DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 862, 20 April 2020

Feature Story (by Jesse Smith)

Recalbox 6.1.1 One of the most recent additions to the DistroWatch database is Recalbox. What is Recalbox? The project's website describes this Linux distribution as follows: Recalbox allows you to re-play a variety of video game consoles and platforms in your living room, with ease! Recalbox OS is free, open source and designed to let you create your very own Recalbox in no time! Use Raspberry Pi, ODROID or even PC (x86)! Put another way, Recalbox is a minimal Linux distribution which has essentially two purposes: to launch a simple, game console-like interface that allows users to play classic video games, typically ones that would normally be found on gaming consoles. The other key feature is the ability to run the Kodi media centre. Recalbox is designed to be copied onto a USB thumb drive or an SD card, plugged into a PC or single-board ARM device, and then used as a livingroom appliance. One which acts like a console that can play both classic video games and multimedia files. The project's website lists supported consoles and hardware platforms.



I downloaded the compressed image file for 64-bit (x86_64) personal computers. The 521MB download expands to about 3.3GB when it is unpacked. This large image file can be transferred to a thumb drive or SD card and then plugged into the computer we want to turn into a gaming appliance.



I began my trial with Recalbox by running it in VirtualBox. Booting from the supplied media brought up a graphical interface with a black background. A window popped up and indicated that no gamepad had been detected and I could press F4 to exit or press a button to signal the input device I was using. Pressing F4 drops the user to a blank text terminal with no information and no login prompt. We can switch to other virtual terminals and, optionally, sign in as the root user. I had some trouble finding the default login credentials, but they are supplied in the project's documentation. (The password is "recalboxroot".)



I booted a second time to get back to the graphical window with the message to press a key to indicate the input device. I tapped a key on my keyboard and the word "keyboard" appeared for a second in the window. Pressing a key and holding it caused the word "keyboard" to get darker. Left long enough the keypress would cause my keyboard to be accepted as the input device and I was brought to a new window, this one used to match actions to keypresses. For instance, I could map any key to actions such as "up", "down", "A", "X", "Top Left", and "Top Right" buttons - essentially mapping part of the keyboard to controller button equivalents.





Recalbox 6.1.1 -- Binding keyboard keys to controller buttons

(full image size: 101kB, resolution: 1024x768 pixels)



Here I ran into two problems. The first was I couldn't find any way to revert an existing mapping. If I went back up the list and tried to change a mapping, it wouldn't work. The second problem was, after all my actions were mapped to keys, I couldn't find any way to have my selections accepted. I highlighted the "OK" button at the bottom of the window, but no matter what I pressed (Enter, "A", "X", Spacebar, etc) the menu remained on the screen and I could not proceed.



During this time I also noticed my CPU was constantly pegged at 100% usage. This was causing my host machine to heat up. At this point I decided to switch to physical hardware and fetched my laptop.



Things went much more smoothly when I booted Recalbox on my laptop. I was quickly brought to a graphical screen which presented me with a list of game consoles the system could emulate. Along the bottom of the display are hints on how to navigate the interface with a game controller. No keyboard short-cuts are provided. Unlike when I ran Recalbox in a virtual machine, I was not asked to map game controller buttons to my keyboard. My CPU ran closer to idle, avoiding the heating problem I had when running the distribution in VirtualBox.



Using the arrow keys, the Enter key and "A", I was able to browse through available emulated consoles Recalbox can support. Selecting a console brings up a list of free games the distribution has pre-loaded. We can select a game to play it. I tried a handful and most loaded and worked, though a few just presented me with a blank, grey screen when I tried to run them.



A problem I then ran into was I could not always back up out of a console and its collection of games to get back to the main menu. Usually Enter would back up a level through the menus, but in this case it did not. I eventually found that "A" would select a highlighted item and "S" would cancel an action or go back up a level. The Enter key would select items, but not confirm selections. Since there is no mouse pointer in the distribution's interface, it seems the only way to efficiently make use of the environment is to have a gaming controller. I do have a few in the house, and I tried to use them, but none of them turned out to be compatible.



