DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 829, 26 August 2019

Feature Story (by Jesse Smith)

Drauger OS 7.4.1 This week I once again turned to the DistroWatch waiting list to sample new items I had not tried before. Near the top of the list of projects waiting for evaluation was Drauger OS, a Linux distribution based on Xubuntu. The project uses the Xfce desktop environment and is built to run on 64-bit (x86_64) computers. The project places a strong focus on offering easy access to games and, correspondingly, good desktop performance. To this end, Drauger ships with Steam installed by default, along with WINE and PlayOnLinux. Drauger OS also comes with the modified, low-latency, Liquorix Linux kernel, which is based off the ZEN kernel.



According to the project's documentation, the distribution can run on UEFI-enabled machines, but booting in legacy BIOS mode is recommended. The documentation also mentions that in place of the regular Xubuntu installer, Drauger uses the System Install utility to copy the operating system from the live media to the local hard drive.



While most of the project's listed features are technical in nature, one of the main talking points goes a bit over the top when describing Drauger's security advantage: " Drauger OS is far more secure than the leading desktop operating system. This means that you can game without fear of trolls hacking into your computer, getting a virus, or losing your data. " Of course Linux systems can be hacked and certainly may lose data due to various bugs, security breaches or hardware failure. The developers' claims strike me as being optimistic, at best.



Drauger is available in one edition and the distribution's ISO file is a 3.2GB download. Booting from the disc brings up a menu asking if we would like to run a live desktop session or launch a system installer. The live option shows the Ubuntu boot screen, which identifies the distribution as "Ubuntu 7.4.1". The system then presents us with a graphical login screen where we are given the choice of using a "user" account or a "guest" account. In either case we can sign in without a password.



Drauger's live mode uses the Xfce 4.12 desktop. Once the desktop loads, a welcome screen appears, showing buttons that open links to the distribution's website, launch a tool for installing third-party drivers, open a readme file, and link to some on-line resources. There is also a tutorial button which opens a series of pop-up messages about the desktop elements. We can only move forward through the tutorial tips one at a time, and cannot go back to previous pop-ups. The Additional Drivers button opens the Ubuntu software sources, updates and driver utility. On-line resources and documentation are opened in the Firefox web browser. The welcome window is pretty straight forward to use and navigate and I like that we are put in touch with both on-line and off-line resources.





Drauger OS 7.4.1 -- The desktop panel and welcome window

(full image size: 688kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



The Xfce environment does not have a panel placed along the edge of the display like most desktops do. Instead there is a panel that runs horizontally through the middle of the screen. Sometimes this panel would appear and disappear, seemingly at random. At first I had trouble figuring out what I was doing to make it show up, or hide. I eventually found that I could make the panel appear by pressing the meta key (sometimes known as the windows key) on my keyboard. Alternatively, if I wanted to launch a program, I could right-click on an empty part of the desktop to open an application menu.



I could not find a launcher for Drauger's system installer in the live environment. The project's documentation indicates we need to reboot and take the installer option from the live disc's boot menu. Selecting the installer option resulted in the operating system showing a blank screen and then locking up. I was unable to get the installer to launch.



I made a few other notes while exploring the Drauger live media. For example, while the project's website claims Drauger can run on UEFI-enabled machines, I found the live media would not boot in UEFI mode. The live session would only start in legacy BIOS mode. I found that the live Xfce desktop would run smoothly on my workstation, however Drauger would not integrate with VirtualBox. This is a rare limitation these days, but it seems the distribution cannot resize its desktop dynamically or use the full screen resolution of the host machine when run in a virtual environment.



Another thing I noticed was that when I shutdown the operating system, it would power down cleanly. However, if I tried to reboot the live media, the media would be immediately unmounted, preventing the operating system from reading pieces of the distribution's live archive. This resulted in the system printing out an endless steam of read errors when trying to reboot.



I did not get very far with Drauger. I am certain many people will appreciate the idea of a performance and gaming focused distribution. However, I was unable to get it installed. I also found it unfortunate that Drauger has replaced the tried and true Ubiquity installer with an unusual install method. Going back to using Xubuntu's installer would probably offer a smoother, more flexible install process. * * * * * EndeavourOS 2019.07.15 The next distribution on my list of projects to try was EndeavourOS. Endeavour plans to follow in the footsteps of Antergos. In other words, Endeavour is an Arch-based distribution which will provide a graphical system installer and a pre-configured desktop. Then, once the operating system is up and running, the user is effectively running Arch Linux. Unlike Antergos, which used an installer which only worked while connected to the Internet, Endeavour currently uses Calamares and performs installs off-line. Endeavour ships with the Xfce desktop and other desktops can be installed after the operating system has been set up.



EndeavourOS is available for 64-bit (x86_64) machines. The project makes one edition available which is a 1.3GB download. Booting from the project's media loads the Xfce 4.14 desktop. (4.14 is new stable branch of the Xfce desktop which migrates to GTK3 from GTK2.) A panel at the bottom of the screen holds the application menu, a handful of quick-launch buttons, the task switcher and system tray. Shortly after we sign in, a small window appears. This window displays buttons for showing us on-line and off-line documentation. There are also two buttons for launching the GParted disk partitioning utility and the Calamares installer. After looking around for a bit, I launched Calamares.





EndeavourOS 2019.07.15 -- Exploring the live desktop

(full image size: 271kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



Installing



When the Calamares installer starts, it pauses for about ten seconds to load modules. At first I thought the installer might have locked up, but it sorted itself out and I got started. The installer offers straight forward, friendly screens that walk us through selecting our preferred language, our time zone, and keyboard layout. We are given the choice of manual or guided partitioning. The manual option is pretty easy to use; the guided option takes over free disk space with an ext4 filesystem for the root partition. Endeavour does not set up up a swap partition or a swap file by default. Should we want to use swap space we will need to set it up manually. We are then asked to make up a username and password for ourselves. The installer quickly copies its files, finishing in well under ten minutes, and offers to reboot the computer.



Early impressions



The first time we boot into Endeavour, the distribution displays a graphical login screen where we can sign into the Xfce desktop. At first the desktop appears to be clean, quiet and uncluttered. However, periodically the screen would be filled with news and package update notifications. These notifications are produced by a program called kalu which runs in the system tray. The kalu program checks for new packages, AUR changes, and project news updates every hour and displays a summary of what it finds on the desktop. We can right-click on the system tray icon to change the frequency of these checks and select what information (if any) is displayed.



Left-clicking on the kalu icon opens a window that lists all available package upgrades. Each package entry includes the software's name, the installed version, the new version and the size of the download. Upgrading through kalu is an all-or-nothing scenario, we cannot pick which items to download. The update manager displays progress information as software is downloaded, marking off each item in the list as it is fetched. Upgrades performed during my trial completed successfully.





EndeavourOS 2019.07.15 -- Checking for software updates

(full image size: 226kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



Apart from the update manager mentioned above, Endeavour does not appear to have any graphical package manager installed by default. We can add one, or we can focus on using the pacman package manager. I decided to stick with the latter option during this experiment. The pacman utility has a short, unusual syntax, but it works quickly and I encountered no errors while using it.



Hardware



EndeavourOS worked well in both of my test environments. My workstation's hardware was all detected and used properly. The operating system ran quickly and smoothly. The Xfce desktop is especially snappy on Endeavour and I liked both the theme and the layout. When running in a virtual machine, Endeavour was responsive and worked well. The distribution was able to integrate with VirtualBox and use my host computer's full screen resolution.





EndeavourOS 2019.07.15 -- Running Firefox and checking Xfce's version

(full image size: 388kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



One of my few hardware-related complaints while running Endeavour was that the system would beep when it was shutting down. Some distributions have done away with the internal speaker beep at shutdown and I wish the rest would discard the practise.



Endeavour uses about 4.5GB of disk space with a fresh install and, when logged into Xfce, the distribution consumed 320MB of memory. This puts Endeavour slightly on the lighter side of average, compared to most mainstream Linux distributions.



