DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 788, 5 November 2018

Feature Story (by Jesse Smith)

Clu Linux Live 6.0 Clu Linux Live is a Debian-based distribution which " provides various processing command line utilities (CLU) and data rescue tools which can be used on a wired or wireless network. " The distribution provides a live CD that will automatically set up Samba network shares and the OpenSSH service to help users rescue files off a computer. The distribution also features such data recovery tools as ddrescue and Clonezilla.



Clu Linux Live is based on Debian 9 and is built for 32-bit x86 computers. The distribution will run on 64-bit processors too and, given the nature of the utilities included, there should be no practical drawbacks to Clu being 32-bit only.



The project's ISO for version 6.0 is approximately 420MB in size. Booting from the ISO brings up boot menu where we can opt to launch the distribution in regular or safe graphics mode. We can also load the distribution entirely into RAM in case we want to remove the boot media.



When the distribution finishes booting we are shown a text console where we are greeted by a series of prompts. The first one asks us to set a password for the root account. The second prompt asks if we would like to mount all attached storage devices. Later we will be told there is a command which will reverse this action, unmounting all hard drives and other attached storage volumes. The next two prompts ask if we would like to start the Samba and OpenSSH network services. These two services can be used to transfer files off the computer and, in the case of OpenSSH, it allows us to remotely manage a cloning or recovery process over the network.



Utilities



The user is then presented with a command line prompt where we are logged in as the root user. Clu does not ship with a graphical interface so we need to be comfortable navigating the command line. The usual collection of GNU programs are included, along with the screen utility for running jobs in the background - typically over OpenSSH. The distribution also provides us with data rescue and copying tools such as ddrescue and Clonezilla. Disk manipulation programs, including cfdisk and parted, are also featured. There are tools such as cryptsetup and ecrypts for accessing encrypted volumes. The 6.0 release of Clu ships with systemd as the default init software and runs on Linux 4.9.



The software included with Clu is mostly standard recovery and disk manipulation tools. These are tried and true utilities and I ran through testing a handful of them to confirm they would work with no surprises. I was not disappointed. The only serious issue I ran into while using Clu was that the distribution does not include any manual pages. If we were dealing with graphical rescue tools this might not matter as much, but several of the utilities included in Clu have command line options and not having a local reference complicates matters. The project's website suggests people can perform web searches to find examples, but this means we either need to make use of the less-than-convenient text-based elinks web browser (included with Clu) or have a second computer/device for looking up examples while sitting at Clu's terminal. Neither option particularly appeals to me, compared with the convenience of local manual pages.



Another quirk of Clu is that the root user's home directory is located at /media instead of the traditional /root location. The /root directory still exists and is populated with profile configuration files, but we are placed in /media by default - probably to make accessing mounted volumes just a little quicker. This is not a problem, just unusual.



Hardware



Clu is a very lightweight distribution. When run without any background services, the operating system uses about 22MB of RAM. When run with Samba and OpenSSH started, the distribution still only consumes 30MB of RAM. Since the system is quite small, even when loaded entirely into RAM, the distribution uses up less than 1GB of memory.



One feature of Clu which I appreciated was that the distribution will automatically detect if our computer has a wireless network card. If one is detected, the system will offer to scan for local wi-fi networks and let us select which network we would like to connect to. Then the system prompts us for a password and sets up the connection, getting an IP address automatically via DHCP. This makes it easier to rescue files off a laptop and send them to another computer on the network.



Conclusions



I do not think there is much Clu Linux Live does which sets it apart from other disk management and data rescue distributions. The included tools are fairly standard and the Debian base is pleasantly predictable. The included tools all work and the distribution is certainly useful, it just does not have much which makes it stand out from the pack of existing rescue CDs. In other words, it offers a mostly good experience in a field of good tools.



My only real complaint about Clu was it doesn't ship with manual pages. And I would have liked to have had access to the photorec recovery tool, but that can be installed from the Debian repositories assuming we have a network connection.



On the positive side, everything works as expected. The distribution automates some important pieces (like activating OpenSSH and connecting to wireless networks). This, along with the small collection of default tools, makes Clu pleasantly predictable and useful. * * * * * 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



Clu Linux Live has a visitor supplied average rating of: 8/10 from 1 review(s).

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





Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith)

