DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 807, 25 March 2019

Feature Story (by Joshua Allen Holm)

Pardus 17.5 Pardus is a Debian-based distribution developed in Turkey. Pardus 17.x releases are based on Debian 9, but they also include software from Debian Backports and Pardus-specific packages. The latest release, Pardus 17.5, will be the final release in the Pardus 17 series, but it will be supported through early 2021.



For this review I will be looking at Pardus 17.5's Xfce desktop version, but there is an alternate download that features the Deepin desktop environment. There is also a server image that installs Pardus without a desktop environment. The Xfce image is 1.3GB, the Deepin image is 1.4GB, and the server image is 530MB.



Pardus live image



I copied the Xfce image to a flash drive and booted my computer from the drive. I was presented with options to use the live desktop in Turkish or English, or to install using a graphical or text-mode installer. I selected the English live desktop and waited just a short time before I had a functional desktop.





Pardus 17.5 -- Xfce desktop environment

(full image size: 52kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



At first glance everything seemed okay. Despite the slightly older version of the Linux kernel (4.9), everything worked okay, including my wireless networking. I explored the customized Xfce desktop environment and found it worked well and was well organized, but as soon as I tried typing anything I found that the keyboard layout was still set to Turkish. I had to adjust this before I could start doing anything in the terminal. This was a minor annoyance, and easy enough to fix, but it might confuse some users if they do not realize what is going on.



Installing Pardus



Once I was sure Pardus worked with my hardware I rebooted and selected the installation option. In my case I opted for the text-mode option because, for some reason, my trackpad does not work in Debian's graphical installer (it works perfectly fine in the live desktop and once Debian, or a Debian-based distribution is installed).



The installation process was also identical to the standard Debian experience, except for the lack of options to select a desktop environment. Debian provides multiple options on its DVD images, but Pardus will just install its pre-selected software packages.



One thing to note is that while Pardus does support disk encryption as part of the installation process, the default boot splash does not provide a password prompt to unlock the encrypted disk. If the user decides to encrypt their disk, they will end up at an animated splash screen with the Pardus logo with a running cat animation, but no visible prompt that they need to enter their pass phrase to decrypt their drive to continue the boot process.



Pardus's default desktop and software



Pardus's default Xfce desktop environment is customized and themed. It features a single bottom panel layout out in a similar manner to the Windows taskbar. The application menu is the left corner and the clock and various functions like wi-fi settings and volume control are on the right. In the centre of panel are the running applications. On the desktop there are shortcuts for the user's home folder and the trash. Overall the experience is very Windows-esque, which is good for a distribution that can be used in corporate environments in place of Windows.





Pardus 17.5 -- Xfce desktop with application menu

(full image size: 87kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



The default selection of software is very typical. Firefox ESR is the browser and Thunderbird is the e-mail client. VLC serves as the default media player. LibreOffice 6.1, one of the packages that comes from Backports, is the office suite. GIMP is pre-installed. The rest of the applications are various system utilities and tools, most of which are from Xfce, but GNOME Disks and Evince are also part of the pre-installed software selection.





Pardus 17.5 -- LibreOffice Writer

(full image size: 52kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



I found Pardus's desktop and software selection to be very usable. I could do most basic tasks on my computer without having to install additional software. However, I noticed that the LibreOffice help files are not installed, not in English or Turkish. When I tried to install the US English help files, there was an error message about the libreoffice-help-common package not being available. The LibreOffice help packages depend on this package, but it does not seem to exist in the Pardus repositories.



Installing additional software



Pardus uses its own repositories that combine packages from Debian Stable, Debian Backports, Pardus, and some non-free software, which makes it closer to Ubuntu's style of being based on Debian than other distributions that still use Debian's repositories and add their own repositories on top of that. This method works, except for the issue noted above with the missing LibreOffice package (and possibly similar issues that I did not come across), but there appears to only be one source for packages, instead of a global network of mirrors, so sometimes installing packages and updates can take a while.





Pardus 17.5 -- Synaptic package manager

(full image size: 92kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



Pardus comes with three graphical tools to install additional packages plus a Package Updater application for installing updates. There is the Pardus Store which is a custom graphical interface for installing a curated collection of software, including non-free packages like Steam and Skype; Synaptic Package Manager for power-users; and GNOME Packages, which honestly feels redundant given the inclusion of Synaptic package manger.





Pardus 17.5 -- Pardus Store

(full image size: 235kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



The Pardus Store looks very nice, but only has a limited selection of software. Like I noted above, the selection is curated, and there is a poll for voting on which package should be added next. However, the text for this poll is the one bit of text I ran across in my English language install of Pardus that was still in Turkish.





