DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 797, 14 January 2019

Feature Story (by Jesse Smith)

Reborn OS 2018.11.28 Reborn OS is a distribution from the Antergos and Arch Linux family of distributions. Like Antergos, Reborn uses the Cnchi system installer and provides a wide range of desktop environments and extra features we can enable at install time. Reborn's website mentions the project offers support for running Android applications through the Anbox compatibility software, works with Flatpaks, and can run the Mycroft personal desktop assistant.



I had previously tried Reborn OS back in October of 2018 and gave up trying to install the distribution because Cnchi kept running into problems downloading packages, telling me it had run into "error: 0". Since failure to download packages during the installation rendered it impossible to set up Reborn, I had to abandon the project.



Shortly after my truncated review appeared, one of the Reborn developers got in touch and reported that the problem with Cnchi had been fixed and invited me to try the distribution again. I gave the project a few months (and updated releases) to mature and then decided to give Reborn another test drive.



The Reborn ISO file is a 1.6GB download. Booting from the media brings up the Budgie desktop environment and shows us a welcome window. The welcome window appears to be borrowed from Antergos and displays buttons which will provide us with information. Some buttons link to the project's on-line source code repository, others offer to show us available software, another gives us a quick overview of the operating system.



Using the welcome window I ran into my first problem with Reborn. Clicking some of the buttons caused the operating system to lock up. For example, browsing the software list caused the system to freeze, necessitating a reboot. When I clicked on the source repository link, the Firefox browser opened, displayed the page and then the system locked up, again forcing a hard reset of the computer.





Reborn OS 2018.11.28 -- Reborn's welcome screen

(full image size:668kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



At this point I decided to stop exploring the live desktop and jumped into the Cnchi installer. The installer runs in a graphical window and feels similar in most respects to Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer or the Calamares installer. We are asked to select our preferred language from a list, select our country and select our time zone from a map. We are asked to confirm our keyboard's layout and then shown a list of available desktops. We can only choose one desktop to install, but the list of options is long and includes Budgie, Cinnamon, Enlightenment, GNOME, i3, KDE Plasma, LXQt, MATE, Openbox, Pantheon and Xfce. There is also one called "Windows interface", but its description does not say what technology is used to present the Windows-like view.



The installer next asks which features we would like to enable. Options include accessibility packages, system maintenance, AUR support, Bluetooth, Chromium, Firefox, LibreOffice, Mycroft, printing support, WINE, VLC and Spotify. The list goes on. I kept my selection short, sticking to some common desktop applications like LibreOffice, a web browser and Mycroft. Cnchi then asks if we want to let it sort its list of package mirrors or manually select mirrors. I took the recommended automated sort.



Partitioning comes next with the option of using guided or manual partitioning. I went with the manual option, and then had to wait as the installer told me it needed to finish sorting its mirror list before I could partition the drive. Once the mirrors are sorted, partitioning is straight forward and pleasantly streamlined. Finally, we are asked to provide a username and password for an account and the installer goes to work downloading and installing packages, over 700 packages in my case.



After waiting for about half an hour, Cnchi finally reported "Can't install necessary packages" and displayed the infamous error 0. Unfortunately there is no way to recover. The installer closes without telling us which package caused the problem, or giving us a chance to proceed anyway, or giving us the option to try another mirror. The installer closes and we are left to try again from step one. The project's documentation says we can try to work around the issue by manually editing the package list to remove the offending package, but that is difficult given there were over 700 packages to go through and Cnchi does not give us a clue as to which one caused the problem.



I ended up trying Reborn OS in a VirtualBox machine and on my laptop. In both cases I quickly ran into a dead end with the distribution. This was frustrating as it means that, despite the assurances of the developers that the system should now be reliable, the installer issue has not been fixed. If anything, it seems new stability issues have crept in since the last time I used the distribution.



