DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 727, 28 August 2017

Feature Story (by Jesse Smith)

Cucumber Linux 1.0 Cucumber Linux is a relatively young project and one of the newest additions to the DistroWatch database. While Cucumber is developed as an independent distribution, the project draws a great deal of inspiration from the Slackware project. Cucumber's website has a similar style to Slackware's and Cucumber uses the same low-level package management utilities. The similarities are also reflected in Cucumber's stance on avoiding automatically configuring the system, the distribution's apparent reluctance to customize upstream software and the project's menu-driven system installer.



Cucumber Linux 1.0 is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds for the x86 architecture. I downloaded the 64-bit build which has an ISO file 1.2GB in size. Booting from the installation media brings up a text-based menu where we can choose to launch the project's system installer or drop to a command line shell. There is no live desktop environment available.



Installing



Cucumber's installer is a menu-based utility which begins by telling us we need to set up partitions for the operating system using the command line programs fdisk or parted. We are then dropped into a command line shell to partition our local disk. I found the cfdisk partitioning tool, which I feel has a nicer interface than the other two utilities, is also available. Once we divide up the disk we also need to use command line tools to format the data partitions. When we exit the shell, we are brought back to the installer's menu system where we are asked to assign mount points to each available partition. This is done by selecting a partition from a menu and then typing the partition's new associated mount point.



The following screens get us to select which groups of software we would like to install. By default only one group, low-level base packages, is selected. There are 19 categories of packages in total which include networking tools, the X display software, the Xfce desktop environment, system libraries, kernel source code and language support. I ended up selecting all available software groups, with the exception of 32-bit compatibility software. It seems Xfce is the only desktop environment available.



The installer then starts copying the selected packages, a process I found took about ten minutes. When the installer is finished, we are asked to make up a password for the root account and select our time zone from a series of menus. The installer then asks if the GRUB boot loader should be installed and prompts us to reboot.



The system installer, while feeling a bit dated, should be familiar to people accustomed to using Slackware or one of the BSDs. My one serious concern with Cucumber's installer was there doesn't appear to be any way to return to previous screens. This means if we want to go back a step our quickest option is actually to exit the installer and start the installation process over again.



Hardware



I tried running Cucumber in two test environments, a VirtualBox virtual machine and a desktop computer. When running in VirtualBox Cucumber got off to rough start. At first I was unable to install Cucumber on a disk with a GPT disk layout and had to re-install on a disk with an MBR layout. Once Cucumber was up and running things seemed to go well for a while. The operating system is light, using just 95MB of memory when logged into the Xfce desktop. However, Cucumber was unable to detect and work with the VirtualBox network interface. This prevented me from getting on-line and greatly reduced the operating system's usefulness. I also found Cucumber was unable to integrate with VirtualBox or use my computer's full screen resolution. Attempting to install the generic VirtualBox guest modules from an ISO file failed.



Running Cucumber on my desktop computer did not go as well. The distribution's installation disc was unable to boot on my computer in UEFI mode and could only start in Legacy BIOS mode. When the operating system booted on my PC, it displayed a text screen saying the installation media (which it had just booted from) could not be found and I would need to mount it manually under the /media/install directory. I was then dropped to a command line. I located the installation media's device and attempted to mount it, but the mount command failed, reporting my media was not a usable partition. This ended my experiment on the desktop computer and I returned to exploring Cucumber Linux in the virtual environment.



Early impressions



When running in VirtualBox, Cucumber defaulted to booting to a text console and presenting the user with a login prompt. From there we can login as the root user and explore the command line environment. Later, if we wish to have the system boot to a graphical login screen, we can edit the /etc/inittab file and change the default runlevel from 3 to 5. While it is common for Linux distributions to display a message of the day or command line tips when a user logs in, Cucumber takes a slightly different approach and displays random Bible quotations.





