DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 740, 27 November 2017

Feature Story (by Jesse Smith)

Artix Linux One of the most recent additions to the DistroWatch database is Artix Linux. The distribution grew out of two other projects, Arch-OpenRC and Manjaro-OpenRC, which provided rolling release packages with the OpenRC init software instead of the systemd init software used by Arch Linux and Manjaro. The project's website explains: After more than two years of maintaining repositories with OpenRC packages, the maintainers of separate but closely or loosely related projects (Arch-OpenRC, Manjaro-OpenRC) decided to join forces and create a project that would be systemd-free and unaffected from upstream changes and updates. That required what might technically be considered as a mini-fork. The result of this mini-fork is Artix Linux. The distribution is available in three editions: a minimal Base edition (385MB), an edition featuring the i3 window manager (697MB) and an edition running the LXQt desktop (646MB). Each edition is available for the 64-bit x86 architecture exclusively. I opted to try the LXQt flavour of Artix.



Booting from the Artix media brings up a menu where we can set boot options. We can then tell the boot loader whether we are running from optical media or a USB thumb drive. The distribution quickly starts up and presents us with the LXQt desktop, version 0.11.0. LXQt runs on top of the Openbox window manager. The interface is snappy and presents the desktop with a dark theme. At the top of the screen we find a panel hosting the application menu, quick-start buttons, the task manager and the system tray.





Artix Linux 2017.08.08 -- The LXQt desktop

(full image size: 541kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



Installing



At first there did not appear to be any obvious way to install Artix, but a little browsing of the distribution's application menu turned up an entry for the Calamares system installer. When we try to run Calamares the system prompts for a username and password. The project has very little documentation and I found, through guessing, that "artix" is the required user account and password.



Calamares is a graphical installer which walks us through the usual steps of selecting our time zone, confirming our keyboard's layout, partitioning the hard drive and creating a user account for ourselves. It's a fairly easy to navigate and, in my opinion, well designed system installer. One customization I found added to Artix's version of Calamares is the final option screen where we are asked to select groups of software to be installed. Most of the software groups are fairly low-level items. We are not choosing our preferred productivity suite or media player here, but rather whether to install the X display software, desktop, a compiler and various drivers or firmware modules. Most packages are not selected by default, leaving us without printer support, graphical desktop or volume control.



When our selection is completed, Calamares downloads and installs the selected packages and offers to reboot the computer. The first time I set up Artix I opted for a lightweight system, choosing to just install the LXQt desktop, audio volume control and little else. When I launched my new copy of Artix, I was brought to a text login screen. I found that while the X display software had been installed along with LXQt, I was missing a login manager, the startx command and, it seemed, some necessary video drivers to launch a graphical environment. After unsuccessfully following a Manjaro guide to try to get a working desktop, I decided the faster route to getting a desktop environment working was to re-install. From then on, each time I installed Artix I made sure to select virtually every software package, with the exception of the extra desktop environments. I found with all the optional components installed, Artix would boot to a graphical login screen and allow me to sign into the LXQt session.



Software



Artix ships with a minimal collection of software and the specific items available to us will vary depending on the packages we select at install time. I found the distribution shipped with the QupZilla web browser, an archive manager and the KWrite text editor and the PCManFM file manager. A process monitor, called qps is included along with the VLC media player. There are two entries in the application menu for QTerminal, one of them runs in a drop-down window which can be accessed using a short-cut key.





Artix Linux 2017.08.08 -- Running the QupZilla web browser

(full image size: 526kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



The distribution includes a settings panel which gives us control over the look & feel of the desktop. When I selected all available software packages at install time the distribution included two launchers for managing printers. The first one opened QupZilla and displayed the CUPS web-based management interface. The second launcher opened the system-config-printer desktop utility for setting up printers. The Network Manager utility is available to help us get on-line. In the background Artix uses the OpenRC init software and, at the time of writing, the distribution ships with version 4.9 of the Linux kernel. Though, as the distribution provides a rolling release model, version numbers will gradually increase over time.



I found when I first started using Artix the VLC media player would not open, whether launched from the desktop's application menu or from the command line. After a little trouble-shooting, I installed the phonon-qt4-vlc package from the distribution's software repository and this fixed VLC so that I could play audio and video files.





Artix Linux 2017.08.08 -- Trying to launch VLC

(full image size: 559kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



Another bug I encountered involved the folder icon next to the application menu. Clicking on the folder icon opens a menu where we can select a folder in our home directory to quickly open. Clicking any of the folders or selecting my home directory itself had no effect and the file manager would not open. I could work around this issue by opening PCManFM from the application menu and browsing to the folder I wanted.



Package management



Artix does not ship with any graphical package manager. To handle installing and upgrading software we can use the pacman command line utility. I find pacman's syntax to be terse and unintuitive, but the package manager does work very quickly and I did not encounter any problems using it during my trial. This reliability proved most welcome as Artix ships with very little software and I had to install several items in order to get any work done. pacman is set up, by default, to pull software primarily from custom Artix repositories, though there are some Arch Linux repositories available.





Artix Linux 2017.08.08 -- Using the pacman package manager

(full image size: 652kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



Hardware



I tried running Artix in two test environments, starting with a VirtualBox virtual machine and then trying the distribution on a desktop computer. The distribution performed well in both environments. When running in VirtualBox, Artix worked quickly and integrated with my host environment. Artix provides support for VirtualBox and can use the host computer's full screen resolution. When running on my desktop computer, the distribution performed well again. Artix booted quickly, properly detected all my computer's hardware and the LXQt desktop was pleasantly responsive. In either environment, the distribution used just 190MB of RAM when signed into a desktop session. With virtually all software packages installed (apart from extra desktop environments), Artix started out using about 3.5GB of disk space.



Conclusions



At the start of my trial, in fact for the first day or two, I was not a fan of Artix Linux. I'm not, generally speaking, in favour of installers that download packages over the Internet, especially when I plan to perform multiple installs. And the first time through my attempt to start with a minimal desktop environment resulted in me not having a working desktop at all. This is probably my fault as I must have missed a necessary package somewhere in the selection, but I think (since I was installing the LXQt edition) it would have made sense for the distribution to automatically install all the components necessary to run a minimal graphical environment.



Once the distribution was installed and running, I ran into a few bugs, such as the folder icon not opening the file manager and the VLC media player failing to run. These are relatively minor bugs in the big picture, but with such a minimal distribution any malfunctioning applications stand out. I also ran into a bug early on where the QTerminal window would open partly off the screen and could not be moved. I had to disable the "remember window position" option in QTerminal to get the window to open entirely on my display.





Artix Linux 2017.08.08 -- The settings panel

(full image size: 870kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



Toward the end of the week I grew to appreciate Artix more. The performance of the LXQt desktop was top notch and a breath of fresh air after the performance I received from some distributions I used back in September. I also appreciate that the developers have joined forces from multiple projects to make a separate distribution with the OpenRC init software. I think OpenRC is under appreciated and I enjoy its speed and relatively simplicity.



I will also say that Artix does a pretty good job of offering us a minimal base from which we can build. There was very little software on the system I did not want. This meant I spent more time downloading new packages, but it also meant I had a very uncluttered application menu and a leaner system.



I do think there are a handful of bugs which could be squashed to make the initial experience smoother, but none of the issues I ran into were insurmountable. Artix is working with a good idea, in my opinion. It's minimal, it is rolling and it offers a little-used init system. All of these I think make the project worthwhile. * * * * * 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



Artix Linux has a visitor supplied average rating of: 8.5/10 from 110 review(s).

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





Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith)

Korora works toward version 27, upgrade option for Ubuntu's Unity users, Nitrux shifting from Snaps to AppImage, running early Unix in a container Korora is a desktop distribution based on Fedora which provides more software repositories and media support out of the box. The Korora team has started working on Korora 27, which will carry the code name "Marlin". " For our next release, Korora 27, we have decided that the codename will be Marlin which continues the tradition of having codenames based on characters from Finding Nemo. The development on Korora 27 is in full progress, this involves fixing the layouts on a couple of our spins and of course building and testing ISOs which is done by the team. Once we are satisfied and everything works as it should the final ISOs will be built, tested and released. " Korora is using a tool called Canvas to help with building and working with installation ISOs. Information on the Canvas utility can be found in Korora's roadmap and on the distribution's GitHub page. * * * * * Earlier this year the Ubuntu distribution switched from using Unity 7 as the default desktop environment to using a modified GNOME Shell. This has left fans of the Unity desktop environment, and users planning to upgrade existing installations, wondering about their best options for the future. One project which aims to help is Ubuntu Unity (aka Unity7sl). The project is an unofficial spin of Ubuntu which plans to provide a smooth upgrade path for existing Ubuntu users. If successful, Ubuntu Unity will make it possible for Ubuntu 16.04 users to upgrade to 18.04 while still using the same Unity desktop environment. The project's current plans can be found in this Ubuntu Community Hub post. * * * * * While most mainstream distributions are adding support for Flatpak and Snap portable packages to their respective software managers, the Nitrux team is pulling back from working with Snaps. The project's latest release, Nitrux 1.0.6, removes Snap support from the distribution's software centre. " The NX Software Center was created with the intention of serving portable apps such as Snaps, however it hasn't gone without its fair share of difficulties. At first were the libraries that we had used: libsnapd-glib and libsnapd-qt, which at the time had very early support for Qt so in order for us to use them and create a Qt front-end we had to patch them. Eventually our changes made their way into upstream and both libraries were available in the Ubuntu repositories with the updated code.



As we continued to update the software center we came across another problem: We couldn't create a Snap store of our own. What does that mean? It means that the only official way to get a Snap is through the Ubuntu Store (read: repository). Say we wanted to create our own platform to serve Snaps, well we can't because the server-side software needed to do that is not publicly available to use by third parties (like us). In the future, NX Software Centre will be adjusted to work with AppImage portable packages in place of Snaps. A post on Medium offers further details. * * * * * Most of the operating systems we talk about here on DistroWatch have their roots in Unix. The multi-user, multi-process approach taken by Unix, while not unique at the time of its creation, ended up being the starting point for many future operating systems, including the BSDs, GNU/Linux distributions, macOS and Android. For people who are curious as to what it was like to run one of the original versions of Unix back in 1972, it is now possible to run an early version of Unix in a Docker container. Nick Janetakis explains: " The PDP-11 was a computer sold back in the early 1970s to 1990s. You can read the original PDF brochure if you'd like, or if you want to research it in detail here's a 300+ page manual . It's labeled as a 'minicomputer' but it weighed about 100 pounds (45kg) and cost $10,800 back in the early 1970s. If you account for inflation that would be like spending $63,246 today. But instead of having of buy one, we've ran a simulator. This is somewhat comparable to running an NES or game system emulator. It will give us the experience of using it, without needing the hardware. * * * * * These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.





Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

Gaining longer battery life Running-out-of-power asks: When I moved from Windows to Linux my laptop battery's life dropped by half. Is there a way to make Linux more efficient? I want my seven hours of battery power back.



DistroWatch answers: There are a few approaches we can take to reduce power consumption and increase a laptop's time on battery. One easy approach is to install the TLP package. Linux distributions generally do not install TLP by default, but most of the mainstream Linux distributions have it packaged in their repositories. The TLP package is described as follows: " TLP brings you the benefits of advanced power management for Linux without the need to understand every technical detail. TLP comes with a default configuration already optimized for battery life, so you may just install and forget it. " Most people can install TLP, start the service and forget about it, hopefully increasing battery life. Even without making manual adjustments, having TLP may be worth an extra 25% of battery time, based on my experiences with the software.



Another approach is to try to identify devices our laptop may be using which could be disabled or used less. One of the bigger power draws will be the laptop's screen. Going into your settings panel and into the power settings module should give you the option of lowering screen brightness. I usually do not notice a big difference between 100% brightness and 80% brightness, but my laptop's battery does. The power setting module of your distribution may also be able to turn off keyboard backlighting to further preserve your battery.



If you do not need to be on-line you can shut down connection features. In the settings panels of most mainstream distributions and desktop environments you can find a module for enabling and disabling Bluetooth. Turning off Bluetooth can save some power. Likewise, on most distributions you can right-click on your network icon and uncheck the box labelled "Enable wi-fi" if you do not currently need network access.



