 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 644, 18 January 2016 |
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Welcome to this year's 3rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Software, particularly open source software, tends to go through phases of development. When new distributions or applications arrive on the scene, they usually grow new features, taking on more tasks and more roles over time. Eventually, the software becomes heavy enough that it is harder to maintain or use. At that time, the developers usually streamline the software or minimal alternatives will appear. Those alternatives usually grow new features and take on more tasks until the cycle begins again. This week we look at some examples of projects taking on new features and others looking to streamline. In our News section we cover Sabayon extending support to ARM-based computers and Slackware introducing support for PulseAudio. We also talk about Linux gaining support for virtualized 3-D video acceleration while the Fedora project considers dropping 32-bit support for its Server edition. In our Feature Story this week we talk about a minimal distribution called Kwort and discuss the project's back-to-basics approach. Then, in our Questions and Answers column, we talk about Linux operating systems that do not rely on GNU software. Also, in this issue, we share the torrents we are seeding via our Torrent Corner and provide a list of the distributions released last week. In our Opinion Poll we ask who among our readers use (or have used) the Tor network service. We wish you all a fantastic week and happy reading!
Content:
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Back to basics with Kwort 4.3
I do not think I have ever installed the Kwort distribution before. It's one of those projects I think about trying when a new release comes out, but something else has always come along to steal away my attention. Last month, during a quiet period, I decided to download the latest release of Kwort, version 4.3, and give it a try.
According to the project's website, "Kwort is a modern and fast Linux distribution that combines powerful and useful applications in order to create a simple system for advanced users who find a strong and effective desktop. Kwort is based on CRUX, so it's robust, clean and easy to extend."
The project's website had the following to say about Kwort 4.3: "As always we remain fast, stable, and simple and now we have grown up a little to include a lot of Linux firmwares available for tons of devices. As usual, everything has been built cleanly and from scratch."
The distribution is available in a single edition and is designed to run on 64-bit x86 computers exclusively. The installation media is relatively small, just 470MB in size. Booting from the project's installation media brings up a text console where we are automatically signed in as the root user. Instructions for installing the distribution are displayed on the screen and we can cause these instructions to be shown again at any time in the future by running the "helpinstall" command or by pressing CTRL-D.
The installation instructions let us know that we will need to do a bit of manual work to get a fresh copy of Kwort up and running. At times the instructions are sparse and I recommend reading the on-line copy of the installation guide as it fills in some of the blanks. Kwort does not have a system installer and so we find ourselves using command line utilities to partition the hard drive, format disk partitions and mount the areas of the disk where we plan to install the distribution. We then run a command called "pkgsinstall" which copies the base operating system onto our waiting hard drive. We then need to manually edit our fstab file and the system's configuration file, rc.conf, to make sure it has our correct keyboard layout and time zone. Another command sets the root password. Next, we need to decide which boot loader to install (LILO or GRUB), along with supporting packages, and run commands to install the boot loader and configure it. Again, the installation steps are a bit vague here and I recommend visiting the on-line documentation to see examples of how best to proceed. Assuming we successfully get a boot loader installed we can then reboot the computer and begin exploring Kwort.
By default, we find ourselves navigating a text console interface. Kwort ships with the usual collection of command line tools, manual pages, a copy of the GNU Compiler Collection and version 4.1.13 of the Linux kernel. Kwort offers users the SysV init software and, at first glance, a very minimal experience. However, we can run the "startx" command from the text console to gain access to the Openbox window manager. Openbox is presented with a task switcher and system tray at the bottom of the screen. We can right-click on an empty region of the desktop to bring up an application menu.
Looking through the application menu we find a short list of programs. The Chrome web browser is included along with the Transmission bittorrent client and the Lftp simple FTP client. The Leafpad text editor is included along with a calculator, the Audacious audio player and MPlayer. Kwort includes multimedia codecs for playing our audio and video files. The GpicView image viewer is included along with the Midnight Commander file manager. What I found strange, and frustrating, was that several programs were listed in the application menu which were not installed and trying to run them would result in an error saying the file was not available. LibreOffice, the PCManFM file manager, the Openbox configuration application and the GTK configuration program are all listed in the menu, but do not exist on the system. Further complicating things, I could not find these applications in the distribution's software repositories, and I will come back to my experiences with Kwort's package manager shortly.
