North America)
@16 i understand your point but have to say it's a matter of choice and $. Linux is after all free for anyone to use. If BSD and DEBIAN and SUSE and MANDRAKE and SOLARIS where all the same it would be called Apple or Microsoft ? Thats where the challenge begins. Do you want to be a slave to them or be free with Linux. It's a choice so we should all make one. I choose Linux because it works for me.
26 • Re: Chapeau 21.2.1 Live DVD (by cykodrone on 2015-04-14 05:37:15 GMT from North America)
@Vince...I totally hear (read) what you're saying and don't take this the wrong way (I know you didn't write Fedora), but my bare metal install right now. root and home, fully loaded (I went nuts installing apps, games, fonts, themes, etc) totals 9.2GB. My point is I have 16GB of system RAM (my 1GB discrete video card does not share it) and I've tried other distros 'live' (mostly burned to DVD, a few from USB without persistence) that let me install and use lots of programs for hours (without freezing or crashing, etc). If Fedora's memory handling and read/write capabilities while live are so inadequate, maybe software installing should be turned off for live demo purposes only? Correct me if I'm wrong but Gentoo turns of installing in their live DVD, on purpose. In all honesty, one of my criteria of a good distro is how well it performs and handles tasks while live, if it does do well, it stands a better chance of making it to a bare metal install. Live is like a 'dog and pony show', the one and only chance to make a good first impression (just ask the thousands of geeks trying to impress their boss or family and friends, lol). Anyway, as it happens, I do have a spare SSD (it's currently unplugged on purpose) and I just might confirm this situation, I'm super curious now. I have a confession to make, I have an ulterior motive, I'm not a big fan of systemd or Gnome 3.x and I want to see how much abuse they'll put up with, heh. O_x
When all the smoke clears, I still think you did a great job on Chapeau, it has a nice GUI with plenty of tools and apps, it's quite impressive (Caffeine is nifty, one click suspend/screen lock disable). I'm not the easiest tester/distro hopper to satisfy, if there's a buggy nook or cranny, you can bet I'll find it. :D
27 • Antergos (by charlieD on 2015-04-14 14:07:03 GMT from North America)
@11 @12 I don't understand what happened as cnchi worked well last year. The installer is a nice feature. Hopefully they sort it out.
One problem I had that seems odd was the Power Saving options did not work . I tried all DE's with the same result. I need my screen to power down at the five minute mark. I would set it but then flash back on. The best that could be suggested was to install XScreensaver but that didn't work correctly.
Nice community willing to help, but Power Saving options should just work. Something I have never experienced with any distro. I'll try it again at some point.
28 • Suse Tumbleweed and Semplice (by Tim on 2015-04-14 14:45:23 GMT from Europe)
Hi. Emjoying Tumbleweed on Iconia W500
If bought it when I saw this
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/install-linux-on-your-x86-tablet-five-distros-to-choose-from-1162825
None of the distros worked for me then
Now it's running pretty good
Put Sempice on a an old 3GHZ Dell and it's very nice
I think if I swapped them they probably wouldn't work. That's one reason Linux is great. We've got lots of distros and lots of choice,
All for free.
Banner of this site says "put the fun back into compting" :-)
29 • @25 Then why TWO installers in the same distro? (by Ben Myers on 2015-04-14 16:43:05 GMT from North America)
Some distros go to the extreme of having two separate graphical installers. K.I.S.S. for all the unwashed who want it all kept simple. Why waste the developers' time and effort on several installers. This all begins to sound like mine is bigger or better than yours. Just a lot of egos.
30 • @27 (by jaws222 on 2015-04-14 17:32:41 GMT from North America)
And now there's an issue with the bootloader they're working on. Hopefully that gets fixed today. I've been running an older version of Antergos for about a year now and really like it. Once in a while there's an issue with updating but easily fixed. Other than that I've always run into issues getting it to install. I hope they fix it because it really is a good distro.
31 • 23 • @20 • Install image checksum (by Rev_Don (by Ron on 2015-04-14 18:47:40 GMT from North America)
Rev, I'm afraid you're looking for perfection in an imperfect world.
Really, I tried the website for superx and just as you say, no checksum.
But -- a simple search for superx on Google shows Distrowatch a few lines down with everything you would need.
