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11 February 2017

Linux tinkering during January 2017

by joshg253

TL;DR: Linux wot I done in Month One, Year One of Emperor-Lord Drumpf’s reign.

 

Aside from two-fingered-typing up the past few posts filled with all the Linux-related alternate facts up through last year I could remember or make up, I’ve also done some more tinkering during the first month of the year.

Budgie

The Budgie desktop seems interesting, albeit a little rough in some places.

I tried out SolusOS, which is the official distro of Budgie desktop, but they also have a MATE version.

Looks like now Budgie is going to be Qt-based (i.e. what KDE is based on) instead of Gnome-based.

budgie-remix 16.10

Late last year an unofficial Ubuntu spin using Budgie called budgie-remix was approved as an official community flavor and is now Ubuntu Budgie, starting with 17.04.

I also tried the budgie-remix “fresh” 16.10 spin, and the apparently stale 16.10 was much better. This must be for someone to use as a base for their own distro or something.

AUI

I also installed Arch in a VM using the Archlinux Ultimate Install setup script a little while back. It turned out really nice. I chose Budgie, and it offered to install yaourt. I’d kinda like to try it bare-metal on the laptop, but the Arch Anywhere install is great and I probably don’t need 2 installs of Arch on the same laptop.

RancherOS 0.7.1

Seems this is something I’d wanna set up on a “server” and use it headless. Don’t have the means for that around the hovel at the moment.

Q4OS 1.8.2 & 2.2.1

Q4OS is a Debian-based distro featuring the Trinity desktop environment, which is a KDE 3.5 fork, with some extra features, including to easily make it look more like Windows XP or 7.

I installed 1.8.2 in VirtualBox. Letting it do the full-auto (illegal in most states) setup, it eventually let me set a password for the root account, and had wizards to install some extras. I could definitely see myself trying to move less tech-savvy relatives to Q4OS. It really looks & feels a lot like previous versions of Windows. After it noticed it was running in a VM it asked to install the VirtuaBox Guest Additions, and I let it do so. Then it suggested I log out and back in for full effect. I logged out, but the ~root account password would not work…

So, did the install again, this time manually. It was quick and easy, let me set up a user which I used to log in, and played a little more with it.

Then I figured let’s try bleeding-edge version 2.2.1, which came in a handy 616 MB liveCD. Really couldn’t tell the difference from the other, though it no doubt had some newer packages. The setup for the liveCD wouldn’t let me have a hyphen in the hostname, so I powered it off.

Alpine 3.5.1

Still have the issue where I can’t get it to connect to my WiFi during setup. Probably something to do with the password containing spaces…

MX-16

MX Linux (antiX + MEPIS)

This one is interesting, nice even, though I must admit: I am somewhat confused that two distros merged, yet there are still two distros?

Main bar on the side? I tried to like it, but eventually moved it to the bottom where it belongs.

Others

More new/updated ISOs I grabbed that’ll have to wail til February or beyond:

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