 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 783, 1 October 2018 |
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Welcome to this year's 40th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Many members of the open source community run multiple operating systems on the same computer. This gives people the opportunity to try out multiple distributions running on physical hardware without giving up their previous operating system. This week, in our Questions and Answers column, we talk about how to set up a dual-boot environment with two very different operating systems: Ubuntu and FreeBSD. Our Opinion Poll also explores booting multiple operating systems and we would like to find out how many platforms you have on your computer. First though we explore the Quirky distribution, a sister project to Puppy Linux with some experimental ideas. We also discuss Canonical offering extended support for Ubuntu 14.04. Lubuntu switching from the LXDE desktop to running LXQt, and the Linux Mint team improving the Cinnamon desktop's performance. Plus we are pleased to share the releases of the past week and list the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a fantastic week and happy reading!
Content:
- Review: Quirky 8.6
- News: Ubuntu plans extended support for 14.04, Linux Mint works on performance improvements, Lubuntu switches to LXQt
- Questions and answers: Dual booting Linux and FreeBSD
- Released last week: pfSense 2.4.4, KDE neon 20180925, Robolinux 10.1
- Torrent corner: 4MLinux, Archman, Bluestar, Haiku, HardenedBSD, Nitrux, pfSense, Robolinux, SmartOS
- Upcoming releases: UBports 16.04 OTA-5
- Opinion poll: Booting multiple operating systems
- Reader comments
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (14MB) and MP3 (10MB) formats.
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| Feature Story (by Robert Rijkhoff) |
Quirky 8.6
Quirky is an offshoot of Puppy Linux. The live distro is maintained by Barry Kauler, who until 2013 was the lead developer of Puppy. The main difference between Quirky and Puppy is that Quirky is experimental - its aim is "to explore new ideas in Puppy's underlying infrastructure".
The official introduction to Quirky consists of a few short paragraphs on the developer's blog. The last paragraph acknowledges that the page "needs to be filled out a bit more" and refers people who want to find out more about the distro to the blog's Quirky tag. There is also a link to the Quirky docs which consists of a single page that reads: "coming soon".
As I was not that familiar with Puppy I read most of the blog posts with the Quirky tag. The blog posts are rather technical and aimed at people interested in the underlying technologies. If, like me, you would like an overview of how to use the distro on a day-to-day basis then you are out of luck.
Installation and first impressions
Installing Quirky is easy enough: you download the ISO, transfer it to a USB stick (or CD/DVD) and boot your computer from the USB. It is recommended that the USB is at least 8GB in size - that will give you enough space for the distro itself and to store data.
Quirky 8.6 -- Quirky's setup wizard
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On the first run you are presented with a "Quick Setup" wizard. You can use this to configure the locale, date, keyboard layout and screen resolution. Next, you are asked if you want to configure the network. There are two separate tools for this. I went with the recommended Simple Network Setup utility, which worked fine. It is worth noting that out of the box Ethernet won't work and that you may need to configure your network every time you boot Quirky (sometimes Quirky remembered the network settings but most times I needed to reconfigure the connection). On the bright side, I didn't have any issues with wireless Internet during my trial.
Quirky 8.6 -- Configuring the network
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Quirky uses the BusyBox init system and the desktop environment is JWM. The desktop features a single panel with a menu, quick launchers, workspace switchers, application launchers and a system tray.
At first sight the menu looks fairly organised but when you start looking inside the various categories you might get a little overwhelmed. Quirky comes with an awful lot of software pre-installed. Among the applications I don't usually see in Linux distros are a graphical application to search the whois database, an animated GIF generator and a personal wiki creator.
Quirky 8.6 -- Quirky's menu
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Another thing I noticed is the file system hierarchy. When I launched the file manager it opened the /file directory, which contained directories such as archive, downloads, media, and projects. As far as I can tell this is the home directory, although the set of default sub-directories is somewhat unusual.
