DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 722, 24 July 2017

Feature Story (by Robert Rijkhoff)

Calculate Linux 17.6 KDE Calculate Linux is a Gentoo-based distribution. The project's slogan is "Easy Linux from the source," which refers to the fact that Calculate is relatively easy to use but still benefits from Gentoo's powerful and flexible source-based Portage package manager.



Calculate recently celebrated its tenth birthday and released Calculate Linux 17.6. The distro comes in four flavours; apart from a desktop and server edition there's Calculate Scratch ("for those who want to build a customized system that works for them") and Calculate Media Center ("for your home multimedia center"). Each version is available for the x86_64 and i686 architectures and uses SysV init rather than systemd. The desktop edition has ISOs for the KDE, Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce desktop environments - GNOME is presumably not available because of its dependency on systemd. I opted for the 64-bit KDE version, which is just over 2GB in size.



Installation



Booting from the ISO takes us to a live desktop environment, which enables us to check if everything works as expected before taking the plunge. The desktop includes short-cuts to a local install guide (which is in fact a single page with links to documentation on the Calculate website), the KDE Partition Manager and the Calculate Linux Installer. I used the partition manager to set up my partitions before running the installer and found the application worked very well - if you're familiar with GParted you'll have no problems with KDE's equivalent.





Calculate Linux 17.6 -- Managing disk partitions

(full image size: 257kB, resolution: 1280x720 pixels)



Calculate's installer is unlike any graphical installer I've seen - it asks for a lot more information than, say, Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer or Fedora's Anaconda. Among others, we can choose whether we want to use Pulse Audio or ALSA for sound, what graphics card and screen resolution we want to use and how often Calculate should check for software updates. These settings can be changed later via the Calculate Console configuration utility, but I appreciate having these options at install-time. I found Calculate automatically detected all my hardware, so I could simply accept the default settings.





Calculate Linux 17.6 -- The system installer

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I mentioned that I had set up my partitions before running the installer. If you prefer, you can let Calculate "auto-partition" your hard drive. "Auto-partition" isn't quite the right term as the installer gives us various options for how the auto-partitioning should be done. On the next tab, called Mount Points, you then have the option to tweak your partitions - it's still possible to add, remove and resize partitions at this stage.



The Users tab is worth mentioning as well. Here, we set the root password and add users. By default there's a user named "guest" with "Full access" - this can be changed to "Updates only". I opted to delete the guest user and add myself as a user with full access. When we add a user we need to choose what groups our new user should belong to and here I ran into an error. Selecting "Default" (which seemed a sensible option) caused a cryptic error message that suggested I hadn't added myself to any groups. Adding myself to all groups and then displaying and then hiding the advanced options on the tab seemed to somehow solve the issue and I was able to proceed.



Apart from the unexpected error while adding a user I was quite impressed with the installer. The developers have clearly put some thought into how an installer can be feature-rich but still user-friendly. I also quite liked the banner images on the first and last tab - the first tab features an image of colourful balloons in a bright blue sky ("let the party begin!") while the final tab shows an image of penguins sliding down a slope and plunging into the sea ("here we go!").





Calculate Linux 17.6 -- The application menu

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Package management (Gentoo-style)



Out of the box Calculate uses binary packages which can be updated either via the graphical Calculate Linux Update utility or via the command line. The commands for updating package information and installing and removing software are fairly straight-forward - for all intents and purposes you can maintain software as you would on, say, Debian or Fedora. There are some fundamental differences between Portage and package managers such as APT and DNF however, and this is where Calculate becomes interesting.