Applications



Endeavour ships with a small collection of software. Some of the applications are popular items found in most distributions, such as the Firefox browser and the Transmission bittorrent software. We are also treated to the Parole media player, along with audio and video codecs. The distribution ships with an image viewer, dictionary, the Orage calendar, and the Xfburn disc burning software. Zenmap is included for checking for open network ports and Grsync provides a graphical tool for synchronizing files between multiple locations.



Endeavour uses the Thunar file manager and includes a file renaming tool. We are also given a full range of Xfce settings modules. These modules deal with the look and feel of the desktop, helping us adjust the theme, the placement of window control buttons, and display resolution. However, there are no lower level tools for managing things like user accounts, printers, or the firewall.





EndeavourOS 2019.07.15 -- Adjusting desktop settings

(full image size: 209kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



The distribution uses the systemd init software and runs on version 5.2 of the Linux kernel. Endeavour is based on Arch Linux and uses the same rolling release approach to software updates. This means packages, including the kernel, will get upgraded fairly frequently.



Endeavour does not include an office suite, image editor or e-mail client in the default install. These utilities can be added later from the Arch Linux repositories. The AUR is also available if we need software not included in the main repositories. Though portable package frameworks, such as Snap and Flatpak, are not supported by default, we can install the Flatpak framework from the Arch repositories.



One bug I encountered early on was the main terminal emulator would display all text as little, white squares on a black background. It looked like the place holders a web browser displays when it does not recognize an emoji code. All other programs displayed text properly. Poking around the terminal's profile settings revealed the font was set to display these little boxes instead of normal text, or the system's default font. Selecting another font from the drop-down list, or telling the terminal to use the system-wide font fixed the issue.





EndeavourOS 2019.07.15 -- Unusual terminal font

(full image size: 186kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



Conclusions



Endeavour is a young project, having just recently come into life after Antergos was discontinued earlier this year. I was not expecting it to have made much progress. However, apart from the terminal font issue, Endeavour provided a pretty solid experience. The installer and default desktop worked better for me than Antergos's counterparts did. In fact Endeavour installs faster and smoother than almost any distribution I have tried lately. I liked the default desktop layout and theme and the minimal, yet functional, collection of applications gives the user enough tools to get started without adding too much bloat to a pristine install.



I would like to see the welcome/install window on the live desktop expanded a bit, but otherwise Endeavour is off to a good start. If you are a person who wants to run Arch Linux while also wanting to get up and running with a desktop in five minutes without typing any commands, then this distribution is an attractive option.



Update: Right after I finished writing this review, a minor update to Endeavour was published (version 2019.08.17). The new snapshot is virtually identical to the one I began reviewing. However, the terminal font issue has been fixed. There is also a handy icon in the system tray for viewing recent notifications and enabling the do-not-disturb feature. Otherwise, as far as I can tell, the two snapshots are the same, apart from a few minor package updates. * * * * * 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, Ralink RT5390R PCIe Wireless card

Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card * * * * * Visitor supplied rating



EndeavourOS has a visitor supplied average rating of: 9/10 from 105 review(s).

Have you used EndeavourOS? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.





Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith)