The reason I am not quite sure about the purpose of the /file directory is that most applications will try to save files to the /root directory. In a way that makes sense, as you are logged in as the super user, but it made me wonder about the relation between the /file and /root directory. I then found that there is also a /home directory with two sub-directories: rover and zeus. An 'about' file in these directories explains that rover and zeus are "intended" as unprivileged users in a container and that they are used in EasyShare (an application for sharing files over a network). The file refers to "container ssh0" for more information but where to look for that container is not explained.
Quirky 8.6 -- Reading the documentation about "rover"
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It is also possible to run applications as the user spot. I found some documentation in /usr/share/doc that talked about spot and fido, which are simply non-root users. The documentation was from 2013 and talked about Puppy rather than Quirky, so my guess is that rover and zeus are Quirky-specific additions.
Applications
Quirky ships with a very large number of applications, many of which have the same function. For example, you get two clipboard managers, two checksum calculators, two batch file renamers and three screenshot utilities; under Business you will find four calculators and under Multimedia you will see applications such as Asunder audio CD ripper, CD player/ripper (pMusic), Pcdripper CD song ripper and pMusic -player -manager -grabber.
Quirky 8.6 -- Calculators galore
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is also an alternative application menu. If you find the main menu a little too cluttered you can click on the apps icon on the desktop to launch EasyApps, which effectively is an application menu in an application window. The layout is a lot less overwhelming than the main menu: under Business there is just one calculator and under Media you've got a single CD ripper. EasyApps also doesn't show the names of applications; instead it provides a generic name and description (such as "CD Ripper - Copy/Extract songs from CD"). Although it is awkward to have a separate window for a menu I did find it easier to use than the main menu. The same goes for the PupControl application, which avoids having to locate configuration options in the menu.
Quirky 8.6 -- The EasyApps and PupControl applications
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Among the more recognisable applications are the SeaMonkey web browser and e-mail client, ROX-Filer file manager, LibreOffice (version 5.1) and the Leafpad and Geany text editors. Generally speaking, these applications worked fine. Many of the less common applications, however, were buggy. Some were usable but a little annoying. For instance, the Figaro's Password Manager works just like other graphical password managers. It has one feature I was not familiar with though: for each entry you are supposed to define a "launcher". The launcher options are None, Web, ssh and Generic command. If you choose None for an entry (which is the default) you can't open the entry - Figaro will complain that the password's launcher is "undefined". I honestly haven't got a clue what the launchers are about and the only way I could view passwords was by selecting the 'Edit' option for an entry.
Other applications were simply unusable. For example, at first I was quite impressed by the pMusic Radio Streamer. The application obtains lots of radio streams from somewhere and lets you not only play streams but also record them. I was indeed able to start recording streams but there was no obvious way to stop recording. My best guess was that I needed to click the "Quit and Update db" button. That, however, resulted in an "Updating database, please wait" message and then an error: the directory to which the audio was saved (named "incomplete") had been deleted. The directory had indeed gone - but it wasn't me who had deleted it.
Quirky 8.6 -- Trying to stop recording an audio stream
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Meanwhile, the "Updating database" message stayed on the screen and the pMusic window had gone blank - the latter appears to happen when an application launches a new window, such as pMusic's "Radio Grabber" dialogue. The main pMusic window would not be redrawn, so I decided to try to kill it via the Pprocess process manager. The application sorts processes by their PID and clicking on the headers to change the sort order resulted in a "No action defined" error and searches for the process returned no results.
Quirky 8.6 -- Trying to kill pMusic
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Interestingly, one of the options shown when you right-click on an application's launcher is "Kill". Selecting that option closed the blank pMusic window but the audio continued to play. The only way to actually kill the application was via the command line. The "Updating database" message turned out to have its own PID and needed to be killed separately.
I encountered issues like these all the time. I don't mind that things like connecting to the Internet are a somewhat manual process. Quirky aims to provide a lightweight, live distro and that comes at a cost. However, I do dislike that few applications are actually usable and that the interface is, frankly, a mess. There is no reason why everything is so ugly and dysfunctional. JWM can look perfectly elegant and applications that are lightweight aren't necessarily broken.
