DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 692, 19 December 2016

Feature Story (by Joshua Allen Holm)

Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 review



For users with older computers, some of the modern Linux distributions can be too resource intensive. Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 is a lightweight distribution designed for those users. The minimum system requirements are a 500MHz processor, 128MB of RAM, and 4GB of disk space. The recommended requirements are a 1.0GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and 10GB of disk space. Available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, as well as a "Legacy" release for really old 32-bit systems, Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 can easily bring new life to older computers.



Bodhi Linux offers a couple of download options beyond the 32-bit/64-bit choice. There is a Standard release and an AppPack version. The Standard release is very bare-bones with only a minimal set of pre-installed options, while the AppPack version comes with a larger number of bundled applications. The ISO for the 64-bit Standard version is 647MB and the 64-bit AppPack version is 1.21GB (about twice the size). For the purposes of this review, I opted for the Standard version, so I could customize my system as I wished. However, I will be mentioning some of the AppPack version's additional software throughout this review.



Installing Bodhi Linux



The live USB I made using the ISO file I downloaded booted quickly, and I was presented with a very nice looking desktop with a helpful quick start guide, which provided a lot of useful information about Bodhi. Honestly, I did not spend much time poking around in the live environment and immediately started the installer. Though from my limited experience using the desktop while the installer ran, the live version is very usable.





Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 -- The Quick Start Guide

(full image size: 150kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 is based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, so there were no real surprises when it came to installing. The installer is the standard Ubiquity installer with just a few theme changes and Bodhi-specific information screens. The only problem I had was the fact that the custom theme used seems to not have an image for unchecked check boxes and unselected radio buttons. A selected option has a mark, but nothing is displayed in front of non-selected options, making it hard to figure out where to click. Users who have never used Ubiquity before might not even know they are being presented with options they can choose. Overall, it is a minor flaw, but something that should probably be addressed.



The Moksha desktop



Bodhi's desktop environment is called Moksha. The Bodhi website describes this desktop as "a continuation of the Enlightenment 17 desktop," which "consists of the back porting of bug fixes and features from future Enlightenment releases, as well as the removal of half finished/broken things E17 contained."





Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 -- The Moksha desktop

(full image size: 820kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



For a lightweight desktop environment, Moksha is beautiful without needing a lot of system resources. On my system, with no extra applications running, the RAM usage was approximately 120MB, give or take a few megabytes either way. Despite low RAM usage, Moksha and the default applications have some wonderful graphical effects. The mouse cursor has a glowing green outline when the mouse or trackpad button is clicked. Terminology, the terminal application, has a glowing blue text cursor and, when doing something that would trigger a boring error beep on most systems, Terminology's window flashes red. This red flash is not a simple, quick color change, it is actually a polished animation. It alerts the user that something went wrong without being overpowering or needlessly distracting.



While I cannot find much wrong with Moksha overall, beyond a general sense of it being a little rough around the edges, I have to say that the graphical effect for the clock in the system tray is super distracting. The current time is displayed in glowing green numbers, which looks really nice, but all the non-current digits are also displayed in light gray. The effect is similar to a digital alarm clock using various lines to create the various numbers by only lighting certain elements, but in the case of Moksha's clock, the numbers are not the LED-style seen on alarm clocks, so you can see nine other digits stacked underneath the currently active digit. I will admit I am nitpicking here, but I found clock's display to be way too jumbled.



While Moksha is very nice, there are a few minor drawbacks with the default applications. The included text editor, ePad, is one of the most spartan text editors I have ever used. It is functional, but there are very few options to customize it. It is the same way for a lot of the bundled apps in the Standard version. The applications are nice, but basic. They might be enough for some people, but could be very limiting for others. Thankfully, the distribution does provide a nice selection of more robust alternatives through its package manager.



Installing and updating software



Like I noted above, I used the Standard version of the install media, so my system did not have much software installed. It came with the Midori web browser, the Terminology terminal emulator, PCManFM file manager, ePad text editor, ePhoto image viewer, and a handful of system utilities for adjusting various settings and updating software. The AppPack version includes a much longer list of bundled software including key applications like LibreOffice and the VLC media player.





Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 -- The AppCenter software manager

(full image size: 89kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



The default method for installing software in the Standard version is the Bodhi AppCenter. This web-based AppCenter contains a rather limited number of packages, but the ones that are included are the big name applications. For web browsers, Chromium and Firefox are available to install and the office category provides lighter applications, like Abiword and Gnumeric, and full office suites, including both Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. It is the same for all the other software categories; the big name applications are there, but overall selection of software is very limited. This drawback can easily be bypassed by installing the Synaptic package manager (which comes included by default in the AppPack version) and installing software from a much larger selection of packages, basically anything available in the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS repositories.