I have been told the Reborn team is working on their own installer to replace Cnchi. Hopefully the new installer (which has not appeared yet at the time of writing) will make setting up the operating system more straight forward. * * * * * TinyPaw-Linux 1.3 Next on my list of projects to try was one I had not downloaded before: TinyPaw-Linux. The distribution's website describes the project as " an extremely lightweight and portable WiFi pen-testing distro. One that wasn't bloated with non-essential tools and features and that could actually boot, run and perform from CD or USB. "



TinyPaw is based on Tiny Core Linux. While the project has a tiny parent and began as a relatively small distro, it has grown quickly in size. Version 1.0 was published in December 2017 and was 294MB in size. Version 1.3 was launched in October 2018 and was a 740MB download. I suspect the extra weight was introduced through new packages and WiFi testing tools.



The latest version appears to be based on Tiny Core Linux 9.0. Booting from the project's live media loads the distribution into RAM, making it highly responsive. At least it does if the distribution completes the boot process. I began by running TinyPaw on a laptop and, though the system started its boot sequence and was able to load modules into memory, it then locked up, unable to get to its graphical interface and unresponsive to keyboard input.



I switched to trying TinyPaw in a VirtualBox environment and had better luck. The distribution booted into a minimal graphical environment which carries a strong red on black theme. A panel at the bottom of the screen holds quick-launch buttons for various WiFi tools, network scanners, a settings panel and a lightweight web browser called Fifth. There are also launchers for a virtual terminal, a text editor and the PCManFM file manager.





TinyPaw-Linux 1.3 -- The Fifth web browser and TinyPaw's settings panel

(full image size: 155kB, resolution: 1024x768 pixels)



Right-clicking on the desktop brings up an application menu which helpfully organizes tools into categories. This makes it easier to quickly find networking tools as opposed to password crackers or scanners.



I played around with a handful of the included utilities and found most of them worked. This allowed me to scan the network, try to brute force passwords and collect network traffic. Some tools did not work though. One would open a blank window that closed after a few seconds, one of the password crackers reported it was missing dependencies and refused to run. For the most part, TinyPaw gave me functioning tools, but occasionally one would fail or simply not run.



A bigger issue I ran into is that TinyPaw includes no manual pages and no local documentation for the tools it features. This means if we don't know what an application does, or we know what it does but want to learn how to use a command line parameter, we need to go on-line and search for the answer. This introduced a series of speed bumps into my trial since anytime I wanted to use a new tool I had to open a web browser, search for the tool, go to its website, hope the utility had on-line documentation and read that. This is quite a bit slower than just opening a local manual page.



A positive side-effect of having such a trim distribution (one without documentation and a full featured desktop environment) is the whole distribution only requires about 300MB of RAM. And it appears as though the distribution runs entirely from within memory, making programs open very quickly.



I had mixed feelings using TinyPaw-Linux. On the one hand, it does ship with some useful penetration testing tools and the platform is small and fast. However, the lack of local documentation and my inability to get the distribution to boot on physical hardware made it impractical for most scenarios in which I would want to use such a tool.

Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith)

Debian tests Secure Boot, Ubuntu shipping on Entroware AIO, most highly popular Steam games run on Linux The Debian team is experimenting with booting their distribution on machines with Secure Boot enabled. Secure Boot strives to prevent the user from booting into compromised environments by checking for signed low-level components. This poses some challenges for Linux users who may have unsigned or custom kernels. People interested in helping Debian work out the bugs in their Secure Boot solution can follow the instructions in the project's wiki. * * * * * Entroware is a computer manufacturer in the United Kingdom which sells personal computers and servers with Linux pre-installed. The company has unveiled a new all-in-one (AIO) system called Ares PC that ships with the customer's choice of Ubuntu or Ubuntu MATE. Forbes comments: " The baseline Ares starts at £739 (about 824 Euros) and includes a 24-inch 1080p matte display with built-in speakers, Intel Core-i3 8100 at 3.6GHz, 8GB of RAM clocked at 2400MHz, a 120GB SSD loaded with your choice of Ubuntu or Ubuntu MATE and a 3 year warranty. From there you can tinker with several upgrade options, stretching all the way to the fully-loaded £2689 Ares. Considering the size, it can pack a pretty considerable punch with a 6-core, 4.6GHz Intel Core-i7 8700, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB NVMe SSD plus an additional 4TB SSD drive. You can also bundle an additional monitor, but it doesn't look like Entroware offers a 4K display option. " Further details can be found on the Entroware website. * * * * * Linux gamers should be pleased to learn that more and more popular gaming titles are becoming available. The GamingOnLinux website took a look at the most popular titles on Steam and discovered over half of the top 250 offer support for Linux. " Overall, out of the 250 most highly rated titles on Steam as reviewed by users, 132 of them have official Linux support. Compared with Mac which has 156, we're not far off there at all. Let's just remember how small the Linux gaming platform is compared to Windows, over 50% there really is impressive. " * * * * * These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.





Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

Dealing with an unresponsive desktop Purging-pop-ups asks: Earlier this year I switched to using Linux, specifically Ubuntu for my computing needs. I am running a background job that requires a lot of CPU, like 100% all the time, and it is making my desktop virtually unusable. Input is slow and I keep seeing pop-ups telling me "This application is not responding - close or wait?" Why does having just one big background process bring Linux to its knees and what can I do to fix this?



DistroWatch answers: Welcome to the Linux community, I'm glad you could join us. There are a number of ideas and issues to explore in this situation so first let's take a look at the surface of the problem and then we will explore some possible underlying causes and solutions.



It sounds like what is happening is your one CPU-intensive process is using all the available resources and it is slowing down everything else, including the desktop environment. When the desktop is starved for resources, applications are not processing input quickly enough to appear "alive". When this happens, the system thinks the program might have crashed and offers to get rid of it. In this case, the applications are not actually crashing, they are just too resource hungry to respond.



Part of the issue here is that Linux tends to favour overall work performance over responsiveness. In other words, Linux will try to accomplish as many things as possible in a given amount of time, rather than making dealing with new input and generating a response its priority. This is ideal for servers and number crunching workstations, but not so great for people using the desktop under heavy load. There are ways to change the way Linux schedules tasks to try to get a more responsive user interface, but it is a technical path to walk and tends to involve re-compiling the kernel, and I think there are probably easier ways to address this situation.



Without the specifications of the computer and information on the processes (and constraints) the system is running under, the best course of action is hard to predict. However, I do have a handful of suggestions for situations like this that will hopefully help.



First, you mentioned the system is running Ubuntu, which suggests either the GNOME Shell or Unity desktop is being used. Both of these desktops use 3-D effects which require support from the video card to draw smoothly. Having a video driver that does not perform well puts more work on the CPU to make up the difference and can bring even modern machines to their knees. This typically happens if your machine is running an AMD or NVIDIA card. Almost all the reports I encounter from people saying Ubuntu runs too slowly or their desktop is not responsive can be traced back to a driver issue. Run the Software & Updates application and click on the Additional Drivers tab. This will show alternative drivers which may work better with your video card.



Second, it sounds like this background task is not being polite and gobbling up all the CPU resources it can find. This is going to slow down any system and is not ideal for a desktop machine. Ideally it would be nice to run such a heavy process on its own, dedicated machine, but if that is not possible, we can force the process to act in a more polite manner.



There are tools, called nice, renice and ionice, which will allow a program to run at full speed, but force it to stay out of the way when another program wants to work. This is done by lowering the heavy process's priority. When nothing else is happening on the system, the process can work as hard as it wants, but its reduced priority means other programs (like desktop applications) can interrupt its work.



We have talked about how to adjust the priority of programs previously in an earlier Tips and Tricks article.



A third possibility is the big background process is not only consuming a lot of CPU, it is also consuming memory. When too much memory is used up, the operating system dumps some memory out to swap space, which then needs to be read back when a program wants to use it. You can run the free command to check memory consumption.



If the computer's memory is full and it is starting to use swap space to make room for the heavy process, then there are only so many things you can do. You can run fewer applications and services, or add more RAM to the system.



Finally, so far as I know, there is no way to disable the pop-up which says a task has stopped responding. At least not without editing and re-compiling the window manager. However, you could try switching to a lighter desktop. Assuming you are running either Unity or GNOME on Ubuntu, these are relatively heavy desktops. Since you are running a CPU-heavy process, I think it makes sense to trim as much of the software as possible on this system. Installing a lighter desktop, such as Xfce or LXDE, will free up more CPU and memory for the heavier program. * * * * * Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.