Software management
Quirky is based on Ubuntu 16.04 but is quite different architecturally. I have already mentioned the file system structure. A more noticeable difference is the package manager. Quirky uses the graphical PETget package manager, which is quite a different beast than APT.
Quirky 8.6 -- The PETget package manager
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PETget's main window shows the software repositories - Quirky is pulling packages from the Ubuntu Xenial repositories and the pet-xerus and pet-noarch repositories - and packages are organised in categories. As with so many other Quirky applications, the interface is rather poor. The application shows a lot of information and I therefore maximised the window so that I wouldn't have to scroll from left to right to view the package names and descriptions. However, maximising the window causes the list with packages to shift to the right, leaving a huge amount of empty space to the left. To read package descriptions you still have to scroll horizontally.
Quirky 8.6 -- Examining dependencies
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More annoyingly, PETget also isn't very good at installing and removing software. The first package I tried to install was the Midori browser. PETget told me that Midori had three dependencies and invited me to "examine" them. The install dialogue showed that there were in fact five dependencies and offered to install the lot. Hitting the Install button resulted in lots of yellow blocks flickering on the screen, and then PETget got stuck. The install dialogue had disappeared but at the top of the screen I got a "please wait, installing" message that just sat there. The main PETget window had of course gone blank and had therefore become unusable.
Quirky 8.6 -- Trying to install the Midori browser
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I had exactly the same result with other graphical applications I tried to install. I did have more luck installing command line utilities. For instance, I was able to install the dnsutils package, which had seven dependencies. As before, the install process caused lots of flickering on the screen but PETget got the job done.
Removing software doesn't appear to be possible at all. The first hurdle is finding the name of the package to be removed. I wanted to remove a couple of the calculators but a search for "*calc*" in all repositories returned just one result: "galculator" (which is interesting as it is the only calculator whose name doesn't match the string "calc"). The package couldn't be removed - clicking on the result would offer to install the application. PETget does list installed packages in a separate pane and clicking on those items enables you to remove a package but the list always showed the same 20-odd packages, whatever I queried.
I thought it might be easier to manage software from the command line. I found that there is a petget command but it looks like the utility simply opens the graphical PETget package manager to either install (petget +package-name) or remove (petget -package-name) software. Running "petget --help" therefore didn't return any help text - instead it offered to remove the package '-help'. As an aside, running "man petget" triggered a Google search for "man petget site:linux.die.net". The search yielded no results.
Quirky 8.6 -- Exploring the petget command
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My final attempt was to remove galculator by running the command "petget -galculator". I was hardly surprised when PETget told me it couldn't find the package.
Installing Quirky to the hard drive
It is possible to install Quirky to the hard drive via the Quirky Universal Installer. You've got two options: you can do a "full" or "frugal" install. I first had a look at the frugal install which, as I understand it, installs everything in a single file. The installer only offered to write the file to the USB stick from which Quirky was running, which didn't seem all that useful - I wanted to install Quirky to a spare partition on my hard drive.
Quirky 8.6 -- The Quirky Universal Installer
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I got a bit further with the full install. I could point the installer at the ISO image I had downloaded and select the destination partition from a drop-down menu, and after a few minutes I got a confirmation message that the installation had finished.
The real challenge, though, comes after the installation has finished as the installer doesn't configure the GRUB bootloader. The confirmation message explains what text you can add to the menu.lst file if you are using the GRUB4DOS bootloader but doesn't have anything to say about GRUB. Running os-prober from within Fedora retrieved Quirky Linux and running "grub2-mkconfig" appeared to add it to the GRUB menu - but after rebooting my laptop I found Quirky wasn't there. As I had little desire to install Quirky anyway I decided that the installer must still be a work in progress.
Conclusions
Much as I wanted to like Quirky, I found very little to like. The distro is developed by one person who is clearly very interested in the underlying technologies of Puppy Linux (in particular the WoofQ build system). If that is what you are interested in then Quirky is fantastic distribution and reading blog posts tagged with Quirky will be fascinating. However, if you are a mere mortal looking for a live distro that looks elegant and is functional then Quirky will be a disappointment.
