DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 674, 15 August 2016

Feature Story (by Jesse Smith)

Zenwalk Linux 8.0 - A more Zen Slackware



In July I reviewed the venerable Slackware distribution. Slackware is well known for its conservative nature and dependability, but it requires a few extra steps to get a friendly desktop environment up and running. The Zenwalk Linux distribution is based on Slackware and maintains binary compatibility with its parent. Zenwalk offers two advantages over Slackware, one of them being Zenwalk runs a graphical user interface by default while Slackware boots into a text console following a fresh installation. The second feature Zenwalk offers is a "one-application-per-task" approach to selecting software. Slackware does allow the user to customize installations up front, but fine-grained application selection takes a long time. By default, Slackware will dump large collections of application on the user's hard drive with a full installation taking up over 9GB of disk space. Zenwalk streamlines things a bit, providing a focused set of desktop applications and a full installation of Zenwalk requires approximately 6GB of hard drive space.



The latest release of Zenwalk, version 8.0, ships with LibreOffice 5.1 and version 4.12 of the Xfce desktop. Zenwalk 8.0 is available exclusively for the 64-bit x86 architecture and is available through a 989 MB download.



At first, booting from the Zenwalk media feels a lot like getting started with Slackware. Zenwalk asks us to supply any needed kernel parameters before beginning its boot process. We are then asked to select our keyboard layout or stick with the default "US" layout. Zenwalk then automatically launches the Slackware system installer. Since I talked about setting up Slackware in July I will skip over the details of the installer here. Zenwalk follows the same steps, selecting which partitions to use and which packages to install. I decided to install everything except development tools for my trial. Zenwalk's version of the installer concludes by giving us the chance to set up a user account for ourselves and then asks us to create a password for the root account. Afterwards, we can reboot the computer to start using our new copy of Zenwalk.



The only issue I had with Zenwalk's installer was that I did not have a partition set aside for the distribution before I began the trial. This meant I had to quit the installer, run a command line partition manager (cfdisk in my case) and then re-launch the system installer. Slackware takes a slightly different approach by booting to a command line and getting us to manually run the tools (partition manager or installer) we need.







Zenwalk Linux 8.0 - the application menu

(full image size: 977kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



The freshly installed copy of Zenwalk boots to a graphical login screen. Signing into our user account launches the Xfce 4.12 desktop environment. At the top of the screen we find an application menu, task switcher, system tray and sign off menu. On the desktop there are icons for launching a file manager and opening the Chromium web browser to show the Zenwalk support forum. At the bottom of the screen we find a quick-launch bar which also features an application menu. The background shows a hot air balloon flying through the sky.



Zenwalk features a fairly dark theme which contrasts nicely with the colourful wallpaper. I found some applications use transparent backgrounds by default. This can work nicely when paired with flat backgrounds, but I found it difficult to read text that was placed over the colourful Zenwalk wallpaper. Fortunately most applications make it easy to disable transparency. Another characteristic I noticed early on was that Zenwalk uses unusually small fonts. The desktop's fonts can be changed with a quick trip into the desktop's control panel under the Appearance settings module.







Zenwalk Linux 8.0 - exploring the settings panel

(full image size: 756kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



Speaking of the control panel, the distribution ships with a central control panel for configuring the Xfce desktop and some of the underlying operating system. We can change the look of the desktop, adjust window behaviour and work with user accounts. The available modules generally worked well and I ran into no bugs. I did find the account manager module, which is menu driven, to be a bit cumbersome to work with compared to other account managers, but it does function properly. I also found it strange there are two configuration modules for changing the keyboard layout. I could not find a settings module for setting up printers, but we can access the CUPS printer manager through either of the desktop's two application menus.



Once I got logged in and adjusted the Xfce desktop to look the way I wanted, my next step was to install software updates. There is a Netpkg entry in the distribution's application menu and I started there. Clicking the program's entry did not produce any results. Next, I turned to the command line and ran netpkg. The netpkg command asks us to select a repository mirror from a list and then goes to work updating or installing software from the selected repository. As it turns out the software available through netpkg is somewhat limited and appears to be intended as a compliment to the official Slackware repositories. We can access Slackware's repositories using the slackpkg command line package manager.