Good day,
Ron
32 • @11 Antergos (by Angel on 2015-04-15 02:00:29 GMT from Asia)
I fail to see any advantage to Antergos' ISO and its supposed multiple desktops and other choices. You get a 1.5GB download so you can try it live, then if you want to install, the installer has to download everything all over again. In the Philippines especially, where I live, bandwidth is not so plentiful that one has the luxury of downloading the same thing over and over.
Ubuntu is by no means a lean distro, yet the Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 ISO with all its bloat is just under 1GB, and can be installed offline in 15 minutes or so.
33 • Ubuntu Mate (!) and other low-resource distros (by Ben Myers on 2015-04-15 04:34:50 GMT from North America)
I've continued my testing of distros intended for use on low-resource older computers. Of the ones tested so far, Ubuntu Mate manages to run nicely on an older Dell 486 tower with 2GB of memory, and it provides a decent set of default installed software to actually use like LibreOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird, for people to create documents, surf the net and send email.
Several other distros seem equally lean and mean but they come up short in the default packages provided, which means one has to install them after the base distro installation. I like it simple, as would many people using Linux for the first time, especially if they need to reinstall the software again.
I think that Mate hits the mark on relatively low resource use, but once again, it is extremely difficult to find information about its minimum requirements. Given that any desktop manager needs to run well with a graphics card, what is the minimum graphics card memory required to run Mate (on any distro) or any other desktop that claims to be lightweight? How low can I go with graphics card memory and still have a nice-looking desktop, not one that ends up with 16 or 256 ugly colors lacking smooth color gradients? 32MB? 64MB? 128MB? 256MB?
34 • SL-71-x86_64-2015-04-08-LiveDVDkde.iso, etc. (by Bobbie Sellers on 2015-04-15 04:41:54 GMT from North America)
I have tried to download the larger version without success.
I.e ot of 4 GiB I got 2.3 GiB and every time I tried to download
it after that I got only a few megabytes before it shut off the download.
Tonight I tried to make a boot-able live disk from
SL-71-x86_64-2015-04-08-LiveDVDkde.iso, the checksum
was Ok but I have wasted two DVDs trying to get a boot-able
disk. The disks cannot be loaded once written, unloaded they
cannot be recognized so cannot be investigated.
So I thought of going to the SL site and reporting it
but they have no way for an unregistered user to contact
them.
As I write the thought occurs that perhaps some
registered user may have reported this and it may have
been deliberately throttled.
I have been installing from downloaded disks since Mandriva
went belly up, Used PCLOS and currently Mageia 4.1.
I am the volunteer librarian for the local LUG and produce
many boot-able disks to that purpose.
When SL have fixed their products they should get them
on torrent.
bliss
35 • Minimum Requirements Ubuntu-Mate (by Ari Torres on 2015-04-15 12:02:09 GMT from North America)
@33 look here: https://ubuntu-mate.org/about/
36 • @35 - No clear statement about video adapter memory (by Ben Myers on 2015-04-15 19:44:48 GMT from North America)
The About Ubuntu Mate page provides no clear and explicit requirement for graphics memory. Maybe I've been doing this for too many years, but I have found that inadequate graphics card memory (e.g. 16MB or 32MB) often results in awful-looking displays. So, once again, what is the minimum required by Mate to give good quality high color graphics? And, while we're at it, what chips and memory are needed for the 3-D graphics alluded to in the cited web page?
I suppose I could experiment with various elderly computers around here, but my time is limited, and I would prefer an answer from the software engineers.
37 • Re: Ubunut MATE (by cykodrone on 2015-04-15 23:06:16 GMT from North America)
Posting from the live 14.04.2 DVD.
The good:
Relatively stable, nice looking, configurable. Over 45,000 package repo (this is astonishingly eye-popping). If you have Debian based experience, most of it will apply. LTS support (security and kernel updates until 2019). Lightning fast (for me), but this is not an aging machine (yet) or a laptop, so I can't really give an opinion. Lots of Universal Access support. Nice sound theme that's not overly annoying.
