First impressions of Project Trident 18.12 Project Trident (hereafter referred to as Trident) is a desktop operating system based on TrueOS. Trident takes the rolling base platform of TrueOS, which is in turn based on FreeBSD's development branch, and combines it with the Lumina desktop environment.



Installing



The debut release of Trident is available as a 4.1GB download that can be burned to a disc or transferred to a USB thumb drive. Booting from the Trident media brings up a graphical interface and automatically launches the project's system installer. Down the left side of the display there are buttons we can click to show hardware information and configuration options. These buttons let us know if our wireless card and video card are compatible with Trident and give us a chance to change our preferred language and keyboard layout. At the bottom of the screen we find buttons that will open a terminal or shutdown the computer.





Project Trident 18.12 -- The system installer

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The centre of the screen is occupied by a series of pages offering configuration options. We begin by providing the time and our time zone. The next screen asks on which disk we should place Trident. It seems Trident takes over the whole disk and formats it with the ZFS advanced file system. The next screen gives us a series of software packages we can optionally install. These packages include a few desktop items, tools and specific drivers for video cards and virtual machines. Then the installer asks us to make up a password for the root account and gives us a chance to create a username/password combination for ourselves. The installer copies its packages to our hard drive and, while it is working, a button appears on the left side of the screen we can click to see detailed log information on its progress. The entire process of setting up Trident took a little under 15 minutes.



Early impressions



Trident boots to a graphical login screen where we can sign into the Lumina desktop or a minimal Fluxbox session. Lumina, by default, uses Fluxbox as its window manager. The Lumina desktop places its panel along the bottom of the screen and an application menu sits in the bottom-left corner. On the desktop we find icons for opening the software manager, launching the Falkon web browser, running the VLC media player, opening the Control Panel and adjusting the Lumina theme.





Project Trident 18.12 -- The two settings panels

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The application menu has an unusual and compact layout. The menu shows just a search box and buttons for browsing applications, opening a file manager, accessing desktop settings and signing out. To see what applications are available we can click the Browse Applications entry, which opens a window in the menu where we can scroll through installed programs. This is a bit awkward since the display window is small and only shows a few items at a time.



Early on I found it is possible to swap out the default "Start menu" with an alternative "Application menu" through the Panels configuration tool. This alternative menu offers a classic tree-style application menu. I found the latter menu easier to navigate as it expands to show all the applications in a selected category.



Hardware



I tried running Trident on a workstation and in a VirtualBox environment. Trident performed well on the physical workstation. My hardware was all detected (apart from a USB wireless card I tested later in the trial). Performance was fairly smooth and the system responsive.



When running in VirtualBox, Trident would function, but with some limitations. For example, the system does not detect the available screen resolution, making the desktop quite small. We can fix this by resizing the VirtualBox window and then manually killing the Fluxbox process. When Fluxbox gets restarted, it detects the proper resolution. I found the mouse pointer would sometimes register my mouse's scroll wheel activity as a mouse click, causing me to accidentally select all sorts of programs and links almost every time I tried to scroll.



I set up Trident with a fairly minimal collection of software, which used up just over 2GB of disk space. When logged into a Lumina session, the system consumed 150MB of Active memory and 270MB of Wired memory.



Applications



Trident does not include a lot of applications in its default install. The Falkon web browser and VLC media player were included. There were also a number of Lumina-specific applications such as a file manager, text editor, PDF viewer and screenshot tool. There is also a Lumina Media Player. There are some configuration tools which I will cover shortly, but otherwise the application menu is minimal.





Project Trident 18.12 -- Viewing the Project Trident website with Falkon

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Trident does ship with BSD command line tools and manual pages. When installed I found Trident did not include any compiler, though one was featured on the install disc. The project uses OpenRC instead of FreeBSD's RC service manager and I found it worked well.



Most of the included software, limited though it was in variety, did work. I was able to create text documents, browse the web and tweak the desktop's look. The only serious problems I ran into concerned multimedia. I could not get the Lumina player to play any files, either audio or video. I could get media to play in VLC. Further, I was unable to get Trident to play any sound when run in VirtualBox. When I tried to play YouTube videos or local media, I only got faint static. This was odd as usually I either get the sound I expect or nothing, but with Trident I got low-volume static in place of audio.



Managing software



Since Trident does not ship with a lot of desktop software, most users will want to make use of the project's software manager: AppCafe. The AppCafe window is divided into three tabs (Browse, Installed, and Pending). The Browse tab shows categories of software and features a search box. The Installed tab shows packages already on the system which we can remove. The Pending tab lists packages that we have queued to be installed or removed and their status.





Project Trident 18.12 -- The AppCafe software manager

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When I first started using AppCafe, all the categories in the Browse tab were empty, except for programs already installed, like Falkon. The documentation mentions this is a known issue and closing and reopening AppCafe usually causes the categories to populate. This worked for me and I was soon able to look through lists of software packages which are ordered alphabetically. Each entry is shown with just a brief description and clicking on a package will bring up a slightly longer description and technical details. There is a region of the AppCafe window that should display screenshots of applications we have selected, but the screenshots never loaded during my trial. We can add or remove packages with a click of a button.