Of course, Quirky is marketed as an experimental distribution. It is a pet project that no doubt benefits the family of Puppy distributions. Still, a little bit of information about the unusual file system hierarchy, the PETget package manager and installing Quirky to a hard drive would go a long way to help potential users. Similarly, a little bit of quality control and usability testing would make running Quirky much less frustrating. The fact that there is no documentation, no bug tracker and no community forum is telling.
The one good thing I have to say about Quirky is that the distro was very responsive. It took just over ten seconds to get to the desktop and all applications launched instantly. Other than that Quirky is a distro to avoid.
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Hardware used for this review
I ran Quirky on various devices but mainly used a Lenovo G50-30 laptop with the following specifications:
- Processor: Intel Celeron CPU N2820, 2.13GHz
- Memory: 4GB of RAM
- Wireless network adaptor: Realtek Semiconductor RTL8723BE
- Wired network adaptor: Realtek Semiconductor RTL8111
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Visitor supplied rating
Quirky has a visitor supplied average rating of: 6.4/10 from 10 review(s).
Have you used Quirky? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Ubuntu plans extended support for 14.04, Linux Mint works on performance improvements, Lubuntu switches to LXQt
Canonical has announced the company plans to provide extended, commercial support for users of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS once the distribution reaches the end of its normal, five year support term. This will allow businesses to continue running Ubuntu 14.04 past the scheduled April 2019 cut-off date for security updates. The extended support term, called Extended Security Maintenance (ESM), will start in 2019: "Ubuntu 14.04 LTS - ESM will become available once Ubuntu 14.04 reaches its End of Life on April 30, 2019. ESM is a feature available as part of Canonical's commercial support package: Ubuntu Advantage. ESM can also be purchased on a stand-alone basis." The length of the ESM and its cost were not included in the blog post.
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The Linux Mint team, having published new versions of both the project's Ubuntu- and Debian-based branches, have turned their attention to working on new features and performance improvements. Two areas which have received a lot of attention are the Cinnamon desktop and the Nemo file manager. The distribution's monthly newsletter reports: "The star of the month within the Cinnamon team is Jason Hicks. Last month we talked about VSYNC, input lag and performance improvements within the Muffin window manager. This is now a reality and it's all been merged in preparation for Muffin 4.0. Input lag was reduced on NVIDIA cards and the window manager feels more responsive when moving windows. You now also have the possibility to turn off VSYNC in the System Settings. This basically delegates VSYNC to your GPU driver (which needs to handle it otherwise you get screen tearing) and if that driver performs well, it can eliminate input lag and boost performance. Jason also ported a huge amount of upstream changes from the GNOME project: Similar to Mutter, Muffin now uses its own embedded version of COGL and Clutter, which received most of the patches applied to the one in GNOME. Many Mutter performance improvements were applied to Muffin. CJS received many commits from GNOME's GJS, including improvements to its garbage collection."
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The Lubuntu team has been planning a migration from using the LXDE desktop to running LXQt as the default desktop for a while now. With Lubuntu 18.10 now on the horizon, the developers have made the switch official. "This is the first Lubuntu milestone to be released with LXQt as the main desktop environment. The Lubuntu project, in 18.10 and successive releases, will no longer support the LXDE desktop environment or tools, and will instead focus on the LXQt desktop environment." Additional information on Lubuntu's 18.10 Beta release can be found in the project's announcement.
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These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Dual booting Linux and FreeBSD
Exploring-two-operating-systems asks: I think a good topic for your Q&A section would be dual-booting BSDs (if you need a specific one FreeBSD would likely be best) and Linux. It's not something that is well documented on-line and many Linux users are at least somewhat interested in trying out BSDs.
DistroWatch answers: Most of the process of setting up a dual boot environment is fairly straight forward. The only tricky part, in my experience, has been in the initial planning phase. When you want to dual boot it is important to plan out how many partitions you will need, how big they will be and what will be put on each one.