The bad:
Am*z*n backend in Deja Dup? Really? Seriously? Yuck. I found Unity Lens settings in dconf (changeable). I disabled the Ubuntu Firefox addon, who knows where that's phoning. Systemd creep, there are trace elements, Ubuntu is warming up to go full blown systemd. Do any of you other heavy duty testers 'feel' distros getting more flakey in relation to the amount of systemd elements used? Or is it just me? Corporate-ware tends to cozy up to other corporations, browse the repo, you'll see some big names. No clipboard manager/utility OOTB, why? I hate galculator, gcalctool is for the everyday, average, lay-person user. No sound mixer OOTB, all of a sudden distros don't need a sound mixer? I have a gazillion sound chip channels and switches, I LIKE TO SEE/CHANGE THEM. The default apps selection, although most are OK, I would have picked a few differently, but this comes down to personal preference so...
The ugly:
You CAN'T uninstall undesirable elements (see above), you probably can with a lot of research and 'trickery', aka CL magic and config tweaking, when you do try, it wants to take the whole desktop meta-package out with it, that's insane, for some obscure package that is really not crucial to the OS or DE. Does this remind of a certain proprietary OS that went to court for anti-trust? There's always a trade off, nothing is ever truly free.
This would make a great 'backup' OS, but for now I'll stick with PCLinuxOS MATE, it doesn't want to 'phone home' and is avoiding systemd like the black death plague.
@Vince, Ubuntu MATE has been up for hours, installing, tweaking, messing around, no crashing yet. Kind of proves my point about Fedora based LIVE distros. ;)
38 • MATE, stuff in general (by Corbin Rune on 2015-04-16 16:06:31 GMT from North America)
Haven't messed with Ubuntu MATE,yet. [To be honest, I tend to stay away from the 'buntus because of how much they roll into an installation by default.]
OTOH, I've been using MATE on a Parrot Security install for ~ 2 weeks, and it runs reasonably enough. Might be a Debian vs Ubuntu thing, could just be something I've done on my end.
As for systemd implementations, a lot of the worst issues seem to come in distro-side. Hell, I personally think Arch had the smoothest rollout on their end.
[Honestly, I'd be fine with systemd overall if its devs could just reach a point where they have "enough" features built in, and would then stick with just bugfixes and overall compatibility work.]
39 • reasons for multiple desktops (by frodopogo on 2015-04-16 17:03:35 GMT from North America)
@32
I haven't tried Antergos, but I am currently trying Cubuntu, a French language distro that comes with Unity, MATE, and Cinnamon on an Ubuntu base. (I'm really liking it BTW now that I've got it mostly converted to English...I know some French but trying to use a computer in a foreign language is still rather daunting!)
I am very familiar with MATE (which is really Gnome 2) and I am starting to like Cinnamon, but am not totally comfortable with it. It also occurred to me that I really ought to TRY the Unity interface. I tend to dislike the idea, but I wanted to be able to hate it from personal experience! ;^D Also Ubuntu being the #1 Linux version there is a remote possibility I will encounter it in the future, and it would be handy to be able to find my way around in it.
But my experience has been that when I try a distro and find something alien that frustrates me, I'm too quick to get rid of it. That doesn't really give it a fair chance. Having another desktop allows you to work on the less familiar desktop, then take a break and continue with something familiar, giving your overheated brain circuitry a chance to cool down!
Also, it occurred to me that it would be useful in a household where say you had perhaps the more conservative parent preferring MATE, the more daring parent trying and liking Cinnamon, and the kid(s) liking Unity.... or whatever. Everyone can have it THEIR way so you wouldn't have to have three separate desktop computers.
However, for a single user who already knows what they like and what they don't, there wouldn't be any point to it. And yes, bandwidth could be a problem!
40 • why LMDE2 isn't a beginner's distro. (by frodopogo on 2015-04-16 18:21:38 GMT from North America)
@19
I think it's because Clement Lefebvre is a very cautious man, and that friendliness is more than a smooth interface.... it also has to do with fewer crashes and lock-ups, and more and better support when you DO have problems.
I've installed LMDE2 recently myself, and superficially, it is so much like the Linux Mint 17.2 version, that I have to remind myself that in fact it is NOT based on Ubuntu.
If user-friendliness were just about the interface, LMDE2 is so close to Mint 17.2 that I can't tell the difference.
However, the repository is giving me a newer version of Audacity, which is why I want it.
And that's the problem.
Newer versions have newer features, which is great, but that means newer code which means more undiscovered bugs. And when a bug causes a crash or lockup, is a newbie going to blame the app, or blame the OS??? Probably the OS!
And when there is a problem, the community support for LMDE2 is going to be thinner because of fewer people using it.
So I think Clem is wise to put out those caveats.