One highlight of the Recalbox experience is the Kodi media centre. It can be launched from a menu on the main Recalbox screen. Kodi presents us with a way to play audio and video files, along with several other options. Getting around the interface with a keyboard instead of a mouse was cumbersome and I would not want to do it with a game controller, but it was functional.



The lack of mouse and proper keyboard support could be a problem in other situations. There are settings menus in the main Recalbox menu, including ones for connecting to wireless networks and performing upgrades. The steps to connect to a wireless network bring up text input boxes and on-screen keyboards. Unfortunately the on-screen keyboards only work by moving the selector over the desired keys and pressing a button to pick the highlighted key. Typing on the physical keyboard does not produce text in the input boxes. I also found that my laptop's touchscreen could not be used to interact with the menus or on-screen keyboards.



Recalbox uses about 2.2GB of disk space for its operating system. About another 275MB is set aside for shared data, presumably pre-loaded games, and background music that plays on the main menu. Very little memory is used, generally in the range of 100MB to 200MB of RAM. This allows Recalbox to run on lower-end hardware, including single-board ARM computers, such as the Raspberry Pi. In the background, the distribution uses SysV init and runs on version 4.15 of the Linux kernel.



Conclusions



Recalbox is one of those projects which I suspect is quite good at what it sets out to do, its functions are just outside the realm of my usual experiences. I don't have compatible game controllers in my home to use with it, I am a keyboard and mouse user rather than game controller user. I don't need a game console or media centre as I have access to emulators and media applications on my workstation which adequately fill my needs. I'm not likely to fire up retro games and sit around with a group of people, passing controllers around the room.



However, if I were, I believe Recalbox would fill the role nicely. Apart from its unwillingness to use keyboard and mouse input for some functions, the system appears to offer a handful of good approaches. The interface is simple and geared towards the controllers its users are likely to have on hand. It ships with some free games out of the box. Recalbox also provides a lot of emulated platforms and some neat features such as the ability to rewind some (maybe all?) games to undo mistakes. The distribution appears to provide a simple, user-friendly appliance, at least while running on physical hardware. I wouldn't recommend running it in a virtual machine.



I also like that the distribution does not need to be installed. We only need to copy the image file to a removable device and plug it in. Also, when not being used as a gaming platform, Recalbox can launch Kodi and access media files. This, combined with the platform's ability to connect to local networks, make it an appealing option for people who want a Linux-based classic gaming platform in their home. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a de-branded HP laptop with the following specifications: Processor: Intel i3 2.5GHz CPU

Display: Intel integrated video

Storage: Western Digital 700GB hard drive

Memory: 6GB of RAM

Wired network device: Realtek RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast

Wireless network device: Realtek RTL8188EE Wireless network card * * * * * Visitor supplied rating



Recalbox has a visitor supplied average rating of: N/A from 0 review(s).

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





Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith)

