AbsoluteLinux [screenshots] is different from most other niche distros because it's built on a Slackware base instead of Debian/Ubuntu, so I installed it in a VM and have been giving it a test drive for a while. It's the work of one man: Paul Sherman, of Rochester, New York, who took his extensive customizations to Slackware and began making them available to the public as a distro.

Absolute fits on a single CD, and focuses on being a lightweight OS optimized for speed and designed to stay out of your way. It's a desktop, with no pretensions of being installed on a server. It uses the IceWM windowmanager, so you get a fast, traditional desktop, task bar and tray with none of the bulkiness of modern KDE or Gnome desktops, and a set of apps judged to be 'best of class' as well as a couple of utilities he wrote himself (the volume control is a stand-alone app that avoids having to install another package that would've had other dependencies).

Because Absolute is based on Slackware you get all of Slackware's simplicity, stability, and dependability. But you also get Slackware's thin package selection and install mechanism. Absolute has its own repo, and you can add Slackware's repository too [file list is here], as Absolute is 100% compatible with Slackware. But you will soon find yourself over at www.slackbuilds.org looking for 3rd party packages. You also have to manage your own dependencies - a good thing if you want to avoid finding out that a simple app brought all the underlying base packages with it, but a bad thing if you prefer the ease of simple apt-getting your way to the desktop you like. That said, you can use gslapt-get, which comes preinstalled, and takes some of the hassle out of package management.

That said, I like it. It boots quickly, and I do appreciate Slackware's simplicity and straight-forwardness. By installing Absolute instead of straight Slackware you get a graphical, lightweight desktop by default. I think I prefer FreeBSD's ports system or Debian's apt-get for installing software, and it's true Slack - and therefore Absolute - aren't for just anybody. But if you're looking for a refreshing change from the quotidian, Absolute Linux is pretty enjoyable. And above all, it's a reminder that the most interesting things don't come out of corporations trying to be everything to everybody, they come out of willful and skilled hackers that focus on doing one thing and doing it well - much like the Unix tradition itself.

Ubuntu Studio was created for a specific use case: multimedia production. Ubuntu Studio focuses on three core areas - video production, audio production and graphics. It uses low-latency Linux kernel, which is built with different configurations to reduce latency, something that is critical in cases of real-time audio recording. Users can use the appropriate kernel tree suited for their work. It comes with a huge list of open source applications for these three areas. Ubuntu Studio does more than just offer multimedia production applications.

The first version of Ubuntu Studio was released in 2007 and it was based on Gnome. In 2011, with the arrival of Gnome 3, the project decided to switch its base to Xfce, a move that the founder of the project said would offer some "immediately tangible" advantages: "For example, XFCE represents a familiar desktop metaphor (@Fab thanks) for users and provides a more resource friendly environment than GNOME, KDE, or (I would expect) Unity."

http://www.itworld.com/article/2998305/linux/meet-the-ubuntu-family.html#slide5

ConnochaetOS, a Slackware- and Salix OS-based GNU/Linux Distribution, has announced a Release Candidate 2 for its version 14.1 after a several year hiatus.

This time it will be again a free/libre distro which contains only free software. It still focuses on lightweight usage and old computers - why there will be only a 32 bit version. To reduce the workload ConnochaetOS will be based on Slackware and Salix OS.

The versioning will follow the Slack/Salix versioning scheme to make things easier. So the next ConnochaetOS release will be version 14.1.

The ConnochaetOS website is also host to the slack-n-free repository, which provides Free Software replacements, including a linux-libre kernel, in the Slackware .t?z format.

Promising news for Free Software and Slackware fans alike.

Ben Everard | April 23, 2015

http://www.linuxvoice.com/build-your-own-linux-distro/
https://archive.is/3z3hY

"Do you have a favourite distro that you've spent hours customising? Mayank Sharma shows you how you can spin it into a live distro that you can pass to friends, family, or even on to DistroWatch!"

Google's premium Chromebook Pixel, launched over 2 years ago, has finally been updated with new hardware internals. Although the new model looks nearly identical to the old model, with both models sharing the same physical size and weight, the insides have received a much needed refresh with a much faster processor and more memory. The port configuration is also updated to include 2 of the new USB Type-C connectors instead of the Mini Display Port and the power connector. An "LS" model (for "Ludicrous Speed") will also be available with even more RAM, SSD, and CPU performance.

For those wanting to run more than just a browser on your shiny new i7 with 16 GiB memory, remember you can still install a traditional Linux distro by activating the Developer Mode toggle. Or you can keep Chrome OS as the base and run Linux from a chroot with Crouton.

Zentyal is an interesting utility distro with a slick web UI designed to solve a common complaint... getting a plethora of networking services up and running on Linux in minutes with just a few clicks, while still being capable enough to support the needs of small to medium businesses. It resembles the very expensive unified threat management products from companies like Symantec (which are often Linux-based themselves) that have become popular in many organizations, but which sell for tens of thousands of dollars instead of being free to install on any spare server (or virtual machine).

Zentyal can be configured to serve as anything from an IDS and firewall which does network routing with QoS, VLAN tagging, and VPN/IPSec, to a certificate authority, or an Exchange replacement with calendar, contacts, ActiveSync, MAPI, and Jabber for chat. It can be your VoIP server, with voicemail and hold music, or Active Directory controller and file server (Samba) supporting Windows clients.