My idea is to have Mint 17.2 on one partition, and use it for normal stuff, mostly internet and printing. LMDE2 is on another partitition, and will be used for recording with that newer version of Audacity. If LMDE2 were to become unusable for some reason, Mint 17.2 is there as backup.
Another way of looking at it might be to use something in the automobile world as a metaphor.
There are models of Toyotas and I believe also Fords that are available either in conventional or hybrid models. In terms of appearance and passenger comfort they are pretty much the same. But what is under the hood/bonnet is radically different, and requires different mechanical knowledge and diagnostics tools to support.
41 • @40 (by jaws222 on 2015-04-16 19:22:43 GMT from North America)
"And when a bug causes a crash or lockup, is a newbie going to blame the app, or blame the OS??? Probably the OS! "
That's just like Siduction. It is a great OS but is Debian unstable and prone to crashes and bugs. They do tell you that up front so when it does break I don't get to upset.
42 • LMDE (by M.Z. on 2015-04-16 19:52:52 GMT from Planet Mars)
@40
I've had very few issues with it myself, but that sounds about right to me. LMDE 2 Cinnamon 64 seems like a lighter, faster & leaner version of the main edition. The extra speed is barley noticeable but seems there to me, and there is definitely less RAM usage. Of course there haven't been any significant updates that I've noticed yet so I don't know how much might break when newer DEs & apps are put in. The only things I don't like are streaming netflix/hulu on Cinnamon due to tearing & the themes of the Gnome 3.14 based apps. Also, is 17.2 in beta already?
43 • @39 reason for multiple desktops (by Angel on 2015-04-17 00:16:53 GMT from Asia)
I think you misunderstand. If the distro offers multiple desktops and that's what you want, go for it. You know the size of the download in advance. (BTW, you can download and install additional desktops on distros like Arch, Debian or Ubuntu and derivatives. No need for them to be pre-installed.) Also some distros include everything but the kitchen sink. They are a sizable download, but you know what you are getting before downloading.
What Antergos does is not that. Antergos doesn't offer multiple desktops. They say they offer a choice of desktops at install, and they do, but none of those are included in the original live ISO. For example, the 1.5GB ISO comes with Gnome DE, which ruins nicely live, but at installation you still have to download Gnome in order to install it, and with a buggy installer that may quit halfway through, they aren't doing anyone or themselves any favors.
Angel
44 • reasons for multiple desktops (by Kubelik on 2015-04-17 00:52:19 GMT from Europe)
@ 39
"Having another desktop allows you to work on the less familiar desktop, then take a break and continue with something familiar, giving your overheated brain circuitry a chance to cool down!
Also, it occurred to me that it would be useful in a household where say you had perhaps the more conservative parent preferring MATE, the more daring parent trying and liking Cinnamon, and the kid(s) liking Unity.... or whatever. Everyone can have it THEIR way so you wouldn't have to have three separate desktop computers."
I completely agree. I have 8 distroes on one pc. - My personal favourits: Debian Testing, Fedora, openSUSE Tumbleweed. DE: GNOME 3. - And then there are the others.
45 • Minimal CL Ubuntu MATE install (by cykodrone on 2015-04-17 03:56:57 GMT from North America)
@38 I have a spare drive, I'm going to attempt a very minimal Ubuntu MATE install from the command line (lightdm, network-manager and mate-desktop for starters). Why am I doing this? Because I want to see if it's possible to unbloat (is that even a word, lol) an Ubuntu MATE install (avoid the alleged snoopware nastiness too). Rest assured, I'll be using '--no-install-recommends' (or --without-recommends) A LOT! I'll be reading the dependency lists very carefully before hitting the 'y' and Enter keys.
I used 'dpkg --get-selections > installed-software' during an Ubuntu MATE 14.04.2 live DVD session to scam the installed software list (print it or save it to a drive/USB stick), now I can cherry pick a few missing components (like printing for example) after the GUI is up and running from that list.
The 37MB (yep, thats MEGAbytes) Ubuntu 14.04.x CL minimal install ISO is here...
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD (a wired internet connection is recommend for this install method)
I've done a few Debian CL installs, it *should* be a walk in the park for me. Good thing I had a blank CD-R hanging around! If this doesn't work, by that I mean get it to NOT drag in any nastiness that I can't get rid of without breaking the system, I'll never go near anything Ubuntu ever again. Make or break time.