One of Portage's most powerful features is USE flags. You can think of USE flags as settings that define if an option should or shouldn't be compiled. If you don't have a fancy graphics card you don't need your software to support OpenGL, for instance, and so you can disable this option, either "locally" (for individual packages) or "globally" (for all packages). The more you specify USE flags, the more your software will be tailored to your requirements. To give an example, I decided that I wanted to install the Shutter screen shot tool. We can search for applications using the eix utility: # eix shutter

* x11-misc/shutter

Available versions: 0.93.1-r3 {drawing}

Homepage: http://shutter-project.org/

Description: Feature-rich screen shot program

* x11-misc/shutterbug

Available versions: 1.7.49 {debug doc +jpeg +png profile +tiff}

Homepage: http://www.fox-toolkit.org/

Description: Screenshot utility based on the FOX Toolkit

Found 2 matches We can next check what USE flags are available. The below output shows that there's a "drawing" flag which is disabled by default: # equery uses x11-misc/shutter

[ Legend : U - final flag setting for installation]

[ : I - package is installed with flag ]

* Found these USE flags for x11-misc/shutter-0.93.1-r3:

U I

- - drawing : Enables drawing tool Shutter's drawing tool makes it possible to draw things like arrows on your screen shots. To enable the feature I created a file named "shutter" (the name is irrelevant) in the /etc/portage/package.use directory and added a statement to tell Portage that "drawing" should be enabled when we compile the "x11-misc/shutter" package: # cat /etc/portage/package.use/shutter

x11-misc/shutter drawing Features can be disabled by adding a minus sign in front of the USE option. For example, we can tell Portage to compile the Chromium browser without proprietary codecs (such as H.264 and MP3) using this line: www-client/chromium -proprietary-codecs Next, we need to tell Portage to install (or merge, in Portage-speak) our Shutter package by compiling it from source: # emerge -uN shutter Installing software this way takes a long time and uses lots of system resources (the output actually displays the system's load averages). Compiling and installing Shutter took about an hour - larger packages such as the Chromium browser will take several hours. The result, though, is software that has been optimized for your system and/or requirements. In my case, I got Shutter with the drawing tool.





Calculate Linux 17.6 -- Creating a screen shot with drawings

(full image size: 197kB, resolution: 1280x720 pixels)





The desktop environment



The KDE version of Calculate comes with Plasma 5.9.5. For browsing we get the latest version of Firefox while LibreOffice is at version 5.2.7. Typical KDE applications include the Kmail email client, Dolphin file manager, Kwrite text editor and Konversation IRC client. There were a couple of unusual applications installed as well. For instance, we get Qt Designer (a "WYSIWYG tool for designing and building Qt-based GUIs") and Ktnef (a proprietary file viewer for e-mail attachments in the TNEF format).





Calculate Linux 17.6 -- Running the KDE Plasma desktop

(full image size: 327kB, resolution: 1280x720 pixels)



I found a few applications that had been customized by the Calculate developers. Firefox, for instance, comes with an ad-blocker (uBlock) and a Flash plug-in pre-installed. Claws Mail, which isn't installed by default, has got a Calculate theme (which needs to be installed separately) and by default the e-mail client checked for new e-mails every five seconds (Claws' default setting is to not automatically check for new emails). Calculate's KDE desktop has been customized quite a bit as well. There's a panel at the top of the screen crammed with a traditional application menu and lots of other widgets and moving the mouse cursor to the bottom of the screen reveals a dock-like panel with application short-cuts. I like having a traditional menu but Calculate's implementation felt a bit crowded. For each application both the name and description are displayed, which results in entries like "Clementine (Clementine Music Player)". Most of these lines are too long to be displayed and the menu therefore contains lots of truncated entries. Personally, I would have been happy with just the names of the applications being displayed.



I'm not very familiar with KDE but got on well with the desktop environment. My only gripe was that there were some seemingly simple customization's that I was unable to make. For instance, there appears to be no way to reduce the size of the humongous clock in the system tray (I ended up removing the eyesore) and I wasn't able to remove desktop icons.



I encountered a couple of small bugs as well. Most notably, the KDE handbook was completely broken. Links to the handbook from KDE applications invariably resulted in a "Documentation not found" page and even navigating the handbook wasn't possible. I also noticed a few translation errors. The default "activity", for instance, was called "Начальная комната" (which translates as "Start-up room"). Overall, though, I was impressed by how responsive the desktop was and I liked the look and feel - it's very much a desktop that doesn't get in your way.