FreeBSD publishes status report, UBports coming to more phones, pfSense users asked to update their Snort rules, Debian elects a new leader The FreeBSD project has published its Quarterly Status Report for the months of January through March of 2020. The report includes updates to the project's infrastructure, X.Org support, and improvements to the operating system's Linux compatibility layer. The report also notes the GNU compiler has been dropped from future releases of FreeBSD: " In 2007 the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) migrated to GPLv3, which prompted discussions about the future of the FreeBSD tool chain. We held a Tool Chain Summit at BSDCan 2010. Roman Divacky gave an update on the ClangBSD project, building FreeBSD using the new and rapidly improving Clang compiler. Since that time Clang was imported into the FreeBSD base system and was used more and more widely - first being installed but not the default cc, then used by default on i386 and amd64, and later used on more and more targets. In the years since Dimitry Andric has been keeping our copy of Clang up-to-date. GCC 4.2.1 was kept in the tree for a few FreeBSD targets that hadn't migrated to Clang, such as MIPS and Sparc64. By early this year all remaining targets had migrated to external toolchain (contemporary GCC from ports or packages), or had been deprecated. With no in-tree consumers remaining, GCC 4.2.1 was removed from FreeBSD in r358454 on February 29, 2020. " * * * * * The UBports team has published an update in which they cover progress in porting their mobile operating system to new platforms along with options to get UBports running on the PinePhone and the upcoming Volla phone. Work is also progressing on the Hallium layer which should allow multiple Linux-based mobile operating systems to run on Android devices. " Alfred spoke about the current status of Halium 9, which is a project to enable Ubuntu Touch and other operating systems to run on Android phones based on version 9. Pretty much all of the base system is running now, including sensors using sensorfw. Bluebinder is installed so Bluetooth works. Calls connect but there is no audio with them yet. Google Pixel 3a is a port which Alfred is working on. Erfan has released a new GSI [generic system image] with roofts and packaged Halium. The compatibility intended by Project Treble does actually seem to be having some valuable consequences. Those who are porting devices using this new version of Halium will only need to supply kernel modifications, so the process should become much simpler and many more devices should come on stream. " Further information can be found in the project's blog post. * * * * * Snort is a network intrusion detection program. The software, which can be run on most members of the Linux and BSD families, is one component of pfSense. The Snort team has asked that pfSense users install the latest Snort package update or adjust their Snort update settings as, currently, pfSense machines are all checking the Snort servers for rule updates at the same time. " We recently were in touch with the package maintainer for Snort on pfSense, to which he was so kind to update the 'Rules Update Start Time' to be random on install in version v3.2.9.10_3. For more information about this update, please check out Bill's forum post here . This update randomizes the start time of the Rules Update for every installation so that we don't have every installation of pfSense in the world simultaneously hitting Snort.org to check for updates all in the same second. As you can imagine, this causes quite a bit of a traffic spike on the site. blog post. * * * * * The Debian project, which includes over 1,000 contributors, has just elected a new Project Leader. The Debian team holds annual elections and have concluded voting this weekend. The Debian developers have chosen Jonathan Carter as their new leader. Carter ran on a platform of making it easier and more rewarding to contribute to Debian with an eye toward removing bottlenecks to work and progress. Details on the election and its results were posted Sunday, April 19th. Congratulations, Carter, and good luck! * * * * * These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.





Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

Trademarks and open source projects Looking-to-share asks: I have a question about using Linux OS trademarks in advertising on-line. I would like to provide a on-line service that ships the Linux OS free of charge. Do I require an approval or several licenses to advertise all Linux OS trademarks on-line and on merchandise?



DistroWatch answers: Before we talk about trademarks, we should first address one potential misconception. There is no one single Linux OS. The Linux distributions we talk about here, and which are discussed on other technical forums, are a family of operating systems, collectively called "Linux" or sometimes "GNU/Linux". These operating systems all share some common components, including the Linux kernel, but typically ship with different libraries, package managers, desktop environments, and end-user tools.



All of that is to say there is no "Linux OS" trademark, but there are trademarks for each specific distribution and often for the individual components included in a distribution. The Linux kernel itself famously has the Tux penguin mascot.



While each Linux distribution has its own set of licenses and trademark agreements, most projects will allow you to use their name and logo to share unmodified copies of their operating system. As long as the copy of Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora you are sharing is exactly the same as the one being provided by the project, then trademark usually is not an issue. However, if you start modifying copies of distributions or slapping their trademarks on merchandise, then you are entering an entirely different realm. One where you are creating a new product and identifying it as (or associating it with) something else. At that point you are probably running counter to the project's trademark agreement.



I am not a lawyer and cannot provide you with legal advice about the specifics of what you may be planning. I can only give you links to some popular projects' license agreements and you can explore options from there. Some projects are entirely up front with their trademark agreements while others may not have a published trademark policy at all. These are the trademark policies for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, and Red Hat. * * * * * Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.