Last, but not least, check to see if there are any services or programs running you do not need. Do you have a system monitor on the desktop which is always updating? Do you have a synchronization service like Nextcloud running in the background? Is your e-mail client checking for new mail messages every two minutes? All of these are little things which can add up over time. Closing these applications (or disabling the services) can give your CPU a bit of a break and save you power.



Do you have tips on how to get the most out of your laptop's battery? Let us know about it in the comments. * * * * * More answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.





Released Last Week

Raspberry Slideshow 10.0



Raspberry Slideshow (RSS) is a operating system for Raspberry Pi computers which provides a system which displays a series of images or videos in sequence. Marco Buratto has announced the release of Raspberry Slideshow 10.0 which is based on Raspbian Stretch. " Marco Buratto has just released Raspberry Slideshow 10.0, which features an upgrade of its underlying Raspbian base operating system from Jessie to Stretch. As of now, all the range of Pi micro-computers is supported. Full version 10.0 changelog: the underlying operating system has been moved to Raspbian Stretch; the overall performance is sensibly better; a systemd unit file now replaces the older SysV init-script for launching the slideshow; smoother transitions between images and videos; some minor improvements on code. " More information can be found in the project's release announcement.



LibreELEC 8.2.1



LibreELEC is a minimal operating system dedicated to running the Kodi media centre. LibreELEC runs on x86 personal computers and ARM-based computers, such as the Raspberry Pi. The project has released LibreELEC 8.2.1 which features time zone fixes and security improvements to Samba network shares. " LibreELEC 8.2.1 is a maintenance release that includes Kodi 17.6. It also resolves a minor time-zone issue after recent daylight saving changes, a resume from suspend issue with the Apple IR driver, and it provides two new SMB client configuration options in Kodi settings. You can now set a minimum SMB protocol version to prevent prevent SMB1 from ever being used, and a 'legacy security' option forces weak authentication to resolve issues seen with the USB sharing functions on some older router/NAS devices. If updating to LibreELEC 8.2 for the first time please read the release notes below here before posting issues in the forums as there are disruptive changes to Lirc, Samba, and Tvheadend. " Further information can be found in the distribution's release announcement.



LXLE 16.04.3



The LXLE distribution is an Ubuntu-based project which is designed to be lightweight and run on lower-end computers. The LXLE project has released a new version, LXLE 16.04.3, which is supported through to the year 2021 and includes several bug fixes. " LXLE 16.04.3 is built upon Ubuntu Mini LTS. Lubuntu-core is used as a starting point. What's New? LXhotkey replaced obkey for better ease of use. Addressed menu clutter, layout and organization. Tweaked theme for consistency throughout system. Further integration of MATE/LXQt/Mint desktop components. Removed Pithos as it's regional and requires a user account. Slimmed game section and focused solely on desktop games. Streamlined default PPAs and repositories to avoid redundancies. Lock screen has better blur and indicator of what happened and what to do. Qt + GTK - forced GTK theme adaptation for stubborn Qt based default applications. GRUB/Login - backgrounds set to default wallpaper for overall theme consistency. Updates - update notifier checks unattended-upgrades log for non automatic updates. Window effects such as shadows, fading, transparency, tear free video provided by Compton. " More information can be found in the project's release announcement.





LXLE 16.04.3 -- Running the LXQt desktop

(full image size: 1.0MB, resolution: 1024x827 pixels)



OpenMandriva Lx 3.03



OpenMandriva Lx, a desktop-oriented Linux distribution featuring the KDE Plasma desktop, has been updated to version 3.03. This version marks the end of the 3.0 series and also end of life for OpenMandriva 2014.x: " This release of OpenMandriva Lx is an enhancement and upgrade to the previous Lx 3 releases. With it you'll get even faster booting than before, so fast in fact that it's sometimes quicker than the BIOS. Even the live image boots faster than before. At the hardware level there is an up-to-date kernel 4.13.12, systemd 234 and, for your graphics stack, MESA 17.2.3 with a S3TC support enabled and X.Org 1.19.5. Our main desktop environment, KDE Plasma, is updated to 5.10.5 and Frameworks are at 5.39. Everything with this release, including the new Firefox Quantum 57, is compiled with LLVM/Clang 5.0.0. This release will be the last in the 3.x series and also the last to support i586. In the next release applications, such as wine32, will be supported by providing i586 libraries. This marks the end of support for OpenMandriva 2014 and for some, this will be a sad day as it was a fine release. " See the release announcement and release notes for further information and screenshots.