Even without resorting to installing Synaptic, I was able to add enough software to my system to make it usable. I had a web browser, e-mail client, terminal, office suite, video player, and a few other utilities. While I could have easily installed from the AppPack install media and had most of these applications included by default, I like that I could start from a minimal desktop and select the packages I wanted.





Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 -- The update manager

(full image size: 690kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



System updates are handled using the eepDater utility. This basic utility does exactly what it is supposed to, so there is not much to say about it. Run the updater, select which updates you want to install, and it installs them. For the entire time I used Bodhi Linux 4.0.0, I had zero problems with the updater, which is a testament both to the updater and the Bodhi team's ability to make their extra packages mesh with the Ubuntu base. When dealing with distributions that are a base distro plus extras, sometimes things can get broken or messed up, but I saw none of that when I was using Bodhi.



Final thoughts



Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 is an excellent choice for anyone looking for a lightweight Linux distribution for their older computers, or anyone who wants something just a little different. While the Moksha desktop is not perfect and it still has a few minor rough edges, it is a functional, traditional desktop. The only real negative with Bodhi is the small number of applications available though Bodhi's AppCenter, but even that is easily bypassed by installing and using the Synaptic package manager. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a Lenovo Ideapad 100-15IBD laptop with the following specifications: Processor: 2.2GHz Intel Core i3-5020U CPU

Storage: Seagate 500GB 5400 RPM hard drive

Memory: 4GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8723BE 802.11n Wireless Network Adapter

Display: Intel HD Graphics 5500

Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith)

Calculate's new Utilities package, Solus and Ubuntu MATE build new application menu, CoreOS becomes Container Linux



The Calculate Linux team has announced their first beta release of Calculate Utilities. The Utilities package features a suite of server configuration tools which will help the administrator perform common tasks. " The first beta of Calculate Utilities 3.5 has been made available. The brand new sys-apps/calculate-utils package now features server configuration tools, even though only basics are supported for the time being, such as database deployment, LDAP server configuration, creating accounts for Unix users, files and configuration backups, etc. We completely rewrote the server utilities. Server templates were moved to the Calculate overlay. Two more USE flags, backup and server, were added to the package, which stand respectively for creating backups and server configuration. " Further information on the Utilities suite and its features can be found in the project's blog post. * * * * * The Solus and Ubuntu MATE projects are working in collaboration to build a better application menu for the MATE desktop environment. The new menu is called Brisk and is written in C in order to offer better performance. The This Week In Solus newsletter reports: " Brisk Menu will be featured in the ISO snapshot for our Solus MATE Edition and the work done on Brisk Menu will be ported back to Budgie 11. Additionally, we're proud to announce that the Ubuntu MATE project has expressed enthusiasm about Brisk Menu and is helping to fund development of it, so all MATE desktop users can benefit from a fast, modern menu implementation. The Ubuntu MATE project will be integrating Brisk Menu as soon as it can replace the core functionality of MATE Menu, and will see that Brisk Menu is packaged for Debian and made available in the Debian and Ubuntu archives. " Ubuntu MATE's lead developer, Martin Wimpress, confirmed the ongoing collaboration in an Google+ post. * * * * * The CoreOS distribution is a Linux-based project for servers. The distribution is designed to be streamlined for running containers and provides rolling updates. The project has announced a change in the name of the distribution from CoreOS to Container Linux. " Over the years, CoreOS (the brand) has grown to represent not just a product but the leadership and expertise we provide to our customers and in the open community. So to differentiate our company from this widely used product, we have renamed CoreOS Linux to 'Container Linux by CoreOS' and have given it a new logo as well. Further information can be found in the project's announcement. * * * * * These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.





Technology Review (by Jesse Smith)

Cappsule - Lightweight virtual machine security



One of our readers sent me a link to Cappsule and recommended I look into it. Cappsule is a product of Quarkslab which strives to improve security by isolating processes. The project's website states: Cappsule is a new kind of hypervisor developed by Quarkslab (to our knowledge, there's no similar public project). Its goal is to virtualize any software on the fly (e.g. web browser, office suite, media player) into lightweight VMs called cappsules. Attacks are confined inside cappsules and therefore don't have any impact on the host OS. Applications don't need to be repackaged, and their usage remains the same for the end user: it's completely transparent. Moreover, the OS doesn't need to be re-installed nor modified. At this time, Cappsule is still in development and carries the beta tag. The software can be installed from a Deb package on an existing instance of Ubuntu 16.04. Alternatively, there are VMware and VirtualBox appliances we can download in order to test the Cappsule software before we install it locally.



I decided to try the VirtualBox appliance first. I downloaded the 2.1GB compressed archive, confirmed the appliance's checksum and tried to import it into VirtualBox. Importing the appliance failed due to storage-related errors. I then created a new virtual machine and tried to attach the provided virtual hard disk, which again failed.



Though not off to a great start, I decided to try installing Cappsule directly on an existing copy of Ubuntu 16.04.1. I downloaded the 540kB Deb package and tried to install it. The package was missing a dependency, specifically the xserver-xorg-video-dummy package. I installed this missing item and then installed the Cappsule Deb package.



According to the project's documentation, Cappsule includes a background daemon which we need to start before using Cappsule. After that, we should be able to run commands inside cappsules by prefixing our commands with virt exec. For example, we might run "virt exec firefox" or "virt exec vi". At first, the virt command was not recognized and I found this was due to the program being installed in the /usr/local/cappsule/usr/bin directory which had to be added to my user account's command path. With this done, I tried running virt and got back an error: "Client error: cannot connect to cappsule server."



As it turned out, the server was not running yet. I launched the server (it needs to be run with root or sudo privileges) and tried again. Once more I was told virt could not connect to its server. A little experimenting showed the Cappsule server was terminating immediately upon launch, not running in the background as expected. To work around this, I ran the Cappsule server in debugging mode. The only thing debugging mode offered me was an error which read: "finit_module: File exists", followed by the daemon shutting down.



A trip back to the project's documentation lead me to realize Cappsule is available in two flavours, one apparently for desktop applications and another for command line programs or services. Since the Desktop version appears, judging by the documentation, to be trickier to get working smoothly, I removed the Desktop version of the package and installed the Server edition.



Trying to run the Server edition of Cappsule worked (or did not work) exactly the same as the Desktop edition. The daemon would crash and I could get no helpful error messages out of the debugging mode. A side-effect of installing the Server edition was, when I rebooted Ubuntu, my operating system would only boot to a command line interface. I was no longer brought to a graphical login screen at boot time. Even once the Cappsule packages had been removed, Ubuntu still only booted to a text console. I could login, but not launch a graphical environment as Cappsule had changed my X software settings.



At this point, Cappsule does not appear to be a practical tool. I could not import the virtual machine appliance and neither of the two Deb packages provided me with a working copy of the Cappsule daemon. Adding insult to injury, removing Cappsule effectively removed my ability to run graphical software on my installation of Ubuntu. The project has some documentation, but it's still sparse and mostly covers what Cappsule is without diving a great deal into how it works or how to trouble-shoot issues.



For now, people hoping to isolate their processes would probably be better served by Firejail, Qubes OS or a virtual machine.





Released Last Week

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.



Operating System Torrent MD5 checksum CentOS 7-1611 CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1611/sha256sum.txt.asc 51303de03dad7fe4c3fa1cede05999e7 MX Linux 16 MX-16_x64.iso beeaa7c1cecc10013e23dabb498733fd Tails 2.9.1 tails-i386-2.9.1/tails-i386-2.9.1.iso.sig d743531a71b44fc24e7104a1cd9c047f



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: 264

Total data uploaded: 49.1TB

Upcoming Releases and Announcements

Opinion Poll

Process isolation



Process isolation can improve security, especially when running network services which may be compromised by outside attackers. This week we discussed Cappsule, a technology created to help isolate running processes from each other. In past articles we have talked about other technologies, such as Qubes OS and Firejail, which seek to isolate processes from the rest of the operating system. There are several other ways to sandbox applications, including using Linux containers, virtual machines and FreeBSD jails.



This week we would like to know what, if any, technology you use to keep your applications and services isolated from the rest of the operating system. If you are using one we do not list here, please tell us about it in the comments.



You can see the results of our previous poll on the types of feature stories we publish here. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.



Process isolation



Cappsule: 6 (0%) Firejail: 169 (12%) FreeBSD jail: 79 (5%) Linux container: 79 (5%) Qubes OS: 50 (3%) Virtual machine: 465 (32%) Other: 33 (2%) None: 585 (40%)