Released Last Week

Funtoo Linux 1.3



Daniel Robbins has announced the release of Funtoo Linux 1.3. Funtoo, a variant of Gentoo Linux, is an distribution that builds packages automatically from the source code. It was launched in 2009, shortly after Robbins left Gentoo Linux, a project he had founded in 2000. Version 1.3 brings a deprecation of "multilib" support, among other changes: " The ability for 64-bit versions of Funtoo Linux to run legacy 32-bit applications has been deprecated, so that Funtoo Linux for 64-bit CPUs is now 64-bit only, what we used to offer as a separate "pure64" build. This was done because 32-bit support was originally created as a stop-gap measure 15 years ago to allow for a seamless transition to 64-bit computing, and we believe the time has come to shed this ongoing maintenance burden and focus efforts that have historically been spent on 32-bit compatibility in other areas. " Read the release announcement and release notes for more information. The Funtoo project does not provide bootable live or installation ISO images; users are instead directed towards the Gentoo-based SystemRescueCd to initiate any new installation. Optimised builds (or "stages") are available for various AMD and Intel processors, as well as the ARM and ARM64 architectures and Raspberry Pi and ODROID single-board computers - visit the project's "Subarches" page for a complete list.



Qubes OS 4.0.1



Marek Marczykowski-Górecki has announced the release of Qubes OS 4.0.1, an updated version of the project's security-focused Linux distribution which allows users to "compartmentalise" computing tasks into isolated compartments called qubes. This new release is mostly a bug-fix and security update and is recommended for all new Qubes installations: " We are pleased to announce the release of Qubes 4.0.1. This is the first stable point release of Qubes 4.0. It includes many updates over the initial 4.0 release, in particular: all 4.0 dom0 updates to date, including a lot of bug fixes and improvements for GUI tools; Fedora 29 TemplateVM; Debian 9 TemplateVM; Whonix 14 Gateway and Workstation TemplateVMs; Linux kernel 4.14. If you're currently using an up-to-date Qubes 4.0 installation (including updated Fedora 29, Debian 9, and Whonix 14 templates), then your system is already equivalent to a Qubes 4.0.1 installation. No action is needed. Similarly, if you're currently using a Qubes 4.0.1 release candidate and you've followed the standard procedure for keeping it up-to-date, then your system is equivalent to a 4.0.1 stable installation. " Read the rest of the release announcement for additional information.



Clonezilla Live 2.6.0-37



Steven Shiau has announced the release of Clonezilla Live 2.6.0-37. Clonezilla Live provides tools for backing up, restoring and copying disk images and disk partitions either locally or across the network. The project's latest version includes several updates and fixes. " The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian 'Sid' repository as of 2019-01-08). Linux kernel has been updated to 4.19.13; Partclone to 0.3.12; ldmtool and haveged packages have been added; cURL has been added; NetworkManager has been added so that users can use 'nmtui' to configure network if necessary, especially for WiFi; making unknown fs as 'dd' and the image name for partition like sda3.dd-img.aa is now legacy - it has been replaced by sda3.dd-ptcl-img.lzma.aa; rewrite the same mechanism in ocs-onthefly; in addition to massive-deployment mode, the interactive-client mode was added so that lite server can provide the ability to enter interactive mode of Clonezilla Live in client; let live-build 20180618 handle uEFI boot, so ocs-put-signed-grub2-efi-bldr and ocs-gen-grub2-efi-bldr are deprecated. " Further details can be found in the release announcement. * * * * * Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases

OSMC 2018.12-1

SparkyLinux 5.6.2

Container Linux 1967.3.0

Bluestar Linux 4.20

Robolinux 10.4

Netrunner 19.01

Torrent Corner

Upcoming Releases and Announcements

Opinion Poll

Tools to keep processes in line Sometimes processes use more resources than they should, interferring with the smooth operation of the rest of the system. When this happens there are several tools a system administrator can use to prevent these runaway processes from having a negative impact. We would like to know which process taming tools our readers use.



You can see the results of our previous poll on running distributions for a long time in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.



Tools to keep processes in line



cpulimit: 29 (4%) ionice: 8 (1%) nice/renice: 110 (14%) ulimit: 9 (1%) Virtual machine: 62 (8%) A combination of the above: 121 (15%) Other: 53 (7%) None of the above: 410 (51%)