Zentyal can even be made into a full "captive portal" gateway, like those used by hotels and other WiFi hotspot providers for displaying terms of service and possibly requesting payment information, but which can also be invaluable for allowing misconfigured laptops internet access. The usual basic services are there, like web sites and printer sharing, of course. And clustering is an option for high availability of services, if you run more than one Zentyal server.

Well, they said they would do it, and they did. A group of Debian loyalists took great issue with the systemd issue in Debian, and threatened they'd fork it if Debian moved forward with its plans to replace trusty old System V init script with the new systemd system developed by RedHat's Lennert Poettering. A week ago, the Debian board voted to move forward with systemd, and the trigger was pulled.

World, meet Devuan. It's pronounced "Dev One" and is backed by a team of "veteran system admins" who prefer the stability and simplicity of the System V init scripts, and frankly aren't overly pleased with a lot of the other recent decisions made at Debian either. They state recent decisions have been too overly influenced by RedHat's developers and are prioritizing Linux desktops over Linux servers, which is not smart given Debian's huge lead in server systems and its relatively small desktop market share.

Forking Debian is no simple matter, and a simple glance at Distrowatch.org serves as a reminder Debian is the underpinning of a huge number of other distros out there. Where to begin? Here:

Devuan will derive its own installer and package repositories from Debian, modifying them where necessary, with the first goal of removing systemd, still inheriting the Debian development workflow while continuing it on a different path: free from bloat as a minimalist base distro should be. Our objective for the spring of 2015 is that users will be able to switch from Debian 7 to Devuan 1 smoothly, as if they would dist-upgrade to Jessie, and start using our package repositories.

Devuan will make an effort to rebuild an infrastructure similar to Debian, but will also take the opportunity to innovate some of its practices. Devuan developers look at this project as a fresh new start for a community of interested people and do not intend to enforce the vexation hierarchy and bureaucracy beyond real cases of emergency. We are well conscious this is possible for us mostly because of starting small again; we will do our best to not repeat the same mistakes and we welcome all Debian Developers willing to join us on this route.
The Devuan distribution will make an effort to improve the relationship with both upstream and downstream and, particularly in its gestational phase, will do its best to accommodate needs of those downstream distributions willing to adopt it as base. We look forward to statements of interest from such distributions, as well involvement in this planning phase.

Devuan will do its best to stay minimal and abide to the UNIX philosophy of "doing one thing and doing it well". Devuan perceives itself not as an end product, but a starting point for developers, a viable base for sysadmins and a stable tool for people who have experience of Debian. Devuan will never compromise for more efficiency at the cost of the the freedom of its users, rather than leave such concerns to the independent choices made by downstream developers.

They've got a lot of work ahead of them, and are happy to receive both donations and developers. Want to know how you can help? Check them out on Github and the Freenode IRC network, for starters.

When I proposed a Linux Distro every Friday, I'd hoped to mostly avoid distros that are simply "Ubuntu plus a theme and/or windowmanager choice" but this week it's impossible. World, meet Ubuntu Linux Satanic Edition, the most appropriate distro for a Halloween Friday. Linux for the Damned is their subtitle, and if you're planning on going off to hell after this and listening to all sorts of awesome death metal in the afterlife, this is probably for you.

So what is it? It's Ubuntu, with a special selection of wallpapers, and a pre-configured Eternity Screensaver set to play the "Eternal Damnation" ray-traced screensaver when it kicks in. I looked around a bit to figure out if there's anything to Ubuntu Satanic other than the screensaver and wallpapers and found something unique: this distro also comes preconfigured with a ton of metal music! I think preloading a soundtrack on a distro might be unique; at least, I am not aware of any other distros that take this approach. Install U/S and you too can enjoy dozens of tunes by the likes of Severed Fifth, Blueprint for Disaster, Music for the Damned, Frontside, Taste of Hell, Holy Pain, and ScapeGoat. To my surprise, most of the artists are French and all of it is licensed freely via Jamendo.

All of this supports U/S's motto: "Ubuntu Satanic Edition is dedicated to combining the best software with the heaviest music." U/S connects you to Ubuntu's own repos, so no worries about the best software consisting of a reduced subset. To those of you who are offended by the presence of a Satanic distro, no worries: there are Ubuntu Muslim Editions and Christian editions as well, all using the same repos - just think about that for a second.

Happy Halloween, Pipedotters! Next time, we'll go back to distros that offer more than superficial skins (although hopefully we'll find some more distros with awesome soundtracks).

Too many Linux distros out there seem to be pet projects, focused on minor choices of theme and desktop environment. Redo Backup & Recovery is much more focused and is worth a look as a useful and important sysadmin tool. For starters, note they don't even bother to call it a distro: the fact that there's Linux underneath is not the point. But take a closer look and it's obvious that it's the power of Linux that makes this thing possible.

RB&R is simple: you download it and burn it to a disk or USB stick you then use to backup your machines. Boot the machine from your B&R disk, and let it work its magic. RB&R will mount the machine's partitions, and create a backup you can store elsewhere, say on a network share. If that machine ever gets misconfigured, virus infected, or anything else, you can simply restore one of the backups as though it were a bare-metal restore. It's essentially OS-agnostic, permitting sysadmins to backup and restore Windows or Linux machines with equal ease (it's not clear how good its Mac support is though!). It's graphical, auto-configs network shares, and because you make the backup by booting the machine from your disk/USB stick, you don't even have to have login rights on that machine.

The whole thing is a simple 250MB disk image, that gets you a graphical interface based on Openbox. Under the hood, it's simply a clever GPLv3 Perl script that leverages GTK2+ and Glade, plus partclone, which does the block-level disk backup or re-imaging. