Antergos 2016.02.21



Antergos is a cutting edge Linux distribution which is based on Arch Linux. The project creates a powerful desktop oriented operating system that supports several desktop environments and install-time add-ons. Around the middle of February the Antergos project released a snapshot carrying the version number 2016.02.19. At the time I downloaded the ISO image, but was unable to get the distribution to boot on my hardware. I then moved on to explore other projects, but then discovered the Antergos developers had released an updated ISO, this one labelled 2016.02.21. I downloaded this new ISO and found it booted on my test system and so proceeded to experiment with the distribution.



There are two editions of Antergos, "Antergos Live" and "Antergos Minimal". Both editions are available in 32-bit and 64-bit x86 builds. The Minimal edition is about 530MB in size while the larger edition is a 1.6GB download. I decided to explore the larger edition.



Booting from the Antergos live media brings up a menu asking if we would like to boot from the computer's hard drive, start a live graphical desktop session or boot Antergos in text mode. Taking the desktop option loads the GNOME Shell desktop environment. A dock on the left side of the screen provides access to a few commonly used programs and the Antergos system installer, which is called Cnchi. Shortly after the desktop finished loading, a message popped up in the upper-right corner of the screen and let me know the system was checking for updates to the Cnchi system installer. A few seconds later, I was assured I had the latest copy of the installer. Then another window appeared in the centre of the desktop and asked if I would like to explore the live desktop further or install the distribution.





Antergos 2016.02.21 -- MATE desktop and application menu

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The Cnchi installer is a graphical application which starts by asking us to select our preferred language from a list. The next two screens ask us to supply our country and our time zone, which we can find on a map of the world. We then confirm our keyboard's layout. The following screen asks which desktop environment we would like to install with options including Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE, MATE, Openbox and Xfce. We also have the option of installing Antergos without a desktop environment and interacting with the operating system via a text console. I decided to run Antergos with the MATE desktop. The next screen asks which optional software packages we would like to install. There are several add-ons: The Arch User Repository (AUR), Bluetooth support, Firefox, Truetype Fonts, Adobe Flash, a long term support kernel, printing support, LibreOffice, Steam, PlayOnLinux, the Uncomplicated Firewall utility and Samba. I chose to install everything except the LTS kernel and Bluetooth support. One thing I like about the screen which lists the optional add-ons is hovering the mouse pointer over any item in the list displays a brief description of the package.



Disk partitioning comes next. We can either let the installer take over the computer's entire disk with some suggestions from us or we can manually divide up our disk. If we take the manual option, Cnchi offers us a very nice, streamlined partition manager where we can work with Btrfs, ext2/3/4, JFS, XFS, fsfs and Reiser file systems. I quite like Cnchi's manual partitioning screen, but one feature that caught my eye is the guided partitioning option features ZFS support. In fact, Antergos may be the only desktop Linux distribution I have used so far that enables ZFS support out of the box and I decided to try it. When ZFS is enabled we are given the chance to adjust some settings, such as telling Cnchi how big our swap partition should be, whether to enable mirroring or RAID support, whether we want our /home directory on its own sub-volume and the name of the ZFS storage pool. There are a lot of options, but most people can get by just by taking the default settings. Once disk partitioning has been handled, we are shown a list of the actions the installer will take and we are asked to confirm Cnchi may proceed. We are then asked to provide a username and password so the installer can create an account for us. The installer downloads the components we have selected and installs its files. Installation took a long time during my test runs. Each installation (I performed five in total) took over an hour, including the time to download and unpack all the optional packages. Since it seems the entire operating system (over 850 packages) is downloaded each time we install it, I would recommend only using Antergos on computers that have access to a high-speed Internet connection.



Our freshly installed copy of Antergos boots to a graphical login screen where a digital clock sits in the middle of the display. Pressing a key or clicking on the clock presents a login form where we can sign in. I found the login screen's elements offered very little contrast and it was difficult for me to see the input fields.