Zenwalk Linux 8.0 - installing package upgrades

(full image size: 736kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



At least, we can access Slackware's repositories after we edit the slackpkg repository list in a text editor and select a repository mirror to use. The problem is, this might not be straight forward. I initially tried to use the vi command line text editor to change slackpkg's configuration only to be told the libperl dependency was missing and I could not launch the text editor. Next I tried a few other editors, like nano, but couldn't find any present. Looking through the application menu I found no graphical text editors. The closest thing I could find was the Geany IDE. While Geany is intended for editing source code, it will work on any text file. Of course I had to launch Geany from the command line as root in order to edit the slackpkg configuration file as Geany does not have root access when launched from the Xfce menu. Once I got slackpkg's configuration sorted out with Geany, I was able to use slackpkg to install the vi editor's dependencies, which included the Perl and Python interpreted languages.



It seems as though my trouble with text editors came about because I installed most of Zenwalk's packages, but skipped development software. Sadly, in this case, the vi text editor relies on development packages and refuses to run without them, making the development packages not so much an option as a necessity. As many popular software packages ultimately need to be compiled from source code or found in third-party repositories on Zenwalk, it turns out the user is best off installing everything (including development libraries) in order to achieve a fully functional system, even if the user does not plan to develop any software of their own.



Let's look at the software which ships with Zenwalk. Looking through the Zenwalk application menu I found it was much less cluttered than Slackware's and therefore I found it easier to find what I wanted. The distribution ships with the Chromium web browser (with Flash support), the gFTP file transfer application, the HexChat IRC client and the Transmission bittorrent software. The menu contains an entry called "Gnome Gmail" which simply launches Chromium and brings up the GMail login page. Unlike its parent, Zenwalk supplies us with the LibreOffice productivity suite. The distribution ships with the Orage Calendar software, MPlayer, the Xfburn disc burning software and a full range of media codecs. Developers will find the Glade interface designer and the Geany IDE. The GNU Image Manipulation Program is present. Zenwalk provides us with quite a few other utilities including an archive manager, calculator, the Thunar file manager and the GParted partition manager. One application helps us rename files in batches and another helps us configure which services will run in the background. Cryptkeeper is included for setting up encrypted folders, but it crashed when I tried to set up a new encrypted space. In the background we find the SysV init software (version 2.88) and version 4.4.14 of the Linux kernel.







Zenwalk Linux 8.0 - using Geany to edit text files

(full image size: 315kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



I experimented with Zenwalk in two test environments, using a physical desktop computer and a VirtualBox virtual machine. Zenwalk, like its parent, worked well on the physical desktop computer. The system was stable and my hardware was properly detected and utilized out of the box. When running the distribution in VirtualBox, I found Zenwalk was not able to integrate into the virtual environment and use my host computer's full screen resolution. As Zenwalk does not include VirtualBox add-on modules in its repositories, fixing my display resolution required installing a couple of packages from source, using the SlackBuilds recipes. I ran into one further problem with the VirtualBox add-on. Specifically, Zenwalk still uses X configuration files to set screen resolution while most other distributions configure X automatically, without the configuration file. Zenwalk's X configuration file set arbitrary limits on my display settings, preventing me from using higher screen resolutions. Removing the X configuration file and restarting X fixed this issue.



When running in either environment Zenwalk used approximately 200MB of memory when logged into the Xfce desktop. Early on I found the desktop was unusually sluggish (Xfce is usually snappy on my hardware) and my CPU was regularly chugging away at 75% usage. A quick investigation revealed the PulseAudio volume control plugin on the bottom panel was consuming large amounts of CPU cycles. Removing the PulseAudio plugin fixed the issue and my desktop became much more responsive. Of course, this meant I had to find and install an alternative audio volume control.



Conclusions



There were a few things I enjoyed about Zenwalk 8.0 and several I did not. Before getting to those, I want to acknowledge that Zenwalk is, in most ways, very much like Slackware. The two distributions are binary compatible and if you like (or dislike) one, you will probably feel the same way about the other. They're quite closely related with similar benefits and drawbacks.