The default installation of Kwort is fairly minimal. The distribution used just 20MB of RAM when sitting idle at the text console and took up approximately 1.4GB of hard dive space. Later, I found running Kwort's default graphical environment, Openbox, caused the operating system to use just 45MB of RAM. I tried running Kwort on a physical desktop machine and in a VirtualBox virtual machine. Kwort worked fairly well on the desktop, though it was a touch slow to boot. In the virtual environment, the distribution would run smoothly, but would not take advantage of my display's full resolution. I wanted to install VirtualBox's guest modules to gain better integration, but Oracle's official modules could not recognize Kwort's environment and the distribution appears to not have any VirtualBox packages in its repositories. This left me with a somewhat restricted experience when running Kwort in a virtual machine. On the subject of hardware, at first when I started using Kwort I thought audio was not working. After a little poking around I discovered audio was, technically, working but the sound mixer available on the desktop was of limited use because the underlying ALSA mixer was turned down low. A trip to the command line allowed me to use alsamixer to raise the background volume and then fine-tune audio output using the desktop control.
Managing software on Kwort is accomplished using the distribution's kpkg command line package manager. At first I was a little confused by the utility because whatever command I passed it to (update, upgrade, install or search) would cause kpkg to immediately return without providing any output. With a little looking through the documentation, I realized there is a command for installing repositories and, until a repository is installed, kpkg does not do anything. The default repository file can be downloaded from the front page of the distribution's website. Once the package database has been downloaded and installed, we can fetch repository data. Then kpkg refused to work until I had manually created the directories under /var it would need to download and store package data.
At this point I found the repositories were fairly small. I did not get an exact package count, but I was unable to find much of anything in Kwort's repositories. I was unable to find LibreOffice, OpenOffice, VLC, desktop environments, AbiWord or a dozen other common packages. I did find a copy of the nmap security tool, but once it was installed nmap failed to run due to missing dependencies. Sadly, I was unable to even find a screen shot utility, which is why this review is so lacking in imagery.
Conclusions
At the end of 2015, I reviewed Arch Linux. At the time I commented that Arch's minimal and sometimes cryptic nature might not make it practical in many situations, but there are things I respect about Arch. Specifically, Arch keeps its users on the cutting edge of technology and, perhaps more importantly, the Arch Linux project has extensive, well written documentation.
Running Kwort was a little like running Arch Linux, but with older packages and virtually no documentation. An experienced user may be able to get Kwort installed by following the on-line guide, but beyond that point there does not appear to be much we can do with Kwort. I was able to get a graphical user interface running, edit text files, play multimedia files and browse the web. But there was no image editing, no screen shot tools, no productivity suite and not even a working graphical file manager. This made running Kwort a very limiting experience and the lack of integration with VirtualBox did not help matters.
My experience with the distribution was, at times, made more frustrating when I had to do things like drop to a command line to fix audio output or download the default software repository data. I'm not sure why repository data is treated as an add-on, it's not as though Kwort is desperately trying to save space since the project ships with the Chrome web browser.
I think my biggest frustration though, after having tried Kwort, is I suspect I am missing out on something, but simply do not know what because of the sparse documentation. There could be a great community repository of software or more useful tools or wonderful reasons for the design decisions made. However, I am not aware of them. For a distribution to be useful it needs, in my opinion, to either present its features in an easy to explore way (like Ubuntu) or it needs to have great documentation (like Arch Linux). Kwort, though it has merit in its lightweight nature, is not easy to explore and has very little documentation. Two factors I think will keep most users away from this minimal distribution.