Cucumber Linux 1.0 -- Running the Xfce desktop

(full image size: 331kB, resolution: 1024x768 pixels)



When I switched the runlevel to boot to a graphical login page, I encountered two bugs. The first was the login screen's Shutdown option would not work. I could reboot the system, but trying to power off the virtual machine would cause the system to mostly shutdown and then hang. I also found that if I made a typo when typing in a username on the login screen, the system would lock up and not give me the opportunity to try to login again. If I mistyped a password I could try again, but mistyping a username would effectively bring down the system.



Assuming we get signed in successfully, we are presented with the Xfce 4.12 desktop environment. At the top of the screen is a panel containing an application menu and a task switcher. At the bottom of the display is a quick launch bar. The desktop is unusually cluttered with icons displaying mounted devices and important system directories.



By default, Cucumber does not establish a network connection. According to the documentation this is intentional. The documentation provides steps for enabling a network connection and I think the documentation is fairly easy to follow, but I could not get Cucumber to detect my virtual machine's network interface.



Software



The distribution provides users with a fairly standard selection of applications. Firefox 52.2 ESR is present for browsing the web, the Thunderbird e-mail client is included and LibreOffice 5 is pre-installed for us. We can also find the GNU Image Manipulation Program, a PDF viewer and the VLC media player in the application menu. The default file manager is Thunar. Version 5 of the GNU Compiler Collection is present for building software. Cucumber runs the SysV init software and comes with version 4.9.35 of the Linux kernel.



Package management



I did not spend much time looking at the package management tools available as I was unable to get Cucumber to connect to the Internet. However, I discovered that the distribution uses Slackware's installpkg and removepkg tools for adding and removing software from the system. We can check for new versions of packages and, reportedly, upgrade software using a tool called pickle. The pickle utility is a command line program which simply checks for new versions of software and, if a new version is found in the distributions' repositories, pickle will offer to install the new version. So far as I can tell, despite Cucumber sharing a good deal of its design (and its package management tools) with Slackware, I do not believe the distribution can make use of Slackware packages.



Conclusions



The Cucumber distribution is fairly young and some rough edges are to be expected. However, the list of problems I ran into while trying to use Cucumber Linux was lengthy. Some small issues are to be expected, like not being able to shutdown the computer from within the desktop environment, or not being able to visit previous screens in the installer. Other issues, like not being able to connect to the local network and hanging when a user mistypes their name at the login prompt, are less easily overlooked.



The Cucumber project borrows a lot of its appearance from Slackware, but unfortunately my experience with the distribution suggests this distribution does not share Slackware's track record for reliability and dependability. I'm not opposed to having another Slackware-like project in the world, but Cucumber has a ways to go before I think it will offer the polish and functionality required to attract users. * * * * * 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



Cucumber Linux has a visitor supplied average rating of: 6.6/10 from 5 review(s).

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





Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith)