46 • SL-71-x86_64-2015-04-08-LiveDVDkde.iso, etc. (by Bobbie Sellers on 2015-04-17 05:54:55 GMT from North America)
In my previous posting 34 • SL-71-x86_64-2015-04-08-LiveDVDkde.iso, etc. (by Bobbie Sellers on 2015-04-15 04:41:54 GMT from North America)
I have tried to download the larger version without success.
I.e ot of 4 GiB I got 2.3 GiB and every time I tried to download
it after that I got only a few megabytes before it shut off the download.
Tonight I tried to make a boot-able live disk from
SL-71-x86_64-2015-04-08-LiveDVDkde.iso, the checksum
was Ok but I have wasted two DVDs trying to get a boot-able
disk. The disks cannot be loaded once written, unloaded they
cannot be recognized so cannot be investigated.
So I thought of going to the SL site and reporting it
but they have no way for an unregistered user to contact
==================================
Well this week there was a sale on External DVD RW drives and I got one.
Out of my curiosity I inserted some of the bad disks my built-in hard drive
had produced then failed to work with. I was able to boot my SL-7.2 kde Live
productions and was able further to boot with other disks that had previously
saved, so I retract my comments of the previous post about making
the disks. Still no luck with downloading the larger install disk. On the other
hand I was pleasantly surprised at the Live Disk with a relatively recent
kernel.
I guess the built-in optical disk is failing due to heavy use in the last year.
Sorry!
bliss
47 • Antergos | systemd (by linuxista on 2015-04-17 06:09:30 GMT from North America)
As sympathetic as I would be to the idea of Antergos (gnome3 + arch, or other distros), it's installer scares the bejesus out of me. I'm an old hand at installing distros, but the Antergos installer quit half-way through and almost hosed my entire multi-boot hard drive. This was a couple of years ago, so I'm disappointed to hear that the installer still seems to be some kind of issue.
Just discovered a great feature in Systemd for non-haters: if you systemctl enable fstrim.timer, it will fstrim any mounted ssd partitions once a week automatically. Perfect solution for avoiding "discard" in the fstab and so easy to implement. Thanks, Leonard! :-)
48 • Antergos typo (by linuxista on 2015-04-17 06:10:36 GMT from North America)
Supposed to say (gnome3 + arch, or other desktops)
49 • Minimal MATE install (by Corbin Rune on 2015-04-17 17:39:04 GMT from North America)
Well, cykodrone ... that should work, considering (last I knew, anyway) 'buntu minimal isos work a lot like the Debian base they sprung from. Hell, if my current experiment had've come with a net installer, I'd have done a few things differently.
Although, Parrot does come with an interesting set of pentesting and anonymity-related defaults.
(Part of me's probably messing with this to figure out how they built everything in ... and then clone it over onto something a bit more barebones, like Arch or Void.
/shrug)
50 • Re: Minimal CL Ubuntu MATE install (by cykodrone on 2015-04-17 17:52:25 GMT from North America)
I tried a bare metal install on my spare SSD, but it seems MATE is not really supported in the Ubuntu TRUSTY (14.04.x) repos pre 15.04.x, even though I enabled backports, it was just too much headaches to bother, there's certainly no specific big meta-package for it (the CL Aptitude mate-desktop selection was a sea of red broken dependencies). I also tried just a CL install/apt MATE GUI install, no joy, but I think that was a video config problem, just a black screen repeatedly attempting to load the GUI. OTOH, I did try the Xubuntu desktop (Xfce 4.10 on the LTS base) in Expert Install/Software Selection, it installed fairly seamlessly and after it was up and running, I poked around and could uninstall unwanted things (software center for starters, I hate it) fairly easily, compared to MATE, except for the DMZ cursor theme, that wants to remove the whole desktop, how nuts is that? I got the impression installing Xubuntu this way seems to be more 'slim' than the actual distro, and more modular. If I were to switch to Xubuntu, this would be the way I'd do it.
51 • Torrent Corner Checksums (by 29lost on 2015-04-18 19:50:46 GMT from North America)
I downloaded the Linux Lite torrent from the torrent corner and got the iso file. The checksum matches that of the torrent corner of DWW Issue 604, but is different from Linux Lite download page. Is there a reason for that?