Mint modernizes Cinnamon, Steam supports more Windows games running on Linux, Fedora & Korora 27 near their end of life, Red Hat dropping KDE support, update from the Solus team The Linux Mint Monthly Newsletter for October talks about a number of visual changes coming to the distribution, particularly the Cinnamon desktop environment. Cinnamon 4.0 will offer a theme with a slightly higher contrast and a larger panel. " By default, Cinnamon will feature a dark large 40px panel, where icons look crisp everywhere, and where they scale in the left and center zones but are restricted to 24px on the right (where we place the system tray and status icons). This new look, along with the new workflow defined by the grouped window list, make Cinnamon feel much more modern than before. We hope you'll enjoy this new layout, we're really thrilled with it, and if you don't that's OK too. We made sure everyone would be happy. As you go through the First Steps section of the Linux Mint 19.1 welcome screen, you'll be asked to choose your favourite desktop layout. " Examples of the new visual elements are included in the newsletter. * * * * * People who run the Steam gaming portal on Linux received some good news this week. Following the news in August that Valve was making it possible for Linux users to run some Windows gaming titles through a WINE fork called Proton, the collection of games Linux users can run has expanded rapidly. " Proton is a new tool released by Valve Software that has been integrated with Steam Play to make playing Windows games on Linux as simple as hitting the Play button within Steam. Underneath the hood, Proton comprises other popular tools like Wine and DXVK among others that a gamer would otherwise have to install and maintain themselves. This greatly eases the burden for users to switch to Linux without having to learn the underlying systems or losing access to a large part of their library of games. " The ProtonDB website now lists over 2,600 Windows games which can be run on Linux using a combination of Steam and the Proton compatibility software. * * * * * The Korora distribution is based on Fedora and, with the scheduled end of life of Fedora 27 approaching, the Korora team would like to remind everyone to upgrade to newer versions of both distributions. " As Korora uses Fedora as the base for our distribution we follow the Fedora Project's life cycle. Consequently Korora 27 will reach its End Of Life status on the 27th of November. Although there was no Korora 27 release it was possible to upgrade to 27 and many people did that. We advise our users to upgrade to the community released Korora 28 as soon as possible. Systems that still have K27 installed will no longer receive any security updates after the EOL date and are considered to be vulnerable. " The project provides upgrade instructions for migrating to Korora 28. * * * * * Red Hat announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.6 on October 31. Apart from the usual package updates and security improvements, there were a number of notable depreciations in the release notes. Some of them were expected and have been mentioned before, such as the migration to Python 3 and the plan to drop Python 2 from future major versions of RHEL. The Sendmail mail service is being replaced by Postfix and Btrfs (an advanced file system) will not be offered in future major versions of RHEL. Future versions will also drop support for KDE Plasma, suggesting Red Hat plans to streamline its support coverage: " KDE Plasma Workspaces (KDE), which has been provided as an alternative to the default GNOME desktop environment has been deprecated. A future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will no longer support using KDE instead of the default GNOME desktop environment. " * * * * * Last month we shared news from the Solus team when they reported they had been out of contact with Solus founder Ikey Doherty. The team has been making progress, regaining access to some of the project's accounts and planning for the distribution's future. A detailed status update is available in a Solus blog post.



Another update comes from the Phoronix website which has published a letter reportedly from Doherty in which he supports the passing of the leadership from himself to the rest of the Solus team: " I'd like to start out by thanking the Solus team for all their hard work and passion over the years. By way of response to their recent blog post, I in no way see what they've done as a 'hostile takeover', rather, a natural evolution of the project. The truth is, the Solus project has stood on its own merit and feet for a long time, and has moved under it's own steam. For a long time I had said that I was merely the first settler in the town that would become Solus, and in time it would need it's own architects, planners and mayor. " * * * * * These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.





Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

Examining RAM consumption, support for older processors Dealing-with-memory-consumption asks: I keep running into issues with my distro using up all my memory. After about a day my 8GB of RAM is almost entirely used up. How can I find out which program is to blame?



DistroWatch answers: Before you go looking for the program which is consuming all of your memory, first I recommend checking to see if your system really is running low on memory. A lot of memory monitoring tools display how much RAM is being used without any distinction for how it is being used. On Linux, memory consumption is typically divided into two types: memory being used by applications (like the desktop and your web browser), and memory that is caching file data for quick access.



The difference is important because memory which is just caching file data, saving the operating system from reading data from the disk, can be discarded and used for something else whenever more memory is needed for applications. Technically, the RAM is being used, but it's still available for other tasks.



In contrast, memory which is being used by an application cannot be used for something else. The operating system needs to either move the application's data to swap space or kill the application if it needs that memory space back.



To check how RAM is being used, open a terminal and run the command "free -m". This will show you six columns with different memory states:



total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 5440 2729 1509 72 1201 2406

We are primarily interested in three of these columns: Total, Used, and Available. The Total column tells us how much memory is physically in your computer. The Used column shows how much is consumed by applications. The Available field lets us know how much memory can still be used by more applications. Most memory reporting tools tend to show how much memory is used by applications and cached combined, but this is misleading. We really only need to worry about memory consumption from applications, which is what causes the Available field to shrink. What we consider "running low" on memory may vary a bit, but you are probably safe as long as you have around 500MB of space listed in the Available column.



Now, with all that being said, while memory consumption worries are usually a result of over-simplified reporting tools, it is possible for applications to use up too much RAM. To identify the culprit, run the "top" command from the command line and then press Shift and the M key (Shift+M). This will sort processes in order of their memory usage, with the worst offenders on top. The name of the command will be in the far-right column. Closing the offending program will free up your RAM for use elsewhere. * * * * * Reviving-older-equipment asks: I found an older computer that looks like it's from the mid-90s. It was running Windows, but I'd like to try running Linux on it, but most distros only support i686 and up. How can I find distros with i586 support?



DistroWatch answers: While support for x86 processors older than i686 is rare these days, there are a few Linux distributions which still claim to support i486 and i586 systems. The Mageia family of distributions still reportedly offer i586 support, as does Tiny Core Linux. I think the antiX distribution does too. You can find others on our Search page.



While the above two options are probably the easiest to try to get running, you may also be interested in trying one of the BSDs. I think both OpenBSD and NetBSD will still run on processors from the 1990s. * * * * * Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.





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IBM purchasing Red Hat Last week we mentioned IBM is purchasing Red Hat, the world's most profitable commerical Linux company. Since then there have been a lot of predictions for the result being positive (strengthening IBM's and Red Hat's presence on cloud deployments), and many worries about what this will mean for Red Hat, and the projects it sponsors such as CentOS and Fedora.



We would like to hear what you think of IBM acquiring Red Hat. Do you see it as a net positive or negative for the Linux community?



You can see the results of our previous poll on Lubuntu's switch from LXDE to LXQt in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.



IBM purchasing Red Hat



I see it as a net positive: 349 (18%) I see it as a net negative: 474 (24%) I think it will be a neutral mix: 198 (10%) It is too soon to tell: 930 (47%) Other: 24 (1%)