DragonFly BSD prepares HAMMER2, Ubuntu's transition to GNOME, a free hardware phone running Debian, SUSE reaffirms their commitment to Btrfs, GNOME's new settings panel, Nimbusoft sells Ubuntu Budgie computers Matthew Dillon has announced the next version of DragonFly BSD's HAMMER file system will soon be available for testing. HAMMER supports modern file system features such as snapshots, deduplication and data checksums to protect against file corruption. The new version of HAMMER will not be an install option in the next release of DragonFly BSD, but the technology will be available for people to test. " The next DragonFly release (probably in September some time) will have an initial HAMMER2 implementation. It will be considered experimental and won't be an installer option yet. This initial release will only have single-image support operational plus basic features. It will have live dedup (for cp's), compression, fast recovery, snapshot, and boot support out of the gate. This first H2 release will not have clustering or multi-volume support, so don't expect those features to work. I may be able to get bulk dedup and basic mirroring operational by release time, but it won't be very efficient. Also, right now, sync operations are fairly expensive and will stall modifying operations to some degree during the flush, and there is no reblocking (yet). The allocator has a 16KB granularity (on HAMMER1 it was 2MB), so for testing purposes it will still work fairly well even without reblocking. The design is in a good place. I'm quite happy with how the physical layout turned out. " More details can be found in Dillon's mailing list post. * * * * * The Ubuntu developers are working on switching Canonical's operating system over from using the Unity desktop environment to GNOME. While the desktop being run is changing between Ubuntu 17.04 and version 17.10, the developers are trying to make the user interface familiar to Ubuntu users. A series of blog posts on DidRocks details the efforts to customize the GNOME desktop. The latest post talks about work being done to the system tray: " We are thinking about providing a solution working for us while not exposing the whole systray content for some specific cases like instant messaging applications (Empathy, Skype), e-mails (Thunderbird, Evolution) or sync (Dropbox) applications. Indeed, we think it's an important workflow for most of our users base, especially in light with the removal of systray support in the incoming [GNOME] Shell 3.26. " * * * * * Purism is a freedom-respecting computer manufacturer based in San Francisco, founded in 2014 with the fundamental goal of combining the philosophies of the free software movement with the hardware manufacturing process. Purism is working on an ambitious project: making a free and open smart phone which will run GNU/Linux distributions. The phone, which is being called the Librem 5, is designed to run on existing cellular networks, run GNU/Linux distributions (including Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and Arch Linux), and plans to offer a completely open application ecosystem. Purism is currently trying to raise funding to kickstart the phone's development and manufacture. If successful, the team hopes to ship the Librem 5 in the first quarter of 2019. * * * * * Three weeks ago we reported that Red Hat would be dropping support for the Btr file system in future releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This move raised some questions about the status of the file system and whether this would affect SUSE's distribution. SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) uses Btrfs as the default root file system and features tools for working with Btrfs features. A blog post on the SUSE website makes it clear the distribution will continue to work on Btrfs and support the advanced file system: " This year, we introduced the SUSE Container as a Service Platform and SUSE MicroOS with 'Transactional Updates'. As the host file system for container deployments on this platform we are supporting Btrfs, using a native Btrfs driver in the container engine, that is without the need for an overlay file system in between container and host, and thus improving the space efficiency when storing containers - flat and layered. And there is more to come: We just start to see the opportunities from subvolume quotas when managing quality of service (QoS) on the storage level. Compression (already there) combined with encryption (future) makes Btrfs an interesting choice for embedded systems and IoT, as may the full use of send-receive for managing system patches and updates to (Linux based) 'firmware'. You see, SUSE is leveraging its expertise and investing on what matters for enterprise readiness, a field where Btrfs has proven in real life to be a great technology over the years and we go where open source technology drives innovation. " * * * * * Georges Stavracas has written a blog post in which he talks about changes coming to the GNOME settings panel. The new panel, simply called Settings, adjusts the layout of the panel and presents configuration modules in a two-column layout. " if you're following the GNOME development closely, you're now more than aware of this movement of reworking GNOME Control Center. It was a remarkably colossal work, especially because we used a bottom-up approach: fix the panels, then switch to the new shell. With the release of GNOME 3.25.91, I'm proud to say: the new Settings layout is the official one now. " Details on the new design, accompanied by screen shots, can be found in the blog post. * * * * * Fans of the Ubuntu Budgie distribution will be happy to learn that the distribution is now available pre-installed on Nimbusoft laptops. An announcement on the project's website reads: " All orders include Ubuntu Budgie stickers and a thank-you from the team to you. Not only that, you can also specify the super key to have our Ubuntu Budgie logo as well if you want. You will be ordering these extra special machines from an exciting Linux vendor; additionally, you will also pleased to know that your distro - Ubuntu Budgie - will receive a percentage of the proceeds. " The line of Ubuntu Budgie computers can be found on the Nimbusoft website. * * * * * These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.





Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

Using Flatpak vs Snap Picking-a-package-format asks: For installing the latest desktop apps, am I better off running a distro with Flatpak or Snaps?



DistroWatch answers: Snap and Flatpak packages are portable software archives that are designed to be able to run on any Linux distributions which include the necessary framework. These package formats are both designed to get around the issue many developers (and users) have with traditional Linux package formats which often do not work across multiple distributions. Ideally, we should be able to download a Snap or Flatpak package and install & run it without tracking down dependencies or worrying about whether our distribution includes the proper package manager like RPM or Dpkg. So long as the Snap or Flatpak framework is installed, packages in the corresponding format should work, regardless of which distribution (or which version of your operating system) you are running.