Kali Linux 2017.3



Kali Linux 2017.3 has been released. Kali Linux, maintained and funded by Offensive Security Ltd, is a Debian-derived Linux distribution designed for digital forensics and penetration testing. This version delivers an updated kernel and a number of new tools: " We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Kali Linux 2017.3, which includes all patches, fixes, updates and improvements since our last release. In this release, the kernel has been updated to 4.13.10 and it includes some notable improvements: CIFS now uses SMB 3.0 by default; ext4 directories can now contain 2 billion entries instead of the old 10 million limit; TLS support is now built into the kernel itself. In addition to the new kernel and all of the updates and fixes we pull from Debian, we have also updated our packages for Reaver, PixieWPS, Burp Suite, Cuckoo.... " Read the full release announcement for further details and screenshots.



ExTiX 18.0



The ExTiX project creates Ubuntu-based distribution spins with alternative desktop environments. The latest ExTiX version is 18.0 and it features the Deepin desktop environment. ExTiX 18.0 is based on Ubuntu 17.10 and is compatible with its parent's software repositories. The project's release announcement states: " About ExTiX 18.0 with the Deepin 15.5 desktop: I've made a new extra version of ExTiX with Deepin 15.5 Desktop (made in China!). Deepin is devoted to providing a beautiful, easy to use, safe and reliable system for global users. Only a minimum of packages are installed in ExTiX Deepin. You can of course install all packages you want. Even while running ExTiX Deepin live. i.e. from a DVD or USB stick. " ExTiX 18.0 ships with Refracta Tools, a desktop utility which helps the user to create their own spin of the distribution, allowing for additional customization.





ExTiX 18.0 -- The application menu

(full image size: 1.5MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)



BlackArch Linux 2017.11.24



BlackArch Linux is an Arch Linux-based distribution designed for penetration testers and security researchers. The project has released a new snapshot, BlackArch Linux 2017.11.24, which contains several updates and more than 50 new packages. The project's blog page lists recent changes: " Today we released new BlackArch Linux ISOs. For details see the change log below. Here's the change log: added more than 50 new tools; various clean-ups and tweaks; updated BlackArch installer to version 0.6; included kernel 4.13.12; updated all BlackArch tools and packages; updated all system packages; update all window manager menus (Awesome, Fluxbox, Openbox). We wish to thank all of BlackArch's users, mirrors, and supporters. Thanks for your help. " This is the first version of BlackArch to drop support for 32-bit x86 packages. 64-bit builds for x86 computers and ARM images are still available. * * * * * Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases

MX Linux 17-beta2

pfSense 2.4.2

Berry Linux 1.25

SmartOS 20171123

NAS4Free 11.1.0.3.4952

ReactOS 0.4.7

Nitrux 1.0.6

NuTyX 9.92

4MLinux 24.0-beta

Torrent Corner

Upcoming Releases and Announcements

Opinion Poll

Laptop battery life on Linux



In our Questions and Answers column we discussed some ways to try to prolong battery life. This week in our opinion poll we would like to find out how much battery life you typically get on your Linux laptop. Do you feel you get enough battery time when running Linux? Let us know in the comments.



You can see the results of our previous poll on using ARM-powered computers as desktop or laptop machines in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.



Laptop battery life on Linux



I get less than 1 hour: 52 (4%) I get 1-2 hours: 233 (16%) I get 2-4 hours: 410 (28%) I get 4-6 hours: 244 (17%) I get 6-8 hours: 88 (6%) I get more than 8 hours: 49 (3%) I do not know: 135 (9%) I do not run Linux on a laptop: 238 (16%)

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