For instance, if I want to dual boot Ubuntu and FreeBSD I will need at least two disk partitions (one for each operating system). I may also want swap space, perhaps a separate /home partition for Ubuntu (FreeBSD will probably keep a separate /home mount point inside its own partition). I may then also want a separate data partition where I can dump files to be transferred between the two operating systems. In the end, I may end up with a need for anywhere from two to five partitions for these two operating systems.
However many partitions we end up needing (and I am going to do this example assuming we just need two partitions, for simplicity's sake) it is important to keep track of which operating system is on which partition. For example, if we plan to set up our disk with a partition for Ubuntu, one for swap, and one for FreeBSD (in that order), then it is important to remember Ubuntu is going to be on partition #1 and FreeBSD will be on #3.
In the following walk through, I am going to assume we are installing Ubuntu first on one dedicated partition and then installing FreeBSD on the remaining disk space. This is as simple as it gets, but the steps will be the same in more complex arrangements.
I recommend installing the Linux distribution (Ubuntu in my case) first. In my case I will assume Ubuntu is being put on the first partition and taking up roughly half the disk. The rest of the disk will remain unallocated space. This can be done through Ubuntu's installer by taking the manual partitioning option and making the first partition the root (/) partition. Any other unused partitions should be deleted at this time. The rest of the installation process can be handled normally.
Once Ubuntu has been installed then we can install FreeBSD. Once again, we can take our normal (default) settings all the way through the FreeBSD installer, with the exception of the partitioning section. When it comes to partitioning on FreeBSD there are a few options: automatically set up a UFS file system, automatically set up a ZFS volume, or manually partition the disk. At this point we should create a FreeBSD partition (called a slice) and then place a root (/) UFS-formatted file system inside the FreeBSD partition. This places FreeBSD, in this example, on partition #2.
When FreeBSD is finished installing we can restart the computer and we should be automatically booted into Ubuntu. This is normal. Next we need to adjust Ubuntu's GRUB boot loader to recognize the FreeBSD system so it appears as a boot option. This can be done by opening the /etc/grub.d/40_custom text file and adding the following text to the bottom of the file, leaving the rest of the text alone. The bottom of the 40_custom file should read:
menuentry "FreeBSD" {
insmod ufs2
set root=(hd0,2)
chainloader +1
}
In the above example, the 2 in "(hd0,2)" is in bold. This is the partition number where FreeBSD lives. If FreeBSD were on the third partition, we would replace the 2 with a 3. This is why it is important to keep track of how many partitions we have and which operating system is on each partition.
Next we need to make sure the boot menu is displayed when the computer is turned on. Otherwise the system will always default to launching Ubuntu without giving us a chance to choose a different operating system. We can do this by opening another text file, /etc/defaults/grub, and deleting the line which reads "GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden".
The final step is to run the following command from Ubuntu's command line:
sudo update-grub
When the command finishes, we should be able to restart the computer and select either Ubuntu or FreeBSD from the GRUB menu.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
pfSense 2.4.4
Jim Pingle has announced the availability of pfSense 2.4.4. The new release of the pfSense operating system for routers and firewalls is based on FreeBSD 11.2 and offers several new features: "2.4.4 includes a number of significant new features: OS Upgrade - base Operating System upgraded to FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE-p3. As a part of moving to FreeBSD 11.2, support is included for C3000-based hardware. PHP 7.2 - PHP upgraded to version 7.2, which required numerous changes to syntax throughout the source code and packages. Routed IPsec (VTI) - routed IPsec is now possible using using FreeBSD if_ipsec(4) Virtual Tunnel Interfaces (VTI). IPsec Speed Improvements - the new Asynchronous Cryptography option under the IPsec Advanced Settings tab can dramatically improve IPsec performance on multi-core hardware. Default Gateway Group - the default gateway may now be configured using a Gateway Group setup for failover, which replaces Default Gateway Switching. Limiter AQM/Queue Schedulers - limiters now include support for several Active Queue Management (AQM) methods and Queue Scheduler configurations such as FQ_CODEL." Further details can be found in the project's release announcement and in the release notes.