NetBSD gets its first Wayland application, UBports publishes updates, Kali updates meta-packages, boot environments for DragonFly BSD, GhostBSD changes base repository, FreeBSD status update Applications and desktop environments which can operate using the Wayland protocol have gradually been entering the Linux ecosystem for the past several years. However, during this time, Wayland generally has not seen much use in the BSD communities. This week one enterprising developer created what may be the first Wayland application to run on NetBSD. The application, called hello-wayland, simply displays an image on the computer's screen. This is the first step toward being able to build native Wayland applications and window managers on the NetBSD platform. The developer has tweeted that some display libraries, such as GTK3 and SDL, can be built with Wayland support on NetBSD, but more work is required to get these tools running properly. * * * * * The UBports team has pushed out updates to supported devices. This over the air (OTA) update features improved camera support, better GPS accuracy, and the ability to write draft messages. " The default Messaging app, used for SMS and MMS messaging, now supports draft messages. You can begin writing a message, leave the chat, and come back to find that your message is still waiting for you to send. Pasting of phone numbers in the "To:" field and an issue with the header randomly switching between your contact's name and phone number were fixed. An option was added to allow the user to select whether to use the light or dark theme or the system preference. Libertine, the legacy application manager, now allows you to search for packages in the archive and select one to install from a list. " Further changes can be found in the project's blog post. * * * * * A meta-package is a special kind of package that does not contain files. Instead it contains dependency information which is typically used to let the package manager know we wish to install multiple packages. For instance, many distributions have a KDE or GNOME meta-package which downloads the many packages required to assemble the entire desktop environment. The Kali Linux team has reworked some of their meta-packages to be more flexible and hopefully reduce download requirements. " Depending on how you use Kali will determine which meta-package would suit you best. This is the power of meta-packages. For example: If you want a core set of tools, stick with kali-linux-default (designed for assessments that are straightforward). If you want a more general and wider range of tools, select kali-linux-large (useful if Internet access is permitted but slow). If you want to be prepared for anything, go with kali-linux-everything (great if you are going to be doing air-gap/offline work). Note: You can install multiple meta-packages at once and are not limited to just one, so mix and match! " Further details can be found in the distribution's blog post. * * * * * Michael Voight has announced that he is working on a boot environment manager for DragonFly BSD. The command line utility takes snapshots of HAMMER2 filesystems and helps the user set up boot environments. This allows users to rollback to previous versions of the operating system's packages and configuration if something breaks the operating system. " A quick overview is that this is a C implementation of beadm on FreeBSD/Illumos, but specifically for DragonFly BSD and HAMMER2. The utility creates snapshots of every mounted HAMMER2 filesystem using the name given on the command line as an identifier, so for example, if you run 'sudo dfbeadm -c testing', a HAMMER2 filesystem 'nvme0s1d at ROOT' gets a new snapshot called 'nvme0s1d at ROOT:testing'. It'll create a backup copy of your fstab in /etc/fstab.bak before installing the new fstab for the boot environment. " * * * * * GhostBSD is a desktop-friendly flavour of the FreeBSD family. Specifically, GhostBSD is based on TrueOS and uses its parent's cutting edge, rolling release base. The GhostBSD project is planning to back away from the cutting edge and use a slower-moving TrueOS repository to gain more stability: " For the last three months, there were some efforts to bring OpenRC to 12-STABLE with TrueOS all thanks to Miwi. Due to this effort, we will follow the STABLE branch instead of CURRENT. This change brings ABI stability and less code change for system updates. The only downside is that all current GhostBSD users will need to reinstall GhostBSD. This change is mostly due because tracking all changes in CURRENT was hard, and the latest NVIDIA driver did not work well with CURRENT. The fast API changes in CURRENT, and GhostBSD not being able to keep up with CURRENT changes, it did bring problems with building our software packages, so the decision was made to go the STABLE ABI route with 12-STABLE branches. " * * * * * The FreeBSD team has published a new Quarterly Status Report which details work being done to the operating system and its infrastructure. The project has been working on video driver improvements, enhancements to Linux compatibility, and updating FUSE userland filesystem code. The project is also making it easier to migrate bhyve virtual machines: " The Migration feature uses the Save/Restore feature to migrate a bhyve guest from a FreeBSD host to another FreeBSD host. To migrate a bhyve guest, one needs to start an empty guest on the destination host from a shared guest image using the bhyve tool with the -R option followed by the source host IP and the port to listen to migration request. On the source host, the migration is started by executing the bhyvectl command with the --migrate or --migrate-live option, followed by the destination host IP and the port to send to the messages. " Additional details can be found in the report. * * * * * These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.





Tips and Tricks (by Jesse Smith)

How to check the licenses of kernel modules Last week we talked about running open source hardware drivers alongside non-free firmware in our Questions and Answers column. We explored some of the practical and philosophical considerations to consider when dealing with open versus closed hardware support. In our comments section one reader raised the important question: "How do I know whether the firmware and drivers are open or closed source?"