On the positive side of things, I like that Zenwalk trims down the software installed by default. A full installation of Zenwalk requires about two-thirds of the disk space a full installation of Slackware consumes. This is reflected in Zenwalk's focused "one-app-per-task" approach which I feel makes it easier to find things. Zenwalk requires relatively little memory (a feature it shares with Slackware) and, with PulseAudio's plugin removed, consumes very few CPU cycles. One more feature I like about this distribution is the fact Zenwalk includes LibreOffice, a feature I missed when running pure Slackware.



On the other hand, I ran into a number of problems with Zenwalk. The dependency problems which annoyed me while running Slackware were present in Zenwalk too. To even get a working text editor I needed to have development libraries installed. To make matters worse, the user needs a text editor to enable the package manager to install development libraries. It's one of those circular problems that require the user to think outside the box (or re-install with all software packages selected).



Other issues I had were more personal. For example, I don't like window transparency or small fonts. These are easy to fix, but it got me off on the wrong foot with Zenwalk. I do want to acknowledge that while my first two days with Zenwalk were mostly spent fixing things, hunting down dependencies and tweaking the desktop to suit my tastes, things got quickly better. By the end of the week I was enjoying Zenwalk's performance, its light nature and its clean menus. I may have had more issues with Zenwalk than Slackware in the first day or so, but by the end of the week I was enjoying using Zenwalk more for my desktop computing.



For people running older computers, I feel it is worth noting Zenwalk does not offer 32-bit builds. The distribution has become 64-bit only and people who still run 32-bit machines will need to turn elsewhere, perhaps to Slackware.



In the end, I feel as though Zenwalk is a more focused flavour of Slackware. The Slackware distribution is multi-purpose, at least as suited for servers as desktops. Slackware runs on more processor architectures, has a live edition and can dump a lot of software on our hard disk. Zenwalk is more desktop focused, with fewer packages and perhaps a nicer selection of applications. The two are quite similar, but Slackware has a broader focus while Zenwalk is geared to desktop users who value performance.



* * * * * 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 2.8 GHz AMD A4-3420 APU

Storage: 500 GB Hitachi hard drive

Memory: 6 GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card

Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card

Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith)

openSUSE prepares for Leap release, Lubuntu migrating to LXQt, Steam running on FreeBSD, PC-BSD's Lumina desktop reaches 1.0.0 milestone



There has been a lot of activity in the openSUSE community in the past week. There were three new snapshots of openSUSE's rolling release edition, called Tumbleweed. These snapshots added a number of application updates and removed the LXDM session manager in favour of LightDM. " Snapshot 20160805 brought more package changes and one major uninstall. LXDM was dropped from openSUSE Tumbleweed and uninstalled in this snapshot. LightDM is being used in the environment instead and is auto-installed with a change configuration for those who are using LXDM. This snapshot provided several repository updates, and NetworkManager-gnome, LibreOffice 5.2.0.4 and WireShark 2.0.5 were a few of the many changes found is 20160805. " openSUSE's more conservative edition, Leap, is nearing a feature freeze for the upcoming release of openSUSE 42.2 and last minute packages are being added prior to the distribution's beta at the end of August.



* * * * * LXQt is a lightweight desktop environment which has grown out of a merger of the LXDE and Razor-Qt desktop projects. LXQt is based upon the Qt software libraries. The Lubuntu distribution is planning to switch its default desktop environment from LXDE to LXQt in the coming months. Simon Quigley has posted that the migration is underway: " The Lubuntu team is ready to begin the migration process to LXQt, and one of the first parts of the migration is getting an image to move to. We have prepared the lubuntu-qt-desktop metapackage and we are ready for an image. A few weeks ago, I submitted two merge proposals thanks to advice given by Adam Conrad on #ubuntu-release. On several occasions (on IRC), both myself and Walter Lapchynski have asked for feedback on the merge proposals in an effort to get the images spun up so we can take our next step, but have not received any. "



* * * * * The Steam marketplace and gaming portal has been available to Linux users for a few years now, but the BSDs (including FreeBSD) have not been able to run a native version of the Steam software. Workarounds generally use WINE to run the Windows version of Steam on the BSDs. One enterprising developer reports it will be possible to run the Linux version of Steam as a native executable on FreeBSD 11.0. The Steam On FreeBSD GitHub project provides scripts and dependencies for running Steam on the development branch of FreeBSD. The page also includes screen shots of Steam running. At this point it looks as though some more work is needed to polish the installation steps and end-user experience, but FreeBSD users may soon be able to run Steam games on their preferred operating system without WINE.