Pardus 17.5 -- Skype in Pardus Store

(full image size: 516kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



Another nice feature of the Pardus store is how clearly it indicates that software is non-free (free in the Free Software Foundation sense of the term, not software that costs money). There are huge brightly colored indicators that state the software is non-free. The software is still available, so the distribution might not be good enough for purists, but for a desktop designed to possibly replace Windows in an office setting, having Skype, Slack, and other non-free tools is very helpful.



Aside from the oddly missing libreoffice-help-common package, I found everything I needed in the repositories. Granted, it was older versions because most of them come from Debian 9, but that is to be expected. I found Pardus's selective use of Backports to be quite good in bringing in slightly more up-to-date version of certain packages.



Final thoughts



Pardus is a nice distribution. It has a few issues, which I noted above, but the default desktop and software selection are solid, which makes it a good choice for adoption in offices and by users who want a conservative desktop experience. The only drawback is that it is very difficult to report issues with the distribution, unless you can communicate in Turkish. Granted the shoe is often on the other foot in the open source world when we often expect everyone to communicate in English, but there are issues in Pardus that I could not just report, but actually fix, if I had the ability to interact with the project's infrastructure and community.



Even though I cannot get truly involved with the project, I think I going to keep using Pardus because it does have some very nice design decisions. Sure, with a little work I could turn Xfce on Debian 9 into something very close to what Pardus offers, but Pardus does that without me having to do the work. I just hope Pardus fixes the boot splash not providing a prompt to decrypt drives issue and the missing libreoffice-help-common package. Those two issues are not major problems, I can still decrypt my hard drive without a visible prompt and I can access LibreOffice help online, but they are annoying. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a Lenovo Ideapad 100-15IBD laptop with the following specifications: Processor: 2.2GHz Intel Core i3-5020U CPU

Storage: Seagate 500GB 5400 RPM hard drive

Memory: 4GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8723BE 802.11n Wireless Network Adapter

Display: Intel HD Graphics 5500 * * * * * Visitor supplied rating



Pardus has a visitor supplied average rating of: 8.2/10 from 46 review(s).

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





Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith)

New features in the Budgie desktop, a GUI for browsing sysctl values on FreeBSD, Debian archives older releases One of the big releases of the past week was the anticipated launch of Solus 4.0. While Solus itself was a big release with a lot of upgrades, some of the improvements to the project's Budgie desktop deserve special attention. Budgie 10.5 has received improvements to the way programs are grouped, the notification centre received more fine-grained responses and the volume control now makes it easier to adjust input and output volumes separately. The Budgie settings panel includes many well-explained features to make life easier, " The Windows section of Budgie Desktop Settings introduces options for: Centre new windows on screen (when possible). Disabling Night Light mode when a window becomes full-screen. This option will automatically re-enable Night Light mode when leaving full-screen. This is great for late night gaming or movie watching. Enabling window focus change on mouse enter and leave instead of based on clicking on a window. " A full list of improvements can be found in the project's release announcement. Hopefully these improvements will soon be packaged and included in other distributions. * * * * * As many FreeBSD users know, the operating system includes special controls which allow the operating system to be fine-tuned while it is running. These special controls are called system controls (sysctl). While these controls are very useful, it can be difficult to remember the many options available or what specific functions they perform. To help with this, a new, third-party tool called sysctlview has been launched to provide a way to browse and get descriptions of available sysctl options from the comfort of a desktop environment. The tool has been added to FreeBSD's collection of ports. * * * * * Joerg Jaspert has sent out a notice to let people know older versions of Debian which are no longer receiving security updates are being moved to the archives. This means the older versions can still be downloaded, but will not be available on Debian's large mirror network. " As Wheezy and Jessie have been integrated into the archive.debian.org structure recently, we are now removing all of Wheezy and all non-LTS architectures of Jessie from the mirror network starting today. That is, only Jessie i386, amd64, armel and armhf will continue to be hosted on the normal mirrors. The data is, of course, not lost - the whole of it is synced to archive.debian.org, so if you still need it you will be able to get it from there. " * * * * * These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.





Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

Tracking down the user who changed a file Trying-to-locate-the-editor asks: Someone with access to my system edited a configuration file and I would like to know who did it. Is there a way to identify who changed the file?



DistroWatch answers: I am assuming the file is on your system and not in a version control system like git that would track who changed the file. And I'm going to assume there is no special auditing software or logging in place. With this in mind, there are a few things you can do to try to figure out who edited your file.