It is a significant question because most distributions do not exclude non-free firmware from the default installation, and some may not make it clear as to whether they are using non-free drivers. Fortunately there are tools we can use to check the licenses of the drivers and firmware a Linux system is running.



The problem of finding out which licenses are applied to our drivers and firmware can be broken down into two main parts. First, we need to know which drivers and firmware (called kernel modules) are being used by our operating system. Then we need to check each module to see what license is attached to it.



GNU/Linux distributions make these tasks relatively straight forward. To see which modules are being used on our system we can run the lsmod command. The lsmod (list modules) command shows all of the modules currently in use by the kernel. Each module is listed with its name, the amount of memory it is using and what components are using the module. It looks like this: $ lsmod

Module Size Used by xfs 1191936 0 jfs 180224 0 fuse 98304 5 This tells us which modules are in use, but it does not tell us what license is attached to each module. To see what license is being used, we can run the modinfo (module information) command with the "-l" flag. This tells modinfo to display one module's license. For instance, we can check the license of the XFS driver by running: $ modinfo -l xfs

GPL This tells us that the XFS driver is licensed under the GPL (GNU Public License), the same free software license as the Linux kernel. If we check more of the modules loaded on our system we will find almost all of them are licensed under the GPL. If we want even more information, such as the location of the driver on our disk, its author, and a brief description then we can run the modinfo command without any flags: $ modinfo xfs At this point you might be looking at the dozens of modules loaded by the kernel (there are 138 on my system at the time of writing) and wondering if there is a way to check all of these modules to see if they are distributed under an open or closed license. There is, with a little help from some command line programs.



We can run a command line that gets a list of modules on our system using lsmod. Then run another command, awk in this case, to clean up the output of lsmod so we can work with the name of each module. Then we can use modinfo to display the path of the each module next to its license. The command looks like this: for i in $(lsmod | awk '{ if (NR > 1) print $1}' | tr '

' ' ') ; do echo $(modinfo -n $i ; modinfo -l $i); done This will print out a long list of module names and licenses. However, it is such a long list that it is tedious to check through it manually and almost all of the modules will be listed as having the GPL as their license. What if we only want to see licenses and modules which are not distributed under the GPL free software license? To do that we can add the grep command and tell it to only show us module entries that do not mention the GPL: for i in $(lsmod | awk '{ if (NR > 1) print $1}' | tr '

' ' ') ; do echo $(modinfo -n $i ; modinfo -l $i) | grep -iv GPL; done On my machine this gives me one module: /lib/modules/5.2.0-1-amd64/updates/dkms/wl.ko MIXED/Proprietary I can get more information about the wl module by running: modinfo wl Usually it is a bad idea to try to remove a loaded module as it may prevent some parts of the system from working. In particular, some hardware may stop running. However, if you want to see what happens when a module is removed, you can run modprobe, as the administrator user, with the "-r" flag: modprobe -r wl This will attempt to remove the wl module from the running kernel. This is risky and it may cause key components such as wireless networking to stop working. Typically we would not remove modules from a running system.



Please note that some modules are open source while not licensed under the GPL. These are rare, but it is possible to find a module that is open source and distributed under the BSD, MIT or CDDL licenses. These are open source licenses, though rarely used in kernel development. * * * * * Additional tips can be found in our Tips and Tricks archive.