The first time I installed Antergos I was unable to sign into my user account, the system merely returned me to the login screen without providing an error message. Switching to a command line terminal, I was able to sign in, but found my user did not have a home directory. With a little exploring, I discovered that while the ZFS volume which housed the base operating system had been mounted, the sub-volume containing my home directory had not mounted. I also found I was unable to list the available volumes using the zpool and zfs command line utilities. Other ZFS related commands worked, but the ones used to list volumes would immediately crash. I suspect this explains why the /home sub-volume did not mount properly. At this point I discovered I could fix the problem in one of two ways. I could place the command "zfs mount data/home" in a start-up script and that would force the sub-volume to mount and allow me to login to my account. The alternative was to run through the install process a second time, choosing to place all my data on one ZFS volume. I opted to try the latter approach to confirm everything would work properly if I kept the /home directory in the main storage volume.



Going through the Cnchi installer a second time and putting all my data on one storage volume did work as expected. However, I did discover a second problem: Cnchi is unable to remove existing ZFS pools. The user needs to manually destroy any existing ZFS volumes before trying to install Antergos on the hard drive. Otherwise the installation fails when Cnchi fails to remove the old ZFS volume.





Antergos 2016.02.21 -- Running various desktop applications

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Once I got the ZFS volume and login issue sorted out, I was able to sign into my account and begin exploring the MATE 1.12.1 desktop environment. The desktop places the application menu and system tray at the top of the screen. A task switcher panel sits at the bottom. The background is plain blue. MATE's application menu is presented as one menu divided into three sections: Applications, Places and System. The Applications section of the menu is then further divided into Favourites and All Applications. Selecting All Applications splits the menu again with categories of software displayed to the left and specific applications from each category shown on the right. Personally, I found the menu to be both cluttered and a bit too nested for my taste as it always felt like there were a few extra steps involved in finding the application I wanted. I do want to give the menu designers credit though for making it easy to move applications from the depths of the nested menu to the Favourites section via a context menu, reducing the time it took to access frequently run programs.



In the system tray there is an icon which indicates when security updates are available. Right-clicking on the update icon gives us the option of launching the distribution's software manager or an update manager. Left-clicking the icon immediately launches the update manager. The update manager displays a simple list of available software updates waiting in the Antergos repositories. Each item in the list is displayed with the package's name and size. We can check a box next to each update to indicate whether we wish to install it. On my first day using Antergos, there was one update available, less than 1MB in size. The following day there were two more updates, each also smaller than 1MB. By the end of the week, more than 30 additional updates became available, totalling 91MB in size. The update manager successfully downloaded and installed each of the waiting packages.



By default, it seems the update manager does not check the Arch Linux AUR repository for new software updates. We can enable checks for updates in the AUR by opening the update manager's settings and putting a check in the appropriate box.





Antergos 2016.02.21 -- Managing packages with Pamac

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Antergos ships with a graphical package manager called Pamac. The Pamac window is divided into two main panes. On the left we can set parameters for finding software. The left pane has tabs that will help us search for software by name, by category, by status or by repository. On the right side of the window is an alphabetical list of packages that match our current search parameters. Each package is displayed with its name, size and version number. We can click a box next to a package to choose whether to install or remove the selected item. Pamac is remarkably responsive and fairly easy to navigate. It may not be pretty, but it is certainly functional.



My one serious complaint with Pamac is that the available software categories are oddly specific and not always intuitive. Instead of the "Internet", "Graphics" and "Office" categories usually found in other package managers, we are presented with dozens of technical names like "Base", "System", "Qt", "Qt5" and "xorg-drivers". I suspect most new users are going to struggle with names like these. I encountered some confusion myself when searching for specific packages. For instance, there is a "Browsers" category where we can find web browsers, but there is also a "Firefox" category which does not contain the Firefox web browser, only plug-ins for Mozilla's web browser. There is an "Email" category which only contains one email client, but if we search for the term "email" in the search tab Pamac offers us a list of half a dozen email applications. The "System" category has ZFS packages and utilities, but the "ZFS" category does not contain ZFS utilities. This sort of maddening behaviour caused me to search for most items using keywords rather than categories. For people who want to manipulate software from the command line, Antergos ships with the pacman package manager. The pacman utility is very fast, though I find its syntax more terse (perhaps even cryptic) compared to other command line package managers.