Newly installed applications have their icon added to the Lumina desktop. At first this is convenient, but over time it makes the desktop cluttered.



People who wish to use the command line can use FreeBSD's pkg package manager or the FreeBSD collection of ports to manage third-party software.



Settings



The Trident operating system features two settings panels. The first is called Control Panel and provides modules for managing the underlying operating system. From the Control Panel we can manage boot environments, browse and revoke SSL keys (I could not find a method for creating new keys), manage the firewall, and enable or disable background services. There are also tools for working with user accounts, adjusting how the mouse works, a graphical process monitor and tools for browsing hardware. These tools tend to be functional while having a rough look. They tend to use simple lists and layouts and, from my experience, work reliably.



The second settings panel contains modules for managing the Lumina desktop theme, changing window effects, selecting preferred applications and changing screensaver settings. We can also customize the desktop's context menu and enable auto-start programs. These modules, like those in the Control Panel, tend to have a simple, minimalist appearance and function as expected.





Project Trident 18.12 -- Changing desktop effects and the default application menu

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One feature I did find odd is the Lumina settings panel includes a few entries that are also in the Control Panel. For example, the process monitor and account manager can both be launched from the Lumina settings window. However, once these shared modules are open, clicking their Back button displays the Control Panel rather than the desktop settings panel. This may throw off some users who expect to see the desktop settings module.



Another curious feature is that the settings modules appear to use different icon themes. This is not a functional problem, but it does look unusual to see different visual styles displayed in the same settings panel.





Project Trident 18.12 -- Managing background services

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Other observations



By default Trident uses a dark theme and, personally, I think it looks nice. However, I wanted to try some lighter themes. (It's winter where I live and I wanted some more light in my life.) I tried some lighter themes and they appealed to me, but a side effect was that some button icons became invisible when the lighter theme was used. This made it difficult to navigate toolbars which obeyed the desktop theme.





Project Trident 18.12 -- Toolbar buttons fading into the background

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The first user we create seems to have a number of special permissions. For example, my regular user was able to create new users and remove old accounts without providing a password. This seems like a security issue to me. Further, when creating new user accounts we are asked if the new user should be considered an Operator (can shutdown or reboot the computer) or an Administrator (can perform almost any task). I disabled both options when creating a guest account. Later, when I checked group permissions I found every user I had created was added to the Operator group even though I had explicitly disabled the option. Further, my guest account was able to launch the account manager and add and remove new accounts, effectively making their own administrator. Both of these issues seem to me to be significant security holes. However, once an account had been manually removed from the Operator group, the account lost the ability to manage other users.





Project Trident 18.12 -- Guest account removing installed packages

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Another security feature built into Trident involves hiding processes from other users. This is a feature borrowed from FreeBSD and prevents users from seeing the processes other users launch. This provides a small layer of security as it is harder to attack services the user cannot see. Trident appears to use randomized PIDs too, making to harder to predict process numbers or tell how many processes a user is running.



Here there was a hole in security too. While any regular user (without Operator or Administrator access) can only see their own processes using standard tools like top and ps, the same restriction does not apply to the Control Panel Tasks module. Any user can open the Control Panel, launch Tasks and see all processes, including the root user's. Further, and this part puzzled me a bit, users with no special privileges and no knowledge of the root password can kill any process on the system. This is a pretty large security flaw when any user can see hidden services and kill them at will.



Moving on from security, I tested boot environments, which are made possible through ZFS snapshots. It is easy to create and remove boot environments through the Control Panel. When the system is booting we can select older environments from the boot menu to restore the older snapshot. This gives us protection against bad system updates and configuration mistakes in the base operating system.



Conclusions



I have a lot of mixed feelings and impressions when it comes to Trident. On the one hand, the operating system has some great technology under the hook. It has cutting edge packages from the FreeBSD ecosystem, we have easy access to ZFS, boot environments, and lots of open source packages. Hardware support, at least on my physical workstation, was solid and the Lumina desktop is flexible.



However, there were a lot of problems I ran into during this trial. Some of them are matters of taste or style. The installer looks unusually crude, for example, and the mixed icon styles weren't appealing. Similarly, switching themes made some icons in toolbars disappear. These are not functional issues, just presentation ones. There were some functional problems too though. For example, needing to close and re-open AppCafe to see available packages, or the desktop not resizing when running Trident in a virtual machine, which required that I change the display settings at each login.



Lumina has come a long way and is highly flexible and I like the available alternative widgets for desktop elements. This is useful because Lumina's weakest link on Trident seems to be its defaults as I had some trouble with the "Start" application menu and I think some work to polish the initial impression would be helpful.



The biggest issues though were with security. Trident ships with some extra security features in place, but most of them can be easily bypassed by any user by simply opening the Control Panel to view or kill processes or even add or remove packages. Some systems intentionally give the user full access by running everything as root, but in those cases at least the administrator knows they have complete access. This situation seems worse since Trident gives the illusion of security and limited access, but any curious user can run administrator tools. I think the project needs time to mature before I would recommend using it. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications: Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU

Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive

Memory: 6GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card

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



Project Trident has a visitor supplied average rating of: 4.8/10 from 16 review(s).

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