52 • 51 • Torrent Corner 604 Linux_Lite Checksum (by Somewhat Reticent on 2015-04-19 02:01:19 GMT from North America)
checksum also does not match SourceForge download md5
note - error in URL of 2nd tracker (double colon) in torrent - which matches torrent in LinuxTracker database
(29lost - did you get anything in addition to the iso file? Perhaps an md5 file, or a directory/folder wrapper?)
53 • Linux Lite torrent (by Jesse on 2015-04-19 12:38:17 GMT from North America)
@51: That is interesting. The torrent file we were seeding here was the same one downloaded from the Linux Lite website. It may be that the ISO was corrupted during the download. I will look into this.
54 • Linux lite torrent (by Jesse on 2015-04-19 12:59:27 GMT from North America)
Update re post 51: I tried downloading the Linux Tracker torrent for Linux Lite to compare it against the torrent file supplied by the Linux Lite website itself. (They should be the same file since the Linux Lite official torrent was uploaded diretly to Linux Tracker.) Attempting to download the Linux Tracker torrent gives me a corrupted file (wrong MD5 checksum). Attempting to download the official torrent from Linux Lite causes my torrent client to crash.
I have removed links to the Linux Lite torrent from DistroWatch as I do not believe it is safe to use. I'm not sure about the torrent file provided by Linux Lite as I am unable to verify whether it is good or not.
I was able to download and use the ISO file from SourceForge and confirm it has the correct checksum. For now, I recommend anyone who wants to try Linux Lite download the ISO directly rather than use the torrent.
55 • Mini Ubuntu CD Xubuntu 14.04.x install update (last one) (by cykodrone on 2015-04-19 16:44:18 GMT from North America)
The good news, I was able to uninstall anything 'scope', 'unity', 'pulse' and 'am*zon' related without breaking the install (yep, I'm just as shocked as you are, lol). I'm going out on a limb and saying an install using this method *IS* more modular, if you're fussy about what does or doesn't stay on your machine like I am, this install method is for you (newbies may need a few practice runs, use a separate drive). Funny story, during some 'surgical' removals of unwanted packages, the OS started to 'puke' a little, like it didn't want its kidney removed, lol, it almost crashed but recovered, that made me chuckle, then I carried on.
The bad news (not really bad), none of the firmware was auto installed, I found this out the hard way. I don't use the proprietary video driver (it doesn't like my monitor's HDMI cable, long story) but have found my AMD CPU and Radeon R7 250 do perform better with firmware installed. I can't seem to get gksu to ask to store my root password for 'this session only', even though I have everything related installed, *scratching head*, maybe it's because I opted to allow root logins as opposed to just sudo up the ying yang, there's always 'su'. ;)
I have a copy of installed-software (use dpkg --get-selections > installed-software in a terminal) from my now gone last Debian Wheezy install (I got out before Jessie on purpose), I'm using that to cherry pick and cut/paste package names in to Synaptic (I'm a lazy point and click bum most of the time), there's quite a few 'transition' packages and most of the time the search will point me to the correct package of a different name. I have install recommends OFF, I just got it cleaned up, I don't want more ama-uni-scope "dependencies" (air quotes), lol. I have every repo (defaults, backports included, no custom PPAs, etc) enabled except the src (source) repos, at my local mirror.
All this is for future proofing (and before Debian/Ubuntu go full blown other init, name withheld on purpose), now I have a second backup OS (until 2019) in case something happens to PCLOS (God forbid). Speaking of PCLOS, on the whole, PCLOS MATE runs faster than even a 'slim' Xubuntu (this surprised me), PCLOS will stay my main OS, Texstar has a great team of packagers and developers, they're quick to tackle problems. Xubuntu has been included in the PCLOS bootloader, I hate having to F12 at the BIOS screen (Xubuntu is on a separate SSD). I had to correct PCLOS's bootloader menu.lst, even though I selected sdb for Xubuntu's root, PCLOS's boot editing utility wrote '(hd0,0)', the correct entry is '(hd1,0)', for MY machine, this stumped me for a few minutes but it was resolved.
Thanks for reading and have a great day. End transmission, there will be no further 'updates'. :D
56 • • Linux lite torrent • (by Somewhat Reticent on 2015-04-19 17:22:41 GMT from North America)
In the LinuxLiteOS forum an upgrade glitch was reported, and the originator "re-uploaded" - perhaps the ISO direct links were replaced, but not all torrent links - question has been posed to website's Contact_Us page.
