DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 670, 18 July 2016

Feature Story (by Joshua Allen Holm)

Linux Lite 3.0



Based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Linux Lite 3.0 is a lightweight distribution with the Xfce 4.12 desktop. In addition to being lightweight, it is also aimed at providing a familiar user experience for users transitioning from Microsoft Windows. In the wide array of Ubuntu derived distributions, Linux Lite has a lot of competition, so what sets Linux Lite apart from the other options? I downloaded the 955MB 64-bit install media to find out and below I share my experience with this very nice, polished distribution.



Booting and installing the distribution is a very familiar experience for anyone who has used Ubuntu or any distribution based on Ubuntu. The standard Ubiquity installer walks the user through the install experience providing guidance and making the experience pretty straight forward. In this regard, Linux Lite 3.0 is almost identical to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.



Because Linux Lite 3.0 is based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, it features version 4.4 of the Linux kernel and supports a wide variety of hardware out of the box using open source drivers. If the user needs proprietary drivers, all the drivers that are available for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS can be installed. Unfortunately users who need to use the proprietary ATI Catalyst drivers will run into problems because Linux Lite 3.0, just like Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, does not support the Catalyst drivers. One other hardware related issue to note is that the Linux Lite documentation recommends switching the computer's BIOS to Legacy mode instead of using UEFI mode and Secure Boot. The documentation states that "Linux Lite does not support or advocate the use of Secure Boot" and it notes that the distribution can be made to work with UEFI booting, but "The solution requires intermediate knowledge of Linux" and provides a link to a YouTube video which provides instructions.





Linux Lite 3.0 -- The application menu

(full image size: 409kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



Once installed, Linux Lite 3.0 provides a very polished experience. A nicely themed Light Display Manager (LightDM) handles the login and Xfce, again nicely themed, provides the desktop experience. The two fit together well and provide a consistent visual experience. From boot splash to shutdown, Linux Lite 3.0 has a visually consistent user experience, and given the lightweight nature of the distribution, which uses only 300MB with no applications running, that experience is very responsive. My one issue with the look and feel of the distribution is that the default wallpaper, which is mostly bright yellow, orange, and red, is just way too bright for me, but that is a subjective thing, and it is my only real issue with my entire experience with Linux Lite 3.0. Several of the other available wallpapers are more muted, so it is easy enough to pick a different wallpaper from the included options making it a very, very minor issue.





Linux Lite 3.0 -- The Lite Software graphical package manager

(full image size: 436kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



When it comes to applications, Linux Lite 3.0 provides all the typical applications out of the box. In addition to the standard Xfce applications and utilities, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice and GIMP all come pre-installed, and everything that is available in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is also available in Linux Lite 3.0. Installing new software is very easy with both Synaptic Package Manager and a utility called Lite Software, which is one of the best value-adds of the Linux Lite experience. Lite Software provides an easy way to install a variety of common software packages that many users add to their system, including Audacity, Dropbox, Skype, PlayOnLinx, VirtualBox, and WINE, just to name a few. Instead of searching through Synaptic, the user can just select a package from the curated list of options and click Install. This is great for new users who might not be familiar with all the software options available in Linux.





Linux Lite 3.0 -- The welcome screen

(full image size: 405kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



Other great additions to the user experience are the Linux Lite Welcome application, the Lite Tweaks utility, and a tool for uploading a profile of the hardware in the computer to the Linux Lite Hardware Database. The Welcome screen is the first thing a user sees after the login for the first time and provides easy access to important options like updating software and access to various support options like the on-line forums and the help manual. Lite Tweaks provides a short list of useful functions like setting the default browser and clearing various caches and histories. The Share Hardware Configuration utility does exactly that, providing information about the computer Linux Lite is installed on so that other people can search the Linux Lite Hardware Database to see if their machine will work with Linux Lite.





Linux Lite 3.0 -- The Linux Lite documentation

(full image size: 302kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



Of all the things in Linux Lite 3.0 that I liked, what impressed me the most was the documentation. The documentation is easy to find with highly visible links on the desktop and on the welcome screen and the documentation is, thankfully, locally installed on the hard drive, so no Internet access is required to read the manual. It is important for help to be easy to find, but it is more important to be thorough while still being easily readable and Linux Lite's documentation is all of those things. The documentation covers everything from installation to configuring the system and using specific applications. Going beyond just describing their own distribution, the Linux Lite documentation has an excellent glossary of computer terms and a list of Linux alternatives for popular Windows programs. Both of those two things push the documentation from great to truly excellent. Other distributions should take note of the work Linux Lite has done with its documentation.