Released Last Week

EndeavourOS 2020.04.11



EndeavourOS is an Arch Linux-based distribution which features graphical install options and pre-configured desktop environments. The project's latest release, version 2020.04.11, introduces a number of custom utilities to improve package management and error reporting. " We’re proud to present you our latest release and it is chucked with new features and improvements. New in-house developed apps - Manuel has created some new apps and tools to make the EndeavourOS experience a bit smoother: Pahis - a tool that shows the package history in the terminal; Eos-log-tool - a GUI app to create a log file needed when reporting a bug on the forum or the bug report area; Eos-rankmirrors - ranks (only) Endeavour mirrors. The existing EndeavourOS apps have received some bug fixes and they all transitioned to ZSTD. Other features and updates: Linux kernel 5.6.3, Firefox 75.0 , Mesa 20.0.4, Calamares 3.2.20; automatic update to the NVIDIA database for the NVIDIA installer; fixes and enhancements for the EOS package build tools. " Additional details and screenshots may be found in the project's release announcement.





EndeavourOS 2020.04.11 -- Running the live Xfce desktop

(full image size: 260kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



Guix System 1.1.0



Guix System is a Linux-based, stateless operating system that is built around the GNU Guix package manager. The operating system provides advanced package management features such as transactional upgrades and roll-backs, reproducible build environments, unprivileged package management, and per-user profiles. The project's latest release is Guix System 1.1.0 which introduces a number of new features and improvements, including the ability to do large scale deployments using the package manager. " The new guix deploy tool allows you to deploy several machines at once, be it remote machines over SSH or machines at a virtual private server (VPS). Channel authors can now write news entries for their users, which are readily readable using guix pull --news. As a result, if you were already using Guix, you've probably already read these news! The new guix system describe command tells you which commits of which channels were used to deploy your system, and also contains a link to your operating system configuration file. Precise provenance tracking that gives users and admins the ability to know exactly what changed between two different system instances! This feature builds upon the new provenance service. " Further details can be found in the distribution's release announcement.



Archman GNU/Linux



Archman GNU/Linux is an Arch Linux-based distribution which features the Calamares system installer and a pre-configured desktop environment. The project's latest snapshot, version 2020-04, introduces a number of changes to the look of the Xfce desktop and its default icons. " In this release you will see a 70% centered panel at the bottom of the screen. With this panel's smart hiding feature, the entire screen will be in your use. We also grouped window tasks as icons only in the panel. In this release we have made many cosmetic changes. We set the Papirus icon set aside and decided to use the Surfn Arc icon set. In Archman Sample Files, we put information and visual files about Balıkesir- Manyas which we introduced in this release. We've fixed many bugs you've detected in earlier release. We have also considered your recommendations. We tried to include your suggestions in this release. " Further details and a list of updated key packages can be found in the distribution's release announcement. * * * * * Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases

Anarchy Linux 1.1.0

Linuxfx 10-beta4

Bedrock Linux 0.7.15

Bicom Systems 6.0.0 "PBXware"

AUSTRUMI 4.2.0

deepin 20-beta (Announcement)

KDE neon 20200416

ArcoLinux 20.4.11

GoboLinux 017-beta (Announcement)

Pop!_OS 20.04-beta (Announcement)

Robolinux 10.10

SystemRescueCd 6.1.3

Torrent Corner

Upcoming Releases and Announcements

Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith)

Linux-based appliances In our Feature Story this week we talked about Recalbox, a Linux-based operating system used for playing video games and playing multimedia. This makes Recalbox a good distribution for Linux-based gaming consoles and media appliances. This week we would like to hear whether you have any Linux-based appliances at home, whether they are used for playing media files, streaming video, gaming, or acting as a network-based storage solution. Let us know which tasks dedicated Linux appliances are handling in your home in the comments.



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



Linux-based appliances



I have a Linux-based appliance: 221 (21%) I have multiple Linux-based appliances: 301 (29%) I do not have any Linux-based appliances: 391 (37%) I do not know if my appliances run Linux: 134 (13%)