57 • @52 (by 29lost on 2015-04-19 18:23:24 GMT from North America)
There were no additional files just the iso file.
Number of Comments: 57
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| • Issue 1128 (2025-06-30): AxOS 25.06, AlmaLinux OS 10.0, transferring Flaptak bundles to off-line computers, Ubuntu to boost Intel graphics performance, Fedora considers dropping i686 packages, SDesk switches from SELinux to AppArmor |
| • Issue 1127 (2025-06-23): LastOSLinux 2025-05-25, most unique Linux distro, Haiku stabilises, KDE publishes Plasma 6.4, Arch splits Plasma packages, Slackware infrastructure migrating |
| • Issue 1126 (2025-06-16): SDesk 2025.05.06, renewed interest in Ubuntu Touch, a BASIC device running NetBSD, Ubuntu dropping X11 GNOME session, GNOME increases dependency on systemd, Google holding back Pixel source code, Nitrux changing its desktop, EFF turns 35 |
| • Issue 1125 (2025-06-09): RHEL 10, distributions likely to survive a decade, Murena partners with more hardware makers, GNOME tests its own distro on real hardware, Redox ports GTK and X11, Mint provides fingerprint authentication |
| • Issue 1124 (2025-06-02): Picking up a Pico, tips for protecting privacy, Rhino tests Plasma desktop, Arch installer supports snapshots, new features from UBports, Ubuntu tests monthly snapshots |
| • Issue 1123 (2025-05-26): CRUX 3.8, preventing a laptop from sleeping, FreeBSD improves laptop support, Fedora confirms GNOME X11 session being dropped, HardenedBSD introduces Rust in userland build, KDE developing a virtual machine manager |
| • Issue 1122 (2025-05-19): GoboLinux 017.01, RHEL 10.0 and Debian 12 updates, openSUSE retires YaST, running X11 apps on Wayland |
| • Issue 1121 (2025-05-12): Bluefin 41, custom file manager actions, openSUSE joins End of 10 while dropping Deepin desktop, Fedora offers tips for building atomic distros, Ubuntu considers replacing sudo with sudo-rs |
| • Issue 1120 (2025-05-05): CachyOS 250330, what it means when a distro breaks, Kali updates repository key, Trinity receives an update, UBports tests directory encryption, Gentoo faces losing key infrastructure |
| • Issue 1119 (2025-04-28): Ubuntu MATE 25.04, what is missing from Linux, CachyOS ships OCCT, Debian enters soft freeze, Fedora discusses removing X11 session from GNOME, Murena plans business services, NetBSD on a Wii |
| • Issue 1118 (2025-04-21): Fedora 42, strange characters in Vim, Nitrux introduces new package tools, Fedora extends reproducibility efforts, PINE64 updates multiple devices running Debian |
| • Issue 1117 (2025-04-14): Shebang 25.0, EndeavourOS 2025.03.19, running applications from other distros on the desktop, Debian gets APT upgrade, Mint introduces OEM options for LMDE, postmarketOS packages GNOME 48 and COSMIC, Redox testing USB support |
| • Issue 1116 (2025-04-07): The Sense HAT, Android and mobile operating systems, FreeBSD improves on laptops, openSUSE publishes many new updates, Fedora appoints new Project Leader, UBports testing VoLTE |
| • Issue 1115 (2025-03-31): GrapheneOS 2025, the rise of portable package formats, MidnightBSD and openSUSE experiment with new package management features, Plank dock reborn, key infrastructure projects lose funding, postmarketOS to focus on reliability |
| • Issue 1114 (2025-03-24): Bazzite 41, checking which processes are writing to disk, Rocky unveils new Hardened branch, GNOME 48 released, generating images for the Raspberry Pi |
| • Issue 1113 (2025-03-17): MocaccinoOS 1.8.1, how to contribute to open source, Murena extends on-line installer, Garuda tests COSMIC edition, Ubuntu to replace coreutils with Rust alternatives, Chimera Linux drops RISC-V builds |
| • Issue 1112 (2025-03-10): Solus 4.7, distros which work with Secure Boot, UBports publishes bug fix, postmarketOS considers a new name, Debian running on Android |
| • Issue 1111 (2025-03-03): Orbitiny 0.01, the effect of Ubuntu Core Desktop, Gentoo offers disk images, elementary OS invites feature ideas, FreeBSD starts PinePhone Pro port, Mint warns of upcoming Firefox issue |