Linux Lite 3.0 is an excellent option for users seeking a user friendly, lightweight operating system. Because of its Ubuntu base, it has solid hardware support while adding several nice features that set it apart from the official Ubuntu variants. Of course, users who need to use the ATI Catalyst drivers or who need a distribution that supports Secure Boot and UEFI should look elsewhere. Aside from those issues, Linux Lite 3.0 is a very well put together distribution with great documentation and a host of utilities that make it very new user friendly. It is good choice for both new users and experienced users who just want an easy to use, ready to go right after install distribution with very light system requirements. * * * * * 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

Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith)

Bodhi team plans for 4.0.0, pfSense changes its license, an interview with FreeDOS's founder, Linux Mint offers upgrade path and Ubuntu's forums breached



Jeff Hoogland has posted an update on the work currently being done in the Bodhi Linux project. The Bodhi developers are working on version 4.0.0 of the distribution, which is should be released within the next two months. Work is also ongoing to update the Enlightenment libraries which form the base of Bodhi's desktop environment. " One of my goals for the 4.0.0 release is to realign our core Enlightenment Foundation Libraries with the latest upstream release. Their 1.18 release has been pushed back for several weeks due to the number of things it is integrating (namely the Elementary widgets are part of the core toolkit now) and ideally I would like to include this release by default in Bodhi 4.0.0. The targeted release for an alpha snapshot of the 1.18 EFL libraries is July 18th and assuming they hit that goal we should have an alpha Bodhi 4.0.0 release shortly there after. If the E team has more delays past this, I will start preparing the first Bodhi 4.0.0 discs with the existing 1.17.x EFL / Elementary releases. " The full report can be found on the Bodhi Linux blog. * * * * * The pfSense project has changed its license and clarified some of its copyright and trademark conditions. " pfSense is moving to the Apache License 2.0 in order to align the goals of the project with other (unannounced) offerings from Netgate. The Apache License 2.0 is a permissive license similar to the MIT License. The main conditions of this license require preservation of copyright and license notices. Where the 2-Clause and 3-Clause BSD licenses provide no direct language around the areas of copyright, patents and trademarks, the Apache License does. The Apache License is very clear that individual contributors grant copyright license to anyone who receives the code, that their contribution is free from patent encumbrances (and if it is not, that they license that patent to anyone who receives the code,) and that use of Trademarks extends only as far as is necessary to use the product. " The full announcement has more details on the license change and pfSense's trademark policy. * * * * * While FreeDOS is not a Unix, Linux or BSD derived operating system, it is an open source platform. FreeDOS, at its core, seeks to duplicate the Microsoft DOS platform while adding its own utilities and features. This combination results in a very familiar (and almost 100% compatible) DOS environment with a few modern and convenient features. Computer World interviewed FreeDOS's creator, Jim Hall, last week. In the interview, Hall talks about the early days of FreeDOS, debates around modernizing DOS and ways in which DOS is still useful to many people. Hall says DOS still runs on older equipment and can keep legacy applications running: " 'FreeDOS is still intended for Intel and Intel-compatible computers. You should still be able to run FreeDOS on your old 486 or old Pentium PC to play classic DOS games, run legacy business programs, and support embedded development.' " The full interview is an interesting read and explores where FreeDOS has been and where it is going. * * * * * The latest release of Linux Mint has been out for a few weeks now and the project has announced an upgrade path for people who wish to update from earlier versions to Linux Mint 18. A post on the Linux Mint blog reads: " If you've been waiting for this I'd like to thank you for your patience. It is now possible to upgrade the Cinnamon and MATE editions of Linux Mint 17.3 to version 18. " The blog links to these upgrade instructions which walk the user through testing the new version of Mint, performing backups and updating the system's packages. * * * * * Canonical's Jane Silber has announced the Ubuntu community forums have been breached. The notice, which was posted early on July 15, indicates the attacker managed to gain access to the forum's database and access user information. " After some initial investigation, we were able to confirm there had been an exposure of data and shut down the forums as a precautionary measure. Deeper investigation revealed that there was a known SQL injection vulnerability in the Forumrunner add-on in the forums which had not yet been patched. The attacker had the ability to inject certain formatted SQL to the forums database on the forums database servers. This gave them the ability to read from any table but we believe they only ever read from the 'user' table. They used this access to download portions of the 'user' table which contained usernames, email addresses and IPs for two million users. No active passwords were accessed; the passwords stored in this table were random strings as the Ubuntu forums rely on Ubuntu Single Sign On for logins. The attacker did download these random strings (which were hashed and salted). The notice goes on to mention the attacker was not able to access Ubuntu's code or update repositories and could not access users' passwords. * * * * * These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.





Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

Getting software to work across distributions



Moving-packages asks: Why can't I copy a package from one distro and have it work on another? I can't even get packages for one version of my distro to work on another version of the same distro! Why is there no cross-distro compatibility?



DistroWatch answers: First, let's look at some of the different ways software can be packaged and how this affects how the software works. This will help explain why some software continues to work for years across multiple versions of a distribution and why other applications are tied to a specific version of a specific distribution.



One way software can be assembled is by a method called static linking. What this does is essentially gather all of the code an application needs to use and crafts it into one big piece of software. All the libraries and functions the program needs are all included in one file. Because the application has everything it needs in one file, it can be moved to different environments (different distributions) and still work. Since the program replies on very little outsides of itself, it is quite portable.



Having a statically linked program might sound ideal. It is highly portable and it is simple to move the application around, but there are drawbacks. The statically linked program may be larger than other types of software, for example. This approach also means if any software that was used to make the statically linked program has a security flaw, the developer must update the statically linked application and redistribute it. If the original developer is not on top of security updates, the person using the software is at risk of their program being exploited. These restrictions make statically linked programs relatively rare because they are inconvenient to maintain, both for users and developers.



Another approach is to dynamically link software. What this does is allow a program to remain small and use libraries on the user's computer as necessary. Dynamically linked programs tend to be fairly small and rely on other software to provide a good deal of their functionality. This makes dynamically linked programs fairly painless to distribute. When a library used by dynamically linked application is found to contain a flaw, the library can be updated independently of the application.



Most Linux distributions use dynamically linked programs. The packages are small, making them relatively painless to download. Dynamically linked packages simplify security a great deal. If we have 500 programs which depend on the C library and the C library needs to be fixed, dynamic linking allows us to just update the C library once. If all 500 programs were statically linked, we would need to download 500 new versions of all those static programs.



The drawback to dynamically linked packages is that they often require a specific version of a specific library to be installed on the system for the program to work. This means if you want to copy a dynamically linked program from one distribution to another, you need to make sure all the libraries the program uses are also present. This is why dynamically linked packages often will not work when moved to another distribution, or across versions of the same distribution.



There is a third packaging option which tends not to get used much in the Linux community, but has been popular on some other platforms. Some organizations, especially those which sell proprietary software, will dynamically link their programs (making them small and easy to update) while packaging the specific libraries their application needs to function. This means the user ends up installing one large package which contains the application and its dependencies. Afterwards, security updates are provided just for the small libraries the application requires, making long-term maintenance easier for all parties.



The third option may sound like the best of both worlds and usually it is, at least when dealing with proprietary applications. However, since most Linux software is open source, it can be updated by anyone and made to work with newer versions of libraries. This is why most open source software tends to be dynamically linked. It may seem less portable at first since we cannot simply throw an application onto a different distribution. In the long run though open source applications can be better tailored to their specific environment and therefore best benefit from dynamic linking.



This is why most packages cannot be moved between distributions. The software is open source and the developers are leaving it up to each distribution to package the software as best fits their platform. However, it is possible for developers to create statically linked (or hybrid) packages and have them work across multiple distributions and continue to work for years to come. Commercial game companies, for example, tend to take this latter approach.



Lately we have been seeing a lot of interest in portable packages among the various Linux distributions. New package formats such as Snap and Flatpak have been gaining momentum recently and may become increasingly common, especially with third-party and commercial developers. * * * * * Past Questions and Answers columns can be found in our Q&A Archive.





Torrent Corner

Weekly Torrents



Bittorrent is a great way to transfer large files, particularly open source operating system images, from one place to another. Most bittorrent clients recover from dropped connections automatically, check the integrity of files and can re-download corrupted bits of data without starting a download over from scratch. These characteristics make bittorrent well suited for distributing open source operating systems, particularly to regions where Internet connections are slow or unstable.



