Uruk GNU/Linux 1.0



One of the more recent additions to the DistroWatch database is Uruk GNU/Linux (or simply Uruk as I will refer to it). According to the distribution's website, Uruk can be described as follows: Uruk GNU/Linux is a distribution of the GNU operating system, with the Linux-libre kernel. It comes ready for home and office use, and programs are easy to find and install. Uruk GNU/Linux is currently based on the Trisquel GNU/Linux core. Uruk ships with MATE as the default desktop environment and includes free software only. Uruk uses Trisquel as a base. Trisquel is, in turn, based on Ubuntu. In this case, Uruk is indirectly based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and is binary compatible with its grandparent distribution. The Uruk website claims the distribution can work with .rpm package files and can install software directly from source code. The website also mentions Uruk may be able to work with other package formats besides .deb and .rpm, but I was unable to find any documentation to indicate how this feature works.



Uruk version 1.0 is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds for the x86 architecture. I downloaded the ISO file for the 64-bit build which is 1.2GB in size. Booting from this media brings up the MATE desktop. At the upper-left corner of the screen we find a single application menu. A clock sits at top-centre and the system tray is present in the upper-right corner. At the bottom of the screen is a launch panel with a handful of application quick-launch buttons. I found moving open windows toward the bottom of the screen would push the launch panel down and off the display. Raising the window toward the top of the screen would pull the panel back up. This action feels surprisingly nature and I like how the panel quietly gets out of the way when we need the extra screen space. On the desktop we find icons which open the file manager and launch the system installer.



A feature I found unhelpful was the way the month part of dates would always display in Arabic. The clock and the available calendar application displayed month names in Arabic while all other applications and menus displayed text in English. This quirk continued after I had installed Uruk on my hard drive and only the calendar application and clock were affected.



Uruk uses the Ubiquity system installer which people who have worked with Ubuntu or Trisquel will find familiar. The graphical installer begins by asking us to select our preferred language from a list. We are given a link to the project's on-line release notes, but this link was broken at the time of writing. Ubiquity's next screen offers to download updates during the installation process. Since Uruk supplies free software exclusively, there is no option in the installer to download third-party items such as proprietary drivers or Adobe's Flash player. The installer then asks if we would like to make use of guided or manual partitioning. The manual option supports working with Btrfs, JFS, XFS and the ext2/3/4 file systems. I found partitioning to be pleasantly straight forward. The next few screens get us to confirm our time zone, select a keyboard layout and create a user account for ourselves. We can, during the account creation process, opt to encrypt our user's home folder. The installer then finishes copying its files to our hard drive and offers to reboot the computer or return us to the live MATE desktop.



Something I noticed while proceeding through the installer was that it used a theme that made borders difficult to see. Most of the time this was not an issue, but on any screen that involved check boxes or radio buttons the interactive elements were invisible. The only indication I had the boxes were available was the indentation of the text next to where the buttons should appear.





Uruk GNU/Linux 1.0 -- Running the MATE desktop

(full image size: 292kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



The locally installed copy of Uruk boots to a graphical login screen. There are two session options available: MATE and Trisquel Mini. Selecting either session signs us into the MATE desktop. I tried running Uruk in two test environments, one was a VirtualBox instance and the other was a desktop computer. Uruk worked well on the physical desktop machine, correctly piping sound through my speakers, setting up a network connection and setting my display to its full resolution. I found Uruk needed about 350MB of memory to login to the MATE desktop. The distribution also ran smoothly in the VirtualBox environment and was stable. However, Uruk did not integrate with VirtualBox and was unable to make use of my host computer's full screen resolution when running in the virtual environment. To make matters worse, Uruk does not feature VirtualBox modules in the distribution's software repositories. This means our best solution for working with Uruk in a VirtualBox environment is to get the necessary modules from the VirtualBox website or Ubuntu's repositories.



Shortly after signing into Uruk, I noticed an icon in the system tray which let me know there were software updates available. Clicking on this icon brings up the Linux Mint update manager. The update manager displays a list of available software updates and assigns a safety rating to each package. Packages with a rating of 1, 2 or 3 are marked as being safe to install while ratings of 4 or 5 indicate packages which may break system functionality if they are installed. The first day I was using Uruk there were six updates listed, totalling 55MB in size. These updates were downloaded from Trisquel's software repositories and they installed without any problems.



Once I had installed the first round of updates, it occurred to me that six updates was a fairly small number and checked the update manager's settings. I found that while packages given a rating of 1, 2 and 3 are all considered to be safe (with most security updates being assigned a rating of 3), only packages with a rating of 1 or 2 were displayed by default. While this means the updates we install are almost guaranteed to be completely stable, Uruk's update manager filters out the majority of software updates, even ones which should be stable. I enabled level 3 updates and found there were another 79 updates available, totalling 198MB in size. These were also downloaded and installed without any problems.



On the topic of software packages, Uruk provides users with a software manager (labelled Add/Remove Applications in the application menu). The first time I opened the software manager a message appeared and reported the repository information I had was out of date and I was asked if it was okay for the software manager to update its information. The software manager window is divided into two main sections. On the left are several software categories, such as Internet and Office. On the right we find a list of applications in the selected category. Each application entry includes the package's name, a brief description and many entries include an icon. We can select packages we wish to install or remove.





Uruk GNU/Linux 1.0 -- The graphical software manager

(full image size: 241kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



Most of the time the software manager worked well for me, but I did run into an unusual bug. Sometimes when trying to download a new package, the software manager would report it had run into an error. The error message said the selected package could not be removed because it was a dependency of another package. This struck me as strange since I was installing a new package, not removing an existing item. Switching to the command line and using the apt-get command line package manager worked around the issue.