| • Issue 1110 (2025-02-24): iodeOS 6.0, learning to program, Arch retiring old repositories, openSUSE makes progress on reproducible builds, Fedora is getting more serious about open hardware, Tails changes its install instructions to offer better privacy, Murena's de-Googled tablet goes on sale |
| • Issue 1109 (2025-02-17): Rhino Linux 2025.1, MX Linux 23.5 with Xfce 4.20, replacing X.Org tools with Wayland tools, GhostBSD moving its base to FreeBSD -RELEASE, Redox stabilizes its ABI, UBports testing 24.04, Asahi changing its leadership, OBS in dispute with Fedora |
| • Issue 1108 (2025-02-10): Serpent OS 0.24.6, Aurora, sharing swap between distros, Peppermint tries Void base, GTK removinglegacy technologies, Red Hat plans more AI tools for Fedora, TrueNAS merges its editions |
| • Issue 1107 (2025-02-03): siduction 2024.1.0, timing tasks, Lomiri ported to postmarketOS, Alpine joins Open Collective, a new desktop for Linux called Orbitiny |
| • Issue 1106 (2025-01-27): Adelie Linux 1.0 Beta 6, Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 5, detecting whether a process is inside a virtual machine, drawing graphics to NetBSD terminal, Nix ported to FreeBSD, GhostBSD hosting desktop conference |
| • Issue 1105 (2025-01-20): CentOS 10 Stream, old Flatpak bundles in software centres, Haiku ports Iceweasel, Oracle shows off debugging tools, rsync vulnerability patched |
| • Issue 1104 (2025-01-13): DAT Linux 2.0, Silly things to do with a minimal computer, Budgie prepares Wayland only releases, SteamOS coming to third-party devices, Murena upgrades its base |
| • Issue 1103 (2025-01-06): elementary OS 8.0, filtering ads with Pi-hole, Debian testing its installer, Pop!_OS faces delays, Ubuntu Studio upgrades not working, Absolute discontinued |
| • Issue 1102 (2024-12-23): Best distros of 2024, changing a process name, Fedora to expand Btrfs support and releases Asahi Remix 41, openSUSE patches out security sandbox and donations from Bottles while ending support for Leap 15.5 |
| • Issue 1101 (2024-12-16): GhostBSD 24.10.1, sending attachments from the command line, openSUSE shows off GPU assignment tool, UBports publishes security update, Murena launches its first tablet, Xfce 4.20 released |
| • Issue 1100 (2024-12-09): Oreon 9.3, differences in speed, IPFire's new appliance, Fedora Asahi Remix gets new video drivers, openSUSE Leap Micro updated, Redox OS running Redox OS |
| • Issue 1099 (2024-12-02): AnduinOS 1.0.1, measuring RAM usage, SUSE continues rebranding efforts, UBports prepares for next major version, Murena offering non-NFC phone |
| • Issue 1098 (2024-11-25): Linux Lite 7.2, backing up specific folders, Murena and Fairphone partner in fair trade deal, Arch installer gets new text interface, Ubuntu security tool patched |
| • Issue 1097 (2024-11-18): Chimera Linux vs Chimera OS, choosing between AlmaLinux and Debian, Fedora elevates KDE spin to an edition, Fedora previews new installer, KDE testing its own distro, Qubes-style isolation coming to FreeBSD |
| • Issue 1096 (2024-11-11): Bazzite 40, Playtron OS Alpha 1, Tucana Linux 3.1, detecting Screen sessions, Redox imports COSMIC software centre, FreeBSD booting on the PinePhone Pro, LXQt supports Wayland window managers |
| • Issue 1095 (2024-11-04): Fedora 41 Kinoite, transferring applications between computers, openSUSE Tumbleweed receives multiple upgrades, Ubuntu testing compiler optimizations, Mint partners with Framework |
| • Full list of all issues |
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Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
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| Random Distribution | 
Bioknoppix
Bioknoppix was a customised distribution of the KNOPPIX live CD. With this distribution you just boot from the CD and you have a fully functional Linux OS with open source applications targeted at the molecular biologist. Besides using some RAM, Bioknoppix doesn't touch the host computer, being ideal for demonstrations, molecular biology students, workshops, etc.
Status: Discontinued
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TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite
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| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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