KDE neon 20180925
Jonathan Riddell has announced that the KDE neon distribution has been upgraded and re-based to Ubuntu's latest long-term support release, version 18.04 "Bionic Beaver". KDE neon is a desktop-focused Linux distribution that provides the very latest KDE Plasma desktop on top of Ubuntu's base system. The users of KDE neon are encouraged to upgrade to the latest version via Ubuntu's built-in upgrade utility. From the release announcement: "The KDE neon team is proud to announce the rebase of our packages onto Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 'Bionic Beaver. We encourage all users to upgrade now. The installable ISOs and Docker images have also been updated to run on 18.04. KDE neon is a project to deliver KDE's wonderful suite of software quickly. We use modern DevOps techniques to automatically build, QA and deploy our packages. We work directly with the KDE community rather than staying far away in a separate project. Our packages are built on the latest Ubuntu LTS edition and today we have moved to their new 18.04 release. This means our users can get newer drivers and third-party packages. There is an upgrade process from the previous 16.04 LTS base which we have spent the last few months writing and running QA on to ensure it runs smoothly."
KDE neon 20180925 -- Running the Plasma desktop
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Robolinux 10.1
The Robolinux team has published a new version of their Ubuntu-based distribution. The new release is Robolinux 10.1 and is based on Ubuntu 18.04, bringing many package updates and support through to 2023. The new version is available in Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce editions. "Robolinux has released its three brand new Raptor Series 10 Operating systems: Cinnamon, MATE 3D and Xfce v10.1 LTS 2023 versions. The Robolinux Series 10 versions are built upon Ubuntu 18.04 which comes with the 4.15 Linux kernel and a plethora of enhancements and improvements such as driver support for the newest hardware. The Robolinux Cinnamon & MATE 3D & Xfce 10.1 versions have free built in Stealth VM, C Drive to VM plus our one click app installers and also provide our users with free expert tech support. Each version has our users favorite apps already installed such as the newest Firefox, Thunderbird, Virtualbox, GIMP, LibreOffice 5, Deluge torrent downloader, Open VPN, VLC, Banshee, Kazam screen recorder, Synaptic, GParted, Brasero DVD Burner plus a few very popular utilities. The built in optional one click app installers include: Tor Browser, Tor Chat, BleachBit, Wireshark, I2P, Clam AntiVirus, Steam, Opera, Google Earth Pro and Google Chrome." See the project's Downloads page for further details.
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not 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 in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 1,037
- Total data uploaded: 21.2TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll |
Booting multiple operating systems
This week we talked about setting up a dual boot environment in our Questions and Answers column. We would like to find out how many operating systems our readers typically multi-boot on their main computer. Do you have just one dedicated operating system, two, three, a dozen? Let us know why you dual boot in the comments.
You can see the results of our previous poll on running operating systems which no longer receive security patches in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Booting multiple operating systems
| I boot just one OS: | 992 (39%) |
| I boot 2 OSes: | 856 (34%) |
| I boot 3-5 OSes: | 542 (21%) |
| I boot 6-10 OSes: | 97 (4%) |
| I boot more than 10 OSes: | 58 (2%) |
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| DistroWatch.com News |
DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 8 October 2018. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Article Search page. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews/submissions, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, donations, comments)
- Bruce Patterson (podcast)