Documentation and community



During my trial I had various questions. Calculate's website has a fair amount of documentation but it's nowhere near enough to really get started with Calculate's more advanced features. I quickly learned that Calculate's English language forums aren't very active (the Russian forums are more lively) and I didn't receive much of a response to questions I asked on Calculate's IRC channel.



My main source of information was Gentoo's excellent handbook. This helped me understand Portage but not some Calculate-specific features. To give two examples, I wasn't able to find out whether or not Calculate really is a rolling release distro (as the documentation mentions in passing) and the graphical Calculate Console utility has various features which aren't documented at all.





Calculate Linux 17.6 -- The settings console

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Conclusions



If you're interested in Gentoo but don't want to dive in head-first then Calculate might be for you. The project's documentation could be improved but if you're an experienced Linux user than I'm sure you'll slowly get familiar with Portage's more advanced features.



I think people who want to avoid systemd should also consider Calculate. The distro is perfectly usable without ever compiling software from source. Everything "just worked" and the developers have clearly made a huge effort to make a polished operating system. * * * * * Hardware used for this review:



My physical test equipment for this review was a Lenovo Z570 laptop with the following specifications: Processor: Intel Core i3-2350M, 2.3GHz

Memory: 4GB of RAM

Wireless network adaptor: Qualcomm Atheros AR9285

Wired network adaptor: Realtek RTL8101/2/6E 05) * * * * * Visitor supplied rating



Calculate Linux has a visitor supplied average rating of: 8.9/10 from 55 review(s).

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





Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith)

Remix OS discontinues desktop product, Starlabs launches line of Linux laptops, Debian project releases update for version 9, an interview with Debian's Project Leader The Remix OS project took the desktop port of Android, Android-x86, and used it to develop an operating system for desktop and laptop computers. Jide, the organization behind Remix OS, has stated that they are discontinuing their Android-based desktop operating system. " Over the past year, we received an increasing number of inquiries from enterprises in various industries, and began helping them build great tools for their organizations by leveraging Jide software and hardware. We see huge potential in the role that Jide can play to revolutionize how these businesses operate. And given our existing resources, we decided to focus our company efforts solely on the enterprise space moving forward. We'll be restructuring our approach to Remix OS and transitioning away from the consumer space. As a result, development on all existing products such as Remix OS for PC as well as products in our pipeline such as Remix IO and IO+ will be discontinued. Full refunds will be issued to all backers via Kickstarter for both Remix IO and Remix IO+. In addition any purchases made via our on-line store that has remained unfulfilled will also be fully refunded. This requires no action from you as we will begin issuing refunds starting August 15th. " * * * * * Starlabs, a PC retailer in the United Kingdom, has announced a line of Linux-compatible laptops. These laptops can be purchased with either no operating installed, or with a selection of Linux distributions installed on the disk drive. There are four laptops available, which will run elementary OS, Kali Linux, Linux Mint and Ubuntu. Additional information and hardware specifications can be found on the Starlabs website. * * * * * The Debian project has announced updated installation media for the distribution's Debian 9 "Stretch" release. The new media is not a new version of Debian, but does provide fresh media with available security updates for people performing new installations. An announcement on the Debian website states: " Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 9 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old Stretch media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror. Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages, and most such updates are included in the point release. "



Chris Lamb became Debian's Project Leader earlier this year. In an interview with the Debian Brasil blog, Lamb shares how he got started with Debian, Debian's experimental ports and issues with the project's live installation media. " My first experience with Debian was a happy accident. I had sent off for a five CD set of Red Hat from 'The Linux Emporium', a company in the UK that shipped CD-ROMs of GNU/Linux distributions, an essential service prior to fast Internet connections. However, I was to discover I lacked the 12MB of RAM required to run the Red Hat installer. Annoyed, I reached for a Debian 'Potato' CD that was included (free-of-charge) in my order due to it being rather outdated, even at the time... " * * * * * These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.





Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

Logging sudo usage



Watching-what-sudo-does asks: I have a computer where multiple people have sudo access. Is there a way I can keep track of what everyone is doing when they run sudo <some command> and log it to a file?



DistroWatch answers: The sudo command is a powerful tool for granting users the ability to run commands as other users. Usually we use sudo to give select people administrative access to the computer. This can be very convenient, but it also means we need to place a certain amount of trust in each person who is granted sudo access.



To answer your question, the sudo command and its cousin doas both automatically log the commands people try to run. The exact location of this log may vary, but is often saved as /var/log/auth.log. Both commands will record who ran the command and the specific command line that was passed to sudo or doas. The auth.log file contains other entries too, but you can filter those out if you wish. The following example with the grep command will show all instances of recent sudo usage on my system: grep sudo /var/log/auth.log If you are worried about someone trying to cover their tracks by tampering with the log, you can run a scheduled script to copy the log to another computer at regular intervals.



While the log file will tell you who did what, a better preventative measure is to grant each user access to only the specific commands they need. With sudo and doas you can grant specific privileges to different users, access does not need to be handed out in an "all or nothing" manner. In a previous Questions and Answers column we covered how to share sudo permissions with multiple users. If you are planning on providing sudo access specifically so someone can set up a printer or install software updates, fine-tuning sudo's configuration to only grant a user access to those tools will provide a more secure solution than logging what the user does with full access to the system. * * * * * More answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.





Released Last Week

SparkyLinux 5.0



The SparkyLinux team has announced the release of SparkyLinux 5.0. The new release is based on Debian's Testing branch and is available in three editions: LXQt, MATE and Xfce. " Sparky "Home" edition provides fully featured operating system with lightweight desktops: LXQt, MATE and Xfce. As usually, Sparky MinimalGUI (Openbox) and MinimalCLI (text based) lets you install the base system with a minimal set of applications and a desktop of your choice, via the Sparky Advanced Installer. Changes between version 4.5 and 5.0: full system upgraded from Debian Testing repos as of July 14, 2017; Linux kernel 4.11.6 as default (4.12.x is available in Sparky Unstable repo); new theme 'Sparky5'; new theme of LXQt edition; new default wallpaper created by our community member 'barti'; new set of wallpapers of the Nature category, with a few nice landscapes from Poland; Calamares 3.1.1 as the default system installer; new tool for checking and displaying notification on your desktop about available updates. " More information on SparkyLinux 5.0 can be found in the project's release announcement.



Netrunner 2017.07 "Rolling"



The Netrunner team has announced a new snapshot of the project's rolling release edition, which is based on Manjaro Linux. The rolling release, which was last updated about 18 months ago, includes package updates across the board. The new snapshot, Netrunner 2017.07, features the KDE Plasma 5.10.3 desktop environment, Firefox 54 and version 4.11.8 of the Linux kernel. " Yes, it's back: An up-to-date Netrunner Rolling ISO has been released today after 18 months from the last release. That means Netrunner is now available again as part of the two biggest non-commercial, community-driven distributions since our split from Maui: Debian and Manjaro/Arch. While it would have been possible to simply update the previous system due to its inherent rolling nature, we recommend a fresh install. Our plan is to release an updated install medium regularly 2-3x times a year. What's new? Compared to the 2016.01 version which featured KDE Plasma 5.5.4, Qt 5.5.1 and Firefox 44 at that time, here is what's changed: KDE Plasma 5.10.3, KDE Frameworks 5.35, KDE Applications 17.04.2, Qt 5.9.0, Linux Kernel 4.11.8, Firefox 54.0.1, Thunderbird 52.2.1, LibreOffice 5.2.7. " Additional information and screen shots can be found in the project's release announcement.