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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) |
Sabayon tests ARM images, Slackware adopts PulseAudio, Fedora considers dropping 32-bit support for servers and Linux offers 3-D acceleration in virtual machines
The Sabayon distribution is expanding its architecture support and has released testing images for ARM devices, including Raspberry Pi mini computers. The new images are accompanied by ARM packages that are built from Gentoo's flexible ports collection. "The approach to the ARM(hfp) support will be different from the previous attempt, we are not going to support kernels for each different board we intend to build images, instead we will release images with vendor-kernel to avoid incompatibilities and unexpected features. This is what almost every distribution does for tons of reasons, among them I want just to underline that in those years we have seen a lot of new ARM boards out of there and we can't just support all of them, maintaining a kernel branch for each one would result in low QA (since our dev-team is small) and probably in hard decisions to be made when support will be dropped from vendors (think also on how short a board's lifespan is, and how projects die quickly). In that way, we can still provide support also for legacy devices as well." More information on the new development images for ARM can be found in this blog post.
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Another project that is rolling out new features is Slackware Linux. The world's oldest surviving Linux distribution released a beta version last week and the change log contained a surprise: Slackware will be shipping with the PulseAudio sound software. "After upgrading to BlueZ 5 recently, everything seemed to be working great, but then it was pointed out that Bluetooth audio was no longer working. The reason was that the newer BlueZ branch had dropped ALSA support and now required PulseAudio. So with some trepidation, we began investigating adding PulseAudio to Slackware. Going back to BlueZ 4 wasn't an option with various dependent projects either having dropped support for it, or considering doing so. After several iterations here refining the foundation packages and recompiling and tweaking other packages to use PulseAudio, it's working well and you'll likely not notice much of a change." The PulseAudio software had a rocky start several years ago when it was introduced into more cutting edge projects, but has since been widely adopted by most Linux distributions.
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While Sabayon and Slackware expand their list of features, the Fedora project is looking to streamline their offerings for the upcoming launch of Fedora 24. The list of potential changes for Fedora 24's Server edition includes the possible removal of support for 32-bit machines. "The Fedora Server SIG has determined that we no longer feel that i686 install media is critical to our success. Since delivering and maintaining each install medium requires significant effort, the Server SIG has decided to stop shipping i686 media. This includes both the Server Install DVD and the Server Network Install ISO." It is hoped that dropping support for 32-bit servers will reduce the work required by the quality assurance team.
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While we do not usually cover specific features in new Linux kernel releases, last week distro-hoppers and gamers received some good news. Starting with Linux 4.4, the kernel will support accelerated 3-D rendering in virtual machines. This means it should be possible to run desktop environments and video games that require 3-D hardware acceleration inside a virtual machine with almost no performance loss. The Kernel Newbies website explains, "virtio-gpu is a driver for virtualization guests that allows it to use the host's graphics card efficiently. In this release, it allows the virtualization guest to use the capabilities of the host GPU to accelerate 3-D rendering. In practice, this means that a virtualized Linux guest can run a OpenGL game while using the GPU acceleration capabilities of the host." There is a video on YouTube demonstrating GNOME Shell running in a virtual machine making use of hardware acceleration.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
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Linux without GNU software
Seeking-a-penguin-without-a-gnu asks: The name GNU/Linux indicates a distribution ships with GNU software and the Linux kernel. Are there any Linux distributions which are not also GNU distributions?
DistroWatch answers: There are operating systems that use the Linux kernel without GNU, or at least without many GNU components. The Android operating system and ports of Android, such as Android-x86, use the Linux kernel while providing a very different userland from GNU/Linux.
Android is a rather focused market though and people looking for general purpose Linux distributions will probably want to look at something like Alpine or Void Linux. According to Alpine's website, the distribution uses the musl C library and BusyBox instead of GNU software: "Alpine Linux is built around musl libc and BusyBox. This makes it smaller and more resource efficient than traditional GNU/Linux distributions."
It has been a while since I last used Void Linux, so I am not sure how much GNU software the distribution does or does not use, but the project's website, mentions Void uses musl rather than GNU's C library: "Many packages are compiled against musl, an alternative libc implementation, in addition to glibc."
Sometimes developers go in the other direction and use GNU without Linux. For example, the Debian project maintains a couple of ports which use GNU userland software with kernels other than Linux. The Hurd port and the GNU/kFreeBSD port are interesting examples of GNU operating systems that run without the Linux kernel.