Uruk ships with quite a useful collection of free and open source applications. The Abrowser web browser is featured. This is essentially a de-branded version of Firefox. Flash support is provided in Abrowser via the Gnash free software implementation of Flash. The Icedove (Thunderbird) e-mail application is featured too. The Deluge bittorrent client is included along with the Liferea RSS reader and the Pidgin messaging software. LibreOffice is installed for us along with a dictionary, a calendar application and the Atril document viewer. The GNU Image Manipulation Program and the Eye of MATE image viewer are featured too. Uruk ships with a media file converter, the VLC multimedia player and the Xfburn disc burning software. I found the distribution would play most video and audio files. Uruk ships with a calculator, archive manager and the Rose Crypt file encryption software. Network Manager is available to help us set up an Internet connection. The distribution provides users with Java and the GNU Compiler Collection. Upstart 1.12 is the distribution's default init software and, in the background, we find version 4.2.0 of the Linux kernel.





Uruk GNU/Linux 1.0 -- Running various desktop applications

(full image size: 518kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



I like the application menu Uruk uses. I'm not keen on the usual three-menu approach used by MATE and I like that this distribution is using a different menu style. It is pleasantly straight forward to rearrange the menu's Favourites area, and we can add or remove favourite items by right-clicking on a menu entry.



One application which stood out was the Rose Crypt program. I do not recall using Rose Crypt before, it is a simple desktop application with just a File menu to control its actions. Rose Crypt will let us encrypt or decrypt a file using a password. The original files are kept, making the encryption method relatively safe. While I like it when developers provide an easy way to work with encryption, I have two concerns when it comes to Rose Crypt. The first is the user's password is displayed on the screen as it is typed. There does not appear to be any way to replace the plain-text password with stars or simply not show any characters. The other issue I had was encrypted files are the same size as the originals, which suggests me to Rose Crypt probably does not pad data, possibly making it more vulnerable to attack.



Uruk ships with lots of configuration tools and it is probably easiest to access them through the control panel. We can open the control panel from the launch bar at the bottom of the screen or by pressing the Power button in the upper-right corner of the desktop. The control panel is more or less divided into two parts. The first group of modules, at the top of the panel, deal with tweaking the look and behaviour of the desktop. Modules toward the bottom of the panel deal with software updates, power management, partitioning disks, enabling background services and creating user accounts. The control panel is nicely laid out and features a search function to help us find what we need. I found all the modules worked well, with the exception of the Software & Updates module. For some reason this module failed to launch. All other modules worked quickly and I found them easy to navigate.





Uruk GNU/Linux 1.0 -- Desktop and system settings

(full image size: 217kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)



One of the key features of the distribution, as described by the project's website, is the handling of .rpm and source archives. There are two command line tools, u-src and u-rpmi, for installing source archives and .rpm packages. I gave these a try, starting with u-src. The u-src utility is actually just a small shell script. The u-src script unpacks a given .tar.gz archive and runs the commands "sudo configure", "make" and "sudo make install". Then the script attempts (and fails) to clean up the unpacked directory. The script fails the clean-up process because configure is run with root privileges, making the resulting output owned by root, which our regular user cannot delete.



In some circumstances u-src can successfully install software from source code. Assuming the source code is in a tar archive compressed with gzip and the archive contains source code which can be built using configure and make and assuming we already have all the necessary dependencies installed on our operating system, then u-src can work. The resulting software does not get packaged or work with our software manager, but it will be installed on our system. However, if we are dealing with a different type of archive, or software that uses qmake or cmake or Java or if we do not have the necessary dependencies installed, then u-src will fail.



I next tried u-rpmi with less favourable results. Like u-src, u-rpmi is a small shell script which simply runs a tool called alien to install the given package. The alien utility tries to convert a .rpm archive into a .deb archive so we can install it. The alien tool can work in some situations, but doesn't do well with more complex archives. However, the big hurdle here is the alien package is not installed on Uruk by default. Running u-rpmi simply produces an error saying "alien: command not found". Of course we can install the alien software and that will allow us to install some .rpm archives, but we may need to hunt down dependencies ourselves as .rpm files tend to name dependencies differently than .deb files. In the end, I did not find either u-rpmi or u-src to be useful as there is a ways to go before they live up to their expected behaviour.



Conclusions



Uruk GNU/Linux appears to be a fairly young project with some lofty goals, but some rough edges and unusual characteristics. I applaud the developers' attempts to provide a pure free software distribution, particularly their use of Gnash to provide a pretty good stand-in for Adobe's Flash player. Gnash is not perfect, but it should work well enough for most people.



On the other hand, Uruk does not appear to offer much above and beyond what Trisquel provides. Uruk uses Trisquel's repositories and maintains the same free software only stance, but does not appear to provide a lot that Trisquel on its own does not already offer. Uruk does feature some add-ons from Linux Mint, like the update manager. However, this tends to work against the distribution as the update manager hides most security updates by default while Mint usually shows all updates, minus just the ones known to cause problems with stability.



As I mentioned above, the package compatibility tools talked about on the Uruk website do not really deliver and are hampered by the missing alien package in the default installation. The build-from-source u-src tool may be handy in some limited cases, but it only works in very simple scenarios with specific archive types and build processes. Hopefully these package compatibility tools will be expanded for future releases.



Right now I'm not sure Uruk provides much above what Trisquel 7.0 provided two years ago. The project is still young and may grow in time. This is a 1.0 release and I would hold off trying the distribution until it has time to build toward its goals. * * * * * 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