Netrunner 2017.07 -- Running the Plasma desktop

(full image size: 365kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)



Quirky 8.2



Barry Kauler has announced the release of a new version of Quirky, a close relative to Puppy Linux that is built using a tool called Woof. The new release, Quirky 8.2, runs on 64-bit x86 computers and offers mostly incremental improvements over previous 8.x releases: " Quirky Linux 8.2 x86_64 is codenamed 'Xerus' and is built using the woofQ Quirky Linux build system, with the help of Ubuntu 16.04.2 binary packages. Thus, Xerus has compatibility with all of the Ubuntu repositories. Quirky is a fork of Puppy Linux, and is mainly differentiated by being a "full installation" only, with special snapshot and recovery features, and Service Pack upgrades, though recently there is limited support for live-CD session-saving and "frugal" installation. Version 8.2 has many architectural improvements and package upgrades, including new packages JWMDesk, UrxvtControl and Take-a-Shot. Among architectural improvements, the overlay file system has been dumped in favour of aufs, mime-handling fixes, and network-connection refinements. A significant change in application selection is VLC dumped in favour of Xine. The Linux kernel is version 4.11.11 and SeaMonkey is upgraded to version 2.48b1. " Further information can be found in the project's release announcement and in the release notes.



deepin 15.4.1



The deepin team has announced the availability of a new release of the project's Debian-based distribution. The new version, deepin 15.4.1, provides mostly minor updates over the previously released 15.4 branch. " deepin is a Linux distribution devoted to providing beautiful, easy to use, security and reliable system for global users. As a revised edition, deepin 15.4.1 added Launcher mini mode, application start animation and window preview effect, optimized 2-D mode of window manager, fixed bugs that forum users submitted and updated Deepin applications to the newest version. Launcher mini mode is added, back to the classic operating way. Two modes are provided for user to switch freely. Well-designed application start animation increased the interest to run application. It's more efficient to drag and drop file to the application on Dock for opening. Window preview effect is back to make your dektop more vivid. Rebuilt Deepin Screenshot, really can start in one second. Newly designed the toolbar and marquee, added the function to directly capture context menu. " Additional information and screen shots can be found in the project's release announcement.



BackBox 5



BackBox Linux is a Ubuntu-based distribution designed for penetration testing and security evaluations. The Backbox distribution is designed to be fast and easy to use with a wide collection of security utilities. It provides a minimal yet complete desktop environment The BackBox project has announced the release of a new version, BackBox 5. The new version features Linux 4.8, several updated tools and builds for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 computers. The release announcement shares the following details: " The BackBox Team proudly announces the major release of BackBox v5. It took long due to several development processes, but we worked hard and got through it. In this major release we made some structural changes, we removed outdated tools and added new ones. What's new: New logo and identity; updated Linux Kernel 4.8; updated all hacking tools. " * * * * * Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases

OPNsense 17.7.r1 (Announcement)

Zenwalk Linux 160717

Q4OS 2.3.4 "Live"

Clonezilla Live 2.5.2-19

Pardus Topluluk 4.0

Container 1409.7.0

Elive 2.9.5 (Beta) (Announcement)

SmartOS 20170720

Revenge OS 2017.07

AUSTRUMI 3.6.6

NAS4Free 11.0.0.4.4490

Pardus topluluk 4.0 "GNOME"

Debian 9.1.0

4MLinux 23.0

Torrent Corner

Upcoming Releases and Announcements

Opinion Poll

Checking system logs



In this week's Questions and Answers column we talked about monitoring the actions of privileged users through system logs. Some people check their system logs on a regular basis, others rely on automated tools to watch logs and report suspicious activity. Others ignore their log files entirely. This week we would like to find out how our readers regard their log files. Do you use them to keep an eye on the system, or are your log files just cluttering up the disk?



You can see the results of our previous poll on installing software from source code in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.



Checking system logs



I check system logs manually: 446 (36%) I get log summaries from automated tools: 81 (6%) I do not check system logs: 721 (58%)

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