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Past Questions and Answers columns can be found in our Q&A Archive
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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 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. 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: 152
- Total data uploaded: 25.5TB
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| Released Last Week |
KaOS 2016.01
Anke Boersma has announced the release of KaOS 2016.01, a new version of the project's desktop Linux distribution featuring KDE's Plasma 5 desktop: "It is with great pleasure to present to you a first KaOS ISO image for 2016. As always with this rolling distribution, you will find the very latest packages for the Plasma Desktop; this includes Frameworks 5.18.0, Plasma 5.5.3 and KDE Applications 15.12.1. Plasma 5.5 has brought new features in Widget Explorer, expanded options in applications launchers, new widgets including Color Picker and Disk Quota, restored support for legacy system tray icons, default font has moved to Noto and Desktop Tweaks for different handling of widgets, plus option to disable the desktop toolbox. Among the new applications in 15.12 are Spectacle, the new screenshot capture program. Many more are now fully ported to Frameworks 5 and are part of the stable tar release in their frameworks version." Continue to the release announcement for further details and screenshots.
KaOS 2016.01 -- Welcome screen and application menu
(full image size: 324kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
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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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| Opinion Poll |
Using Tor
Tor is free software and an open network that helps its users defend against traffic analysis. The Tor software essentially bounces a person's Internet traffic around a number of nodes to help disguise where network connections originated. This can help keep Tor users somewhat anonymous when communicating on-line. Some Linux distributions, including Tails, ship with Tor enabled by default to assist users in maintaining their privacy while on-line.
Tor is not just useful for anonymous communication, it can also help people bypass censorship in order to read websites in other countries or to get around other forms of regional filtering. This week we would like to know how many of our readers have experimented with the Tor software. Was it an effective tool for you? Please leave us your thoughts on Tor in the comments section.
You can see the results of our previous poll on making new distributions and re-spins here. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Using Tor
| I have used Tor and it worked well: | 893 (47%) |
| I have used Tor and it did not fit my needs: | 264 (14%) |
| I plan to use Tor in the future: | 306 (16%) |
| I have not used Tor and do not plan to use it: | 421 (22%) |
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| DistroWatch.com News |
Comparing package versions
Often times it is useful to be able to compare package versions between two distributions. Perhaps to see if one distribution is staying closer to the bleeding edge of software development, or to see which distributions have adopted a new feature such as UEFI support. It can also be helpful to compare packages between two versions of the same distribution. This can show how quickly a distribution moves forward over time.
This week we are pleased to unveil a new feature which will allow visitors to DistroWatch to compare package versions from two separate distribution releases. This enables us to see whether CentOS or Debian Stable ships with older packages. Or we can compare Fedora's development branch to Arch Linux to see which project is offering fresher packages. We can also see how far ahead Debian Unstable is compared to Debian's Testing repositories.
This feature is in its early stages and we are hoping to get feedback on the package comparison functionality to better adjust it to our readers' needs. Please send us an e-mail with your suggestions and put "Compare Packages" in the subject line.
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Distributions added to waiting list
- Remix OS. Remix OS is an operating system based on the Android-x86 project. It is designed to run on desktop and laptop computers while providing a familiar interface for users of the Android operating system.
- DuZeru. DuZeru is a beginner friendly Linux distribution for Portuguese speakers. The DuZeru distribution is based on Debian and Ubuntu.