The first, and easiest, check you can perform is running the ls command on the file to find out when it was last changed. If the user copied a new, altered file into place instead of editing the original, the ls -l command may also tell you who overwrote the original. Here is an example of running ls -l on a file called example.conf to find out when it was modified: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 46252 Feb 10 12:31 example.conf In this case the file is owned by the root user and was altered on February 10th. This tells us when the file changed, but since the file was probably owned by root all along, we still do not know who changed it.



Assuming the file was owned by root, then chances are the person who made the edit had to use a tool like sudo or doas to change the file. Your distribution should record sudo use in a log file such as /var/log/auth.log or /var/log/security. On my system, I can see when someone edits a configuration file by running the grep command on the log, the result is shown below in bold: grep example.conf /var/log/auth.log

Feb 10 12:31:54 gwen sudo: jesse : TTY=pts/1 ; PWD=/var/log ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/vi example.conf Here we can see that user "jesse" ran the sudo program in order to perform the command "/usr/bin/vi example.conf" as the root user. This happened on February 10th, the same day the file was last edited.



If checking the security log does not work, or the file is not owned by root and does not require special permissions to access, another approach we can take is looking through the users' history. Most command line shells record commands we run to a history file (the name of the file varies depending on the shell). We can run a command like the one shown below to see if we can spot who edited example.conf: sudo grep -l example.conf /home/*/.bash_history /home/*/.history The above command may not give you the time when a file was changed, but it should give you a list of people who changed the file from the command line.



Finally, if none of the above options work, it might be worthwhile trying a social approach instead of a technical one. Assuming not a lot of people have access to your configuration file (and not many people should), then you can sit your team down and ask (or send a query to them over e-mail): "Who changed the example.conf file?" This tactic might require less effort than combing through log files. * * * * * Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.





Released Last Week

Solus 4.0



Joshua Strobl has announced the release of Solus 4.0, an independently-developed desktop Linux distribution featuring the simple but efficient Budgie desktop (separate editions with GNOME and MATE desktop environments are also available) and a custom package management called eopkg. From the release announcement: " We are proud to announce the immediate availability of Solus 4 'Fortitude', a new major release of the Solus operating system. This release delivers a brand new Budgie experience, updated sets of default applications and theming, and hardware enablement. All our editions feature: Firefox 65.0.1, LibreOffice 6.2.1, Rhythmbox 3.4.3 with the latest release of the Alternate Toolbar extension, Thunderbird 60.5.2. Our Budgie and GNOME editions ship with GNOME MPV 0.16 and our MATE Edition ships with VLC 3.0.6. This release of Solus ships with Linux kernel 4.20.16, enabling us to provide support for AMD Picasso and Raven2 APUs, AMD Vega20 and broader Vega10 enablement, as well as improved support for Intel Coffee Lake and Ice Lake CPUs. Furthermore, Linux kernel 4.20 expands our support for other hardware devices, such as touchpad support for the Lenovo IdeaPad 130-15IKB and 330-15ARR. "





Solus 4.0 -- Running the Budgie desktop

(full image size 1.3MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)



Tails 3.13



The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails) is a Debian-based live DVD/USB with the goal of providing complete Internet anonymity for the user. The product ships with several Internet applications, including web browser, IRC client, mail client and instant messenger, all pre-configured with security in mind and with all traffic anonymised. The project's latest release is Tails 3.13 which includes localization fixes, prevents the software centre from downloading packages which are already available on persistent storage, and upgrades several packages. " Fixed problems: Prevent Additional Software from downloading packages that are already saved in the persistent storage. Fix the localization of Tor Launcher, the application to configure a Tor bridge or a local proxy. Fix accessibility when opening Tor Browser from a desktop notification. Fix WhisperBack crashing when additional APT repositories is configured. " Further details and a list of known issues can be found in the project's release announcement. * * * * * Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases

Parabola GNU/Linux-libre 2019.03.11

Bicom Systems PBXware 5.2.3

LinHES 8.6

Zorin OS 15-beta (Announcement)

Clonezilla Live 2.6.1-19

Septor 2019.2

BSDRP 1.92

HardenedBSD 1200058.4

GParted Live 0.33.0-2

Tails 3.13.1

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP1 RC 1 (Announcement)

Torrent Corner

Upcoming Releases and Announcements

Opinion Poll

Looking through log files In our Questions and Answers column we talked about finding out who performed a specific action on a system, a task which is greatly aided by log files. While logs are incredibly useful on servers for improving performance and auditing security, they are rarely used on desktop machines. This week we would like to hear whether you routinely check the log files on your laptop or desktop computer. If you do, please let us know what you look for in the comments.



You can see the results of our previous poll on Kubuntu versus KDE neon in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.



Looking through log files



I do routinely exmaine logs: 106 (8%) I look through logs to fix specific problems: 712 (54%) I do not exmaine logs: 503 (38%)