While some people view portable package formats like Snap and Flatpak as being in competition with each other, the two can live side-by-side on the same operating system. This means you do not need to choose to use just Flatpak or just Snap, you can experiment with both. Most of the major Linux distributions support both formats these days. So far I have not come across a compelling reason to use one package format over the other exclusively, so I suggest using both, selecting whichever one is more convenient at the time.



If you are interested in exploring the world of Flatpak packages, you can find instructions for installing Flatpak and see many of the available Flatpak packages on the project's website. In a similar fashion, there are installation instructions for the Snap software and an on-line app browsing store for Snap packages.



We maintain a growing list of distributions which support Flatpak or Snap on our Search page. * * * * * More answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.





Released Last Week

Black Lab Linux 11.0.3



The Black Lab Linux team has announced the availability of a minor upgrade to the distribution's 11.x series. The new release, Black Lab Enterprise Linux 11.0.3, ships with version 4.10 of the Linux kernel, LibreOffice 5.4, Google Chrome 60 and Samba 4. " While our official builds are based on the GNOME desktop with the exception of Black Lab Embedded Linux, which is based on LXDE, we do offer desktop spins for users. that include KDE Plasma 5, Xfce, LXDE and MATE. Black Lab Enterprise Linux focuses on the following changes: Kernel 4.10.0-37; Google Chrome 60; Thunderbird 52.3; LibreOffice 5.4; Webmin 1.8; ksplice for rebootless kernel updates; Samba 4; OpenLDAP; Container support; Web container support; Support for the XFS, JFS and Btrfs file systems for installation targets. " The distribution is available in many editions and spins, providing a range of desktop environments, including GNOME, LXDE, MATE Plasma and Xfce. The official images include the following editions: Enterprise, Education, Embedded and Studio. A detailed list of features and the available spins can be found in the distribution's release announcement.



Raspberry Slideshow 9.0



Raspberry Slideshow is a distribution focused on being a quick-to-set-up platform for displaying image and video files on Raspberry Pi computers. The project has released version 9.0 of Raspberry Slideshow, which is based on Raspbian "Jessie". " Underlying Raspbian Jessie operating system updated (I tried to switch to Raspbian Stretch, but it's still full of bugs, like an incredible and random error when mounting USB keys); kernel and bootloader packages have been updated as well; omxplayer is now taken from Stretch (APT pinning); the way the operating system mounts the inserted USB keys has been changed: usbmount has been removed (because it is now deprecated for the now-stable Debian Stretch - it's available but it does not work on Raspbian Stretch, another issue!) and now Raspberry Slideshow itself is responsible for the mount; improvement: all txt config files (as network-share.txt & co) are now pre-processed in order to clean non-unix line terminators in one passage (dos2unix); if Raspberry Slideshow finds out a .txt.txt filename exists, which of course is an error, it renames the file as .txt. " Additional changes are listed on the project's changelog page. * * * * * Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases

pfSense 2.4.0-RC

Clonezilla Live 2.5.2-28

SystemRescueCd 5.0.4

Ultimate Edition 5.6-alpha "Lite"

Manjaro Linux 17.0.3-rc1

FreeBSD 10.4-BETA2

AUSTRUMI 3.6.9

Nitrux 1.0.3

Torrent Corner

Upcoming Releases and Announcements

Opinion Poll

Snap packages and Flatpak



In this week's Questions and Answers column we talked about two portable package formats, Flatpak and Snap. Both formats are being adopted by most of the mainstream distributions, making up-to-date versions of application available for most Linux users.



This week we would like to find out if you use either Snap or Flatpak packages. If you prefer one over the other, please let us know why in the comments.



You can see the results of our previous poll on running BSD in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.



Snap packages and Flatpak



I use Flatpak packages: 72 (5%) I use Snap packages: 79 (5%) I use both package formats: 65 (4%) I use neither: 1245 (85%)