Antergos 2016.02.21 -- The settings panel

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Antergos provides us with a control panel where we can launch configuration modules to change our desktop environment and manage some aspects of the operating system. The control panel has modules for changing the desktop's theme and wallpaper. We can also find modules for managing printers, setting up network connections, configuring the firewall, the screen saver and start-up applications. These modules generally worked well. One module, the one for configuring the firewall, always failed to launch. I also regretted that I was unable to find a module for working with user accounts, either in the control panel or in MATE's application menu. Another minor annoyance appeared while I was using the Appearance module which changes the look and theme of the desktop. At one point I accidentally clicked on an alternative theme, causing MATE to immediately change its look. The original theme, called Custom, was immediately lost, preventing me from switching back. This quirk is not specific to Antergos, but rather seems to be common across distributions which ship with a special "Custom" MATE theme.



The distribution ships with a varied and useful collection of software. Looking through the application menu we find the Firefox web browser with Adobe's Flash plug-in, the Pidgin instant messenger software and the Transmission bittorrent software. LibreOffice is available along with the Atril document viewer and the Eye of MATE image viewer. PlayOnLinux and Steam are available to help us install Windows software and Linux games, respectively. Unfortunately, Steam would not launch on my test system. PlayOnLinux did work most of the time, but was not always able to successfully complete installations of Windows applications. The Pragha audio player and Totem video player are included. I found I was able to play music files, including mp3 files, in Pragha. However, I was not able to play video files using Totem. I downloaded a copy of the VLC media player from the Antergos software repository and found VLC was able to play my video files. Antergos also ships with the Xfburn optical disc burning software, a text editor, calculator and archive manager. Antergos ships with the GNU Compiler Collection for developers. In the background we find systemd 229 and version 4.4.1 of the Linux kernel.



The first user we create when setting up Antergos has the ability to perform administrator actions using the su and sudo commands. This concerns me a little as I do not think there is any part of the installation which asks us to set up a root password. It seems as though the root password is just automatically set to match the first user's account. Personally, I would rather the root account have its own password or the system lock root and get users to perform administrative actions using sudo exclusively. Having one password to access two accounts feels like a potential problem to me.



I tried running Antergos in two test environments, a physical desktop computer and a VirtualBox virtual machine. Antergos performed well in both environments, properly detecting my hardware and running smoothly. My one complaint was that when booting Antergos took over a minute and a half to reach the login screen. I am uncertain if this is an issue specific to ZFS or a result of some services (like dev-disk) which took an unusually long time to start-up. However, once the system had booted, Antergos was responsive. The distribution, with all optional add-ons installed, used about 6GB of disk space, plus a 500MB /boot partition formatted with the ext4 file system is set aside when we install Antergos on a ZFS volume. When logged into the MATE desktop, Antergos used approximately 560MB of memory. Some opponents of ZFS like to state the file system requires several gigabytes of RAM, but the ability to run the operating system, MATE and ZFS with under 600MB of memory indicates none of the distribution's components is particularly heavy.



Conclusions



Throughout the week, I was impressed with the features Antergos brings to the table. There is a lot of cutting-edge software included in the distribution. Antergos worked well in both of my test environments, has a very friendly system installer and lots of useful features. I especially like how the project ships one ISO image and we can select our desktop and add-ons from the Cnchi installer. This gives us a good deal of flexibility without cluttering up the project's download page with extra editions. I was also happy to see Antergos supports both Btrfs and ZFS as both are useful, advanced file systems. This may be the first Linux desktop distribution I have encountered which supports ZFS at install time.



However, on the other hand, I occasionally ran into problems. Usually small things, but ones that made Antergos feel less polished. For example, I mentioned earlier that asking the installer to place our /home partition on its own ZFS sub-volume would cause /home to not be mounted at all. Also, while most ZFS functions worked, listing volumes and snapshots did not, which puts a damper on some of the more useful ZFS functions. The Steam gaming portal did not work for me and Totem was unable to play my video files and I had to install an alternate media player. Most configuration modules worked beautifully, particularly the printer manager, but the firewall utility failed to launch.



I think the Antergos project is doing some interesting things and the developers are providing a great deal of flexibility combined with cutting edge software. Personally, I wish there was an off-line version of the Cnchi installer so I did not need to wait so long for packages to download each time I installed the distribution. And I did run into a few problems. However, overall I liked Antergos. The distribution is fast, easy to customize and provides access to a huge repository of software via the main repositories and Arch Linux's AUR community repository. * * * * * 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