Many Linux and BSD projects offer bittorrent as a download option, partly for the reasons listed above and partly because bittorrent's peer-to-peer nature takes some of the strain off the project's servers. However, some projects do not offer bittorrent as a download option. There can be several reasons for excluding bittorrent as an option. Some projects do not have enough time or volunteers, some may be restricted by their web host provider's terms of service. Whatever the reason, the lack of a bittorrent option puts more strain on a distribution's bandwidth and may prevent some people from downloading their preferred open source operating system.



With this in mind, DistroWatch plans to give back to the open source community by hosting and seeding bittorrent files. For now, we are hosting a small number of distribution torrents, listed below. The list of torrents offered will be updated each week and we invite readers to e-mail us with suggestions as to which distributions we should be hosting. When you message us, please place the word "Torrent" in the subject line, make sure to include a link to the ISO file you want us to seed. To help us maintain and grow this free service, please consider making a donation.



The table below provides a list of torrents we currently host. If you do not currently have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.



Operating System Torrent MD5 checksum NAS4Free 10.3.0.3.2853 NAS4Free-x64-LiveCD-10.3.0.3.2853.iso b0431a4a21c9e80fc5c4c2f206abe693 IPFire 2.19 Core 103 ipfire-2.19.x86_64-full-core103.iso df0d67197d31a7f93ec7d276e1f8a3d1



Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found here. All torrents we make available here are also listed on the very useful Linux Tracker website. Thanks to Linux Tracker we are able to share the following torrent statistics.



Torrent Corner statistics:

Total torrents seeded: 215

Total data uploaded: 40.1TB

Released Last Week

IPFire 2.19 Core 103



The IPFire project has announced a new update to the distribution's 2.19 series. The new version, IPFire 2.19 Core 103, features updates to the Squid proxy service, ClamAV anti-virus software and Tor networking software. " The web proxy Squid has been updated to the 3.5 series and various improvements for stability and performance were made. On machines with slow hard disks or on installations with very large caches it was likely to happen that the cache index got corrupted when the proxy was shut down. This resulted in an unstable web proxy after the next start. The shutdown routine was improved so that a cache index corruption is now very unlikely. Additionally we have means installed that allow us to detect if the cache index was corrupted and if so have it automatically rebuilt at the next start. This update will delete the presumably corrupted index on all installations and start a rebuild of the index, which could result in slow operation of the proxy for a short time after installing the update. Details can be found in the project's release announcement.



Untangle NG Firewall 12.1



The Untangle NG Firewall distribution is a firewall solution based on Debian. It offers pluggable modules for network applications like spam blocking, web filtering, anti-virus, anti-spyware, intrusion prevention and VPN. The latest release, Untangle NG Firewall 12.1, offers a number of interface updates as well as geolocation data for all network traffic. " In addition to the user interface enhancements, NG Firewall version 12.1 provides new geolocation capabilities for all traffic. NG Firewall's Integrated Rules Engine can utilize geolocation data to allow network administrators to create and apply rules based on client or server latitude and longitude or country. This enables network administrators to quickly triangulate where a threat is originating and create an appropriate policy response. Geolocation data is also available in NG Firewall's reports and widgets. " For additional information, please see the distribution's release announcement. * * * * * Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases

NAS4Free 10.3.0.3

4MLinux 19.0

NuTyX 8.2-beta1

NethServer 7.2-beta1

LinuxBBQ Anorexia-alpha

Tails 2.4-rc1

NethServer 7.2-beta1 (Announcement)

OpenMediaVault 3.0-beta

4MLinux 19.0-beta

elementary OS 0.4-beta2 (Announcement)

Upcoming Releases and Announcements

Opinion Poll

Minimal vs full distributions



In the Linux ecosystem there are distributions for every niche. Some distributions strive to include every piece of software the user is likely to want. Other projects ship minimal installation images, leaving the installation of desktop applications to the user. Some projects try to strike a balance, selecting one application to perform each common task.



This week we would like to know if you prefer minimal distributions, one-app-per-task distributions, or do you want lots of software to be available via a full DVD image?



You can see the results of our previous poll on preferred methods of getting technical support here. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives. Minimal vs full distributions



I prefer minimal distributions: 956 (39%) I prefer full distributions: 670 (27%) I prefer one-app-per-task distributions: 657 (27%) No preference: 158 (6%)