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| Archives |
| • Issue 843 (2019-12-02): Obarun 2019.11.02, Bluestar 5.3.6, using special characters on the command line, Fedora plans to disable empty passwords, FreeBSD's quarterly status report |
| • Issue 842 (2019-11-25): SolydXK 10, System Adminstration Ethics book review, Debian continues init diversity debate, Google upstreaming Android kernel patches |
| • Issue 841 (2019-11-18): Emmabuntus DE3-1.00, changing keys in a keyboard layout, Debian phasing out Python 2 and voting on init diversity, Slackware gets unofficial updated live media |
| • Issue 840 (2019-11-11): Fedora 31, monitoring user activity, Fedora working to improve Python performance, FreeBSD gets faster networking |
| • Issue 839 (2019-11-04): MX 19, manipulating PDFs, Ubuntu plans features for 20.04, Fedora 29 nears EOL, Netrunner drops Manjaro-based edition |
| • Issue 838 (2019-10-28): Xubuntu 19.10, how init and service managers work together, DragonFly BSD provides emergency mode for HAMMER, Xfce team plans 4.16 |
| • Issue 837 (2019-10-21): CentOS 8.0-1905, Trident finds a new base, Debian plans firewall changes, 15 years of Fedora, how to merge directories |
| • Issue 836 (2019-10-14): Archman 2019.09, Haiku improves ARM support, Project Trident shifting base OS, Unix turns 50 |
| • Issue 835 (2019-10-07): Isotop, Mazon OS and, KduxOS, examples of using the find command, Mint's System Reports becomes proactive, Solus updates its desktops |
| • Issue 834 (2019-09-30): FreedomBox "Buster", CentOS gains a rolling release, Librem 5 phones shipping, Redcore updates its package manager |
| • Issue 833 (2019-09-23): Redcore Linux 1908, why Linux distros are free, Ubuntu making list of 32-bit software to keep, Richard M Stallman steps down from FSF leadership |
| • Issue 832 (2019-09-16): BlackWeb 1.2, checking for Wayland session and applications, Fedora to use nftables in firewalld, OpenBSD disables DoH in Firefox |
| • Issue 831 (2019-09-09): Adélie Linux 1.0 beta, using ffmpeg, awk and renice, Mint and elementary improvements, PureOS and Manjaro updates |
| • Issue 930 (2019-09-02): deepin 15.11, working with AppArmor profiles, elementary OS gets new greeter, exFAT support coming to Linux kernel |
| • Issue 829 (2019-08-26): EndeavourOS 2019.07.15, Drauger OS 7.4.1, finding the licenses of kernel modules, NetBSD gets Wayland application, GhostBSD changes base repo |
| • Issue 828 (2019-08-19): AcademiX 2.2, concerns with non-free firmware, UBports working on Unity8, Fedora unveils new EPEL channel, FreeBSD phasing out GCC |
| • Issue 827 (2019-08-12): Q4OS, finding files on the disk, Ubuntu works on ZFS, Haiku improves performance, OSDisc shutting down |
| • Issue 826 (2019-08-05): Quick looks at Resilient, PrimeOS, and BlueLight, flagship distros for desktops,Manjaro introduces new package manager |
| • Issue 825 (2019-07-29): Endless OS 3.6, UBports 16.04, gNewSense maintainer stepping down, Fedora developrs discuss optimizations, Project Trident launches stable branch |
| • Issue 824 (2019-07-22): Hexagon OS 1.0, Mageia publishes updated media, Fedora unveils Fedora CoreOS, managing disk usage with quotas |
| • Issue 823 (2019-07-15): Debian 10, finding 32-bit packages on a 64-bit system, Will Cooke discusses Ubuntu's desktop, IBM finalizes purchase of Red Hat |
| • Issue 822 (2019-07-08): Mageia 7, running development branches of distros, Mint team considers Snap, UBports to address Google account access |
| • Issue 821 (2019-07-01): OpenMandriva 4.0, Ubuntu's plan for 32-bit packages, Fedora Workstation improvements, DragonFly BSD's smaller kernel memory |
| • Issue 820 (2019-06-24): Clear Linux and Guix System 1.0.1, running Android applications using Anbox, Zorin partners with Star Labs, Red Hat explains networking bug, Ubuntu considers no longer updating 32-bit packages |
| • Issue 819 (2019-06-17): OS108 and Venom, renaming multiple files, checking live USB integrity, working with Fedora's Modularity, Ubuntu replacing Chromium package with snap |
| • Issue 818 (2019-06-10): openSUSE 15.1, improving boot times, FreeBSD's status report, DragonFly BSD reduces install media size |