* * * * * After several years in development, the Lumina desktop environment has reached version 1.0.0. Lumina's lead developer, Ken Moore wrote: " After roughly four years of development, I am pleased to announce the first official release of the Lumina desktop environment! This release is an incredible realization of the initial idea of Lumina - a simple and unobtrusive desktop environment meant for users to configure to match their individual needs. I hope you all enjoy it, and I look forward to working with all of you on the next iterations of this desktop! " Lumina began as a lightweight, portable desktop environment with minimal dependencies for the PC-BSD operating system. Lumina's portability and its general lack of platform-specific dependencies have caused the Qt-based desktop environment to be ported to several operating systems other than PC-BSD. To date, Lumina has been ported to Arch Linux, Debian GNU/Linux and GNU/kFreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, Fedora, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Manjaro Linux, OpenBSD, openSUSE, NetBSD, PCLinuxOS, Slackware, SparkyLinux and Ubuntu.



* * * * * These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.





Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

Ubuntu phone follow-up



Following my review of the Meizu Pro 5 phone running the Ubuntu Touch operating system, many people had questions about the device. Some of these questions were posted and answered in the comments section while others came in from social media or e-mail. In an effort to make the answers public and easily accessible, I decided to collect the questions and answer them all in one place. Here they are, in no particular order.



What are the hardware specifications of the Meizu Pro 5?



For those who missed in the link in the article, information on the Pro 5's hardware can be found here. Hardware specifications for all Ubuntu phones can be found on the Ubuntu Phone lineup page.



Will the phone work on my carrier's network?



I have checked three different North American carriers so far (Telus, T-mobile and Koodo) and they were all compatible with the Pro 5. If you want to be certain, compare the frequencies the phone supports against the network frequencies used by your carrier. The phone's supported frequencies are listed on this page. Click the "Expand" button on the right to see a complete list. Your carrier's network frequencies should be available on their website or through a customer service representative.



What about GPS? The article doesn't mention GPS or navigation.



This was an oversight on my part. The short answer is GPS works and Ubuntu has multiple map apps available to help people navigate. The Pro 5 I used bundled an application called HERE Maps which works a lot like Google Maps. The phone's GPS can target the device's position and the map application can provide directions between two addresses. GPS works and, in my area at least, was accurate. I only tried navigating to two locations using HERE Maps, but both times I received accurate information from the navigation software.



The phone runs Ubuntu 15.04, isn't it past its end of life? How do you upgrade?



The Desktop edition of Ubuntu 15.04 has reached its end of life, but the phone runs the Touch edition of Ubuntu 15.04, which is still supported. The operating system is updated about once every six weeks. Updates can be accessed through the settings panel in the Updates module. The Updates module handles updates to both the operating system and individual applications.



Switching between mobile and wi-fi networks.



In the review I mentioned the Ubuntu phone would continue to use a mobile connection even when a wi-fi network was available. I reported this issue to Canonical and, as it turns out, I was mistaken. The phone's settings panel will sometimes continue to show it is using a mobile network even after the phone has switched back to a wi-fi connection. This makes it look like the phone is using mobile data, but further investigation shows the phone has really switched to the wi-fi network. Given more time, or a display refresh, the phone will properly report it is using the wi-fi network.



The phone allows you to run as root, can the operating system be re-installed if the user damages something?



The phone does allow the user to run as root (via the sudo command) which can be a dangerous tool. However, key components of the phone's operating system are protected by being mounted read-only. This gives the user an extra layer of protection they need to by-pass in order to cause lasting harm. Should you need to re-install, supported images can be found on the Ubuntu website. Installations instructions can be found here.