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DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 25 January 2016. To contact the authors please send email to:
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| Linux Foundation Training |
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| Archives |
| • Issue 794 (2018-12-17): Void 20181111, avoiding software bloat, improvements to HAMMER2, getting application overview in GNOME Shell |
| • Issue 793 (2018-12-10): openSUSE Tumbleweed, finding non-free packages, Debian migrates to usrmerge, Hyperbola gets FSF approval |
| • Issue 792 (2018-1203): GhostBSD 18.10, when to use swap space, DragonFly BSD's wireless support, Fedora planning to pause development schedule |
| • Issue 791 (2018-11-26): Haiku R1 Beta1, default passwords on live media, Slax and Kodachi update their media, dual booting DragonFly BSD on EFI |
| • Issue 790 (2018-11-19): NetBSD 8.0, Bash tips and short-cuts, Fedora's networking benchmarked with FreeBSD, Ubuntu 18.04 to get ten years of support |
| • Issue 789 (2018-11-12): Fedora 29 Workstation and Silverblue, Haiku recovering from server outage, Fedora turns 15, Debian publishes updated media |
| • Issue 788 (2018-11-05): Clu Linux Live 6.0, examining RAM consumpion, finding support for older CPUs, more Steam support for running Windows games on Linux, update from Solus team |
| • Issue 787 (2018-10-29): Lubuntu 18.10, limiting application access to specific users, Haiku hardware compatibility list, IBM purchasing Red Hat |
| • Issue 786 (2018-10-22): elementary OS 5.0, why init keeps running, DragonFly BSD enables virtual machine memory resizing, KDE neon plans to drop older base |
| • Issue 785 (2018-10-15): Reborn OS 2018.09, Nitrux 1.0.15, swapping hard drives between computers, feren OS tries KDE spin, power savings coming to Linux |
| • Issue 784 (2018-10-08): Hamara 2.1, improving manual pages, UBports gets VoIP app, Fedora testing power saving feature |
| • Issue 783 (2018-10-01): Quirky 8.6, setting up dual booting with Ubuntu and FreeBSD, Lubuntu switching to LXQt, Mint works on performance improvements |
| • Issue 782 (2018-09-24): Bodhi Linux 5.0.0, Elive 3.0.0, Solus publishes ISO refresh, UBports invites feedback, Linux Torvalds plans temporary vacation |
| • Issue 781 (2018-09-17): Linux Mint 3 "Debian Edition", file systems for SSDs, MX makes installing Flatpaks easier, Arch team answers questions, Mageia reaches EOL |
| • Issue 780 (2018-09-10): Netrunner 2018.08 Rolling, Fedora improves language support, how to customize Kali Linux, finding the right video drivers |
| • Issue 779 (2018-09-03): Redcore 1806, keeping ISO downloads safe from tampering, Lubuntu makes Calamares more flexible, Ubuntu improves GNOME performance |
| • Issue 778 (2018-08-27): GuixSD 0.15.0, ReactOS 0.4.9, Steam supports Windows games on Linux, Haiku plans for beta, merging disk partitions |
| • Issue 777 (2018-08-20): YunoHost 3.0.0.1, limiting process resource usage, converting file systems on Fedora, Debian turns 25, Lubuntu migrating to Wayland |
| • Issue 776 (2018-08-13): NomadBSD 1.1, Maximum storage limits on Linux, openSUSE extends life for 42.3, updates to the Librem 5 phone interface |
| • Issue 775 (2018-08-06): Secure-K OS 18.5, Linux is about choice, Korora tests community spin, elementary OS hires developer, ReactOS boots on Btrfs |
| • Issue 774 (2018-07-30): Ubuntu MATE & Ubuntu Budgie 18.04, upgrading software from source, Lubuntu shifts focus, NetBSD changes support policy |
| • Issue 773 (2018-07-23): Peppermint OS 9, types of security used by different projects, Mint reacts to bugs in core packages, Slackware turns 25 |
| • Issue 772 (2018-07-16): Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre 0.2.4, UBports running desktop applications, OpenBSD auto-joins wi-fi networks, boot environments and zedenv |
| • Issue 771 (2018-07-09): Linux Lite 4.0, checking CPUs for bugs, configuring GRUB, Mint upgrade instructions, SUSE acquired by EQT |
| • Issue 770 (2018-07-02): Linux Mint 19, Solus polishes desktop experience, MintBox Mini 2, changes to Fedora's installer |
| • Issue 769 (2018-06-25): BunsenLabs Helium, counting Ubuntu users, UBports upgrading to 16.04, Fedora CoreOS, FreeBSD turns 25 |