| • Issue 817 (2019-06-03): Manjaro 18.0.4, Ubuntu Security Podcast, new Linux laptops from Dell and System76, Entroware Apollo |
| • Issue 816 (2019-05-27): Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, creating firewall rules, Antergos shuts down, Matthew Miller answers questions about Fedora |
| • Issue 815 (2019-05-20): Sabayon 19.03, Clear Linux's developer features, Red Hat explains MDS flaws, an overview of mobile distro options |
| • Issue 814 (2019-05-13): Fedora 30, distributions publish Firefox fixes, CentOS publishes roadmap to 8.0, Debian plans to use Wayland by default |
| • Issue 813 (2019-05-06): ROSA R11, MX seeks help with systemd-shim, FreeBSD tests unified package management, interview with Gael Duval |
| • Issue 812 (2019-04-29): Ubuntu MATE 19.04, setting up a SOCKS web proxy, Scientific Linux discontinued, Red Hat takes over Java LTS support |
| • Issue 811 (2019-04-22): Alpine 3.9.2, rsync examples, Ubuntu working on ZFS support, Debian elects new Project Leader, Obarun releases S6 tools |
| • Issue 810 (2019-04-15): SolydXK 201902, Bedrock Linux 0.7.2, Fedora phasing out Python 2, NetBSD gets virtual machine monitor |
| • Issue 809 (2019-04-08): PCLinuxOS 2019.02, installing Falkon and problems with portable packages, Mint offers daily build previews, Ubuntu speeds up Snap packages |
| • Issue 808 (2019-04-01): Solus 4.0, security benefits and drawbacks to using a live distro, Gentoo gets GNOME ports working without systemd, Redox OS update |
| • Issue 807 (2019-03-25): Pardus 17.5, finding out which user changed a file, new Budgie features, a tool for browsing FreeBSD's sysctl values |
| • Issue 806 (2019-03-18): Kubuntu vs KDE neon, Nitrux's znx, notes on Debian's election, SUSE becomes an independent entity |
| • Issue 805 (2019-03-11): EasyOS 1.0, managing background services, Devuan team debates machine ID file, Ubuntu Studio works to remain an Ubuntu Community Edition |
| • Issue 804 (2019-03-04): Condres OS 19.02, securely erasing hard drives, new UBports devices coming in 2019, Devuan to host first conference |
| • Issue 803 (2019-02-25): Septor 2019, preventing windows from stealing focus, NetBSD and Nitrux experiment with virtual machines, pfSense upgrading to FreeBSD 12 base |
| • Issue 802 (2019-02-18): Slontoo 18.07.1, NetBSD tests newer compiler, Fedora packaging Deepin desktop, changes in Ubuntu Studio |
| • Issue 801 (2019-02-11): Project Trident 18.12, the meaning of status symbols in top, FreeBSD Foundation lists ongoing projects, Plasma Mobile team answers questions |
| • Issue 800 (2019-02-04): FreeNAS 11.2, using Ubuntu Studio software as an add-on, Nitrux developing znx, matching operating systems to file systems |
| • Issue 799 (2019-01-28): KaOS 2018.12, Linux Basics For Hackers, Debian 10 enters freeze, Ubuntu publishes new version for IoT devices |
| • Issue 798 (2019-01-21): Sculpt OS 18.09, picking a location for swap space, Solus team plans ahead, Fedora trying to get a better user count |
| • Issue 797 (2019-01-14): Reborn OS 2018.11.28, TinyPaw-Linux 1.3, dealing with processes which make the desktop unresponsive, Debian testing Secure Boot support |
| • Issue 796 (2019-01-07): FreeBSD 12.0, Peppermint releases ISO update, picking the best distro of 2018, roundtable interview with Debian, Fedora and elementary developers |
| • Issue 795 (2018-12-24): Running a Pinebook, interview with Bedrock founder, Alpine being ported to RISC-V, Librem 5 dev-kits shipped |
| • 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 |
| • Full list of all issues |
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the Star Lite, Star LabTop and more. Available with a choice of Ubuntu, Linux Mint or Zorin OS pre-installed with many more distributions supported. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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| Random Distribution | 
Thisk Server
Thisk Server was a Debian-based Linux distribution designed for PBX (Private Branch Exchange) environments. It uses Asterisk - a free software implementation of PBX.
Status: Discontinued
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