Released Last Week

Runtu 18.04.3



Runtu is a Russian desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu's LTS (long-term support) releases. It features full support for Russian and a variety of extra applications, tools and media codecs. The project's latest release is an update to its 18.04 branch. An English translation of the project's release announcement (with screenshots) in Russian states: " The 64-bit version of the Runtu Xfce 18.04 distribution is presented, based on the Bionic Beaver 18.04.3 LTS package release base. The release includes improvements backported from Ubuntu 19.04: the Linux kernel version 5.0 and the graphics stack components and the package database has been updated; the distribution kit is built using debootstrap, the base system and the working environment of Xfce 4.12 are installed; the software includes tools for playing audio and video files, the office suite LibreOffice 6.3.0, the graphic editor GIMP 2.10 and the printing subsystem; to work with the Internet, Firefox 68 browser, uGet download manager, Transmission torrent client and Thunderbird email client are preinstalled. "



Netrunner 19.08



The Netrunner development team has announced the availability of Netrunner 19.08 (code name "Indigo"), the project's first release based on Debian 10: " The Netrunner team is happy to announce the immediate availability of Netrunner 19.08 Indigo, a 64-bit ISO image. This version is based on Debian 10 'Buster' and comes with a few new and updated software versions: KDE Plasma 5.14.5, KDE Frameworks 5.54, KDE Applications 18.08, Qt 5.11.3, Linux Kernel 4.19.37, Firefox 60.8.1, Thunderbird 60.7.2. Switching from Firefox to Firefox ESR allows our users to enjoy a stable long-term supported version which gets regular security updates provided by the Debian security team. KDE Plasma 5.14.5 provides a stable and advanced desktop environment that you can tweak to your needs. Netrunner 19.08 ships with a brand-new theme called Indigo which features the identically named color as main attraction. The mixture of darker blue and lighter blue together with classic white-like gray creates a pleasent-to-the-eye look that matches the Breeze icon theme perfectly. " Continue to the release announcement for more details and screenshots.





Netrunner 19.08 -- Running the KDE Plasma desktop

(full image size: 1.3MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)



EasyOS 2.1



Barry Kauler has announced the release of EasyOS 2.1. EasyOS is an experimental Linux distribution which uses many of the technologies and package formats pioneered by Puppy Linux. The distribution features custom container technology called Easy Containers which can run applications or the entire desktop environment in a container. The new release uses packages build for Debian 10 "Buster". " The 'Buster' series start from version 2.0, and are intended to be where most of the action is, ongoing. Version 2.0 was really a beta-quality build, to allow the testers to report back. The first official release is 2.1. The main feature of Easy Buster is that it is built from Debian 10 Buster DEBs, using WoofQ (a fork of Woof2. Woof-CE is another fork of Woof2, used to build Puppy Linux). The advantage of Buster over Pyro is access to the large Debian package repositories. That is a big plus. On the other hand, DEB packages have many dependencies, and the end result is a release considerably larger than Pyro with similar app selection. For example, the download file of Pyro 1.2 is 418MB, Buster is 504MB -- despite the Buster build having less apps (Pyro has Qt5 and big Qt5-based apps such as Scribus, this is all missing from the Buster build, but can be installed). " Additional details can be found in the project's release announcement. * * * * * Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases

LXLE 18.04.3-beta (Announcement)

Karoshi 12.1.0 "Server", 6.1 "Client"

Raspberry Digital Signage 12.1

Alpine Linux 3.10.2

BigLinux 19.04

Clonezilla Live 2.6.3-3

OviOS 3.02

AUSTRUMI 4.0.6

Simplicity 19.10-alpha1 (Announcement)

OSGeoLive 13.0

Torrent Corner

Upcoming Releases and Announcements

Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith)

EndeavourOS taking over from Antergos In our Feature Story we discussed two distributions with the latter, EndeavourOS, attempting to fill the role vacated by Antergos. While both projects are based on Arch Linux, they have several differences, particularly with regards to the install process.



What do you think of EndeavourOS? Is it a good replacement for Antergos, or did you prefer the Antergos approach to setting up a custom, pre-configured flavour of Arch? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.



You can see the results of our previous poll on using open or closed drivers and firmware in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.



How is EndeavourOS doing compared to Antergos?



I think Endeavour is an improvement over Antergos: 150 (15%) I preferred Antergos over Endeavour: 57 (6%) I think they are about equal: 59 (6%) I do not see Endeavour as a replacement for Antergos: 60 (6%) I have not tried both of these distros: 702 (68%)

Website News (by Jesse Smith)