| • Issue 768 (2018-06-18): Devuan 2.0.0, using pkgsrc to manage software, the NOVA filesystem, OpenBSD handles successful cron output |
| • Issue 767 (2018-06-11): Android-x86 7.1-r1, transferring files over OpenSSH with pipes, LFS with Debian package management, Haiku ports LibreOffice |
| • Issue 766 (2018-06-04): openSUSE 15, overview of file system links, Manjaro updates Pamac, ReactOS builds itself, Bodhi closes forums |
| • Issue 765 (2018-05-28): Pop!_OS 18.04, gathering system information, Haiku unifying ARM builds, Solus resumes control of Budgie |
| • Issue 764 (2018-05-21): DragonFly BSD 5.2.0, Tails works on persistent packages, Ubuntu plans new features, finding services affected by an update |
| • Issue 763 (2018-05-14): Fedora 28, Debian compatibility coming to Chrome OS, malware found in some Snaps, Debian's many flavours |
| • Issue 762 (2018-05-07): TrueOS 18.03, live upgrading Raspbian, Mint plans future releases, HardenedBSD to switch back to OpenSSL |
| • Issue 761 (2018-04-30): Ubuntu 18.04, accessing ZFS snapshots, UBports to run on Librem 5 phones, Slackware makes PulseAudio optional |
| • Issue 760 (2018-04-23): Chakra 2017.10, using systemd to hide files, Netrunner's ARM edition, Debian 10 roadmap, Microsoft develops Linux-based OS |
| • Issue 759 (2018-04-16): Neptune 5.0, building containers with Red Hat, antiX introduces Sid edition, fixing filenames on the command line |
| • Issue 758 (2018-04-09): Sortix 1.0, openSUSE's Transactional Updates, Fedora phasing out Python 2, locating portable packages |
| • Issue 757 (2018-04-02): Gatter Linux 0.8, the UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, Red Hat turns 25, super long term support kernels |
| • Issue 756 (2018-03-26): NuTyX 10.0, Neptune supplies Debian users with Plasma 5.12, SolydXK on a Raspberry Pi, SysV init development |
| • Issue 755 (2018-03-19): Learning with ArchMerge and Linux Academy, Librem 5 runs Plasma Mobile, Cinnamon gets performance boost |
| • Issue 754 (2018-03-12): Reviewing Sabayon and Antergos, the growing Linux kernel, BSDs getting CPU bug fixes, Manjaro builds for ARM devices |
| • Issue 753 (2018-03-05): Enso OS 0.2, KDE Plasma 5.12 features, MX Linux prepares new features, interview with MidnightBSD's founder |
| • Issue 752 (2018-02-26): OviOS 2.31, performing off-line upgrades, elementary OS's new installer, UBports gets test devices, Redcore team improves security |
| • Issue 751 (2018-02-19): DietPi 6.1, testing KDE's Plasma Mobile, Nitrux packages AppImage in default install, Solus experiments with Wayland |
| • Issue 750 (2018-02-12): Solus 3, getting Deb packages upstream to Debian, NetBSD security update, elementary OS explores AppCentre changes |
| • Issue 749 (2018-02-05): Freespire 3 and Linspire 7.0, misunderstandings about Wayland, Xorg and Mir, Korora slows release schedule, Red Hat purchases CoreOS |
| • Issue 748 (2018-01-29): siduction 2018.1.0, SolydXK 32-bit editions, building an Ubuntu robot, desktop-friendly Debian options |
| • Issue 747 (2018-01-22): Ubuntu MATE 17.10, recovering open files, creating a new distribution, KDE focusing on Wayland features |
| • Issue 746 (2018-01-15): deepin 15.5, openSUSE's YaST improvements, new Ubuntu 17.10 media, details on Spectre and Meltdown bugs |
| • Issue 745 (2018-01-08): GhostBSD 11.1, Linspire and Freespire return, wide-spread CPU bugs patched, adding AppImage launchers to the application menu |
| • Issue 744 (2018-01-01): MX Linux 17, Ubuntu pulls media over BIOS bug, PureOS gets endorsed by the FSF, openSUSE plays with kernel boot splash screens |
| • Issue 743 (2017-12-18): Daphile 17.09, tools for rescuing files, Fedora Modular Server delayed, Sparky adds ARM support, Slax to better support wireless networking |
| • Full list of all issues |
| Random Distribution | 
Magic Linux
Magic Linux was a new distribution, which was specifically designed for Chinese users. Magic Linux was a non-commercial production completely developed by Linux enthusiasts with a simple motive in mind: say farewell to endless Chinese localisations from one Linux distribution to another and bring the native Chinese support to your desktop.
Status: Discontinued
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