Where can I buy one of these devices?



Earlier this year JoyBuy was selling the Pro 5, but the phone is currently out of stock. Meizu is planning to launch an upgraded Ubuntu phone later this year. I think it will be called the MX6 and should appear on the Ubuntu mobile devices list when the phone becomes available.



What games does Ubuntu Touch have?



Games and other applications in the Ubuntu Store can be found on the uApp Explorer website.



Is there a free developer SDK for the Ubuntu phone?



Indeed there is, it is the Ubuntu SDK. Right now the SDK appears to be packaged for the Ubuntu Desktop operating system (and its many derivatives) exclusively so you may need to install a member of the Ubuntu family of distributions or set up a virtual machine for development.



Since Ubuntu is Linux, can I install other Linux distributions on the phone?



Not without a lot of work. In this case Linux refers to just the kernel, one component in thousands which make up the operating system. Anyone wanting to port a distribution onto the phone would need to make sure they have the right drivers and cross-compile the distribution to the phone's hardware. It would be a long process. * * * * * Additional Questions and Answers articles can be found in our archive.





Torrent Corner

Weekly Torrents



Bittorrent is a great way to transfer large files, particularly open source operating system images, from one place to another. Most bittorrent clients recover from dropped connections automatically, check the integrity of files and can re-download corrupted bits of data without starting a download over from scratch. These characteristics make bittorrent well suited for distributing open source operating systems, particularly to regions where Internet connections are slow or unstable.



Many Linux and BSD projects offer bittorrent as a download option, partly for the reasons listed above and partly because bittorrent's peer-to-peer nature takes some of the strain off the project's servers. However, some projects do not offer bittorrent as a download option. There can be several reasons for excluding bittorrent as an option. Some projects do not have enough time or volunteers, some may be restricted by their web host provider's terms of service. Whatever the reason, the lack of a bittorrent option puts more strain on a distribution's bandwidth and may prevent some people from downloading their preferred open source operating system.



With this in mind, DistroWatch plans to give back to the open source community by hosting and seeding bittorrent files. For now, we are hosting a small number of distribution torrents, listed below. The list of torrents offered will be updated each week and we invite readers to e-mail us with suggestions as to which distributions we should be hosting. When you message us, please place the word "Torrent" in the subject line, make sure to include a link to the ISO file you want us to seed. To help us maintain and grow this free service, please consider making a donation.



The table below provides a list of torrents we currently host. If you do not currently have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.



Operating System Torrent MD5 checksum Apricity OS 07.2016 apricity_os-07.2016-aspen-v2-cinnamon.iso f5b8d436b7c457905c0d1af2c118a4b7 DragonFly BSD 4.6.0 dfly-x86_64-4.6.0_REL.iso.bz2 aaaf3212b3922ed694324a6659fd2604 Guix System Distribution 0.11.0 guixsd-usb-install-0.11.0.x86_64-linux.xz 4ffa8a156ca4f6c306988d6ecb993e46



Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found here. All torrents we make available here are also listed on the very useful Linux Tracker website. Thanks to Linux Tracker we are able to share the following torrent statistics.



Torrent Corner statistics:

Total torrents seeded: 223

Total data uploaded: 41.7TB

Released Last Week

Upcoming Releases and Announcements

Opinion Poll

The state of Devuan



The Devuan distribution began its existence as a fork of Debian which would provide alternative init implementations following the Debian team's decision to adopt systemd. Devuan has been maturing and releasing development snapshots slowly with the developers now close to a final, stable release of their Debian fork.



This week we would like to know if our readers have tried Devuan and, if you did, what did you think? Is Devuan a suitable drop-in replacement for Debian or is there still lots more work to do? Please let us know about your experiences in the comments.



You can see the results of our previous poll on the status of gaming on Linux here. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.



The state of Devuan



I have tried Devuan and it is ready to use: 95 (27%) I have tried Devuan and it needs a little more work: 45 (13%) I have tried Devuan and it needs lots more work: 19 (5%) I have not yet tried Devuan but plan to later: 90 (25%) I have not yet tried Devuan and have no plans to try it: 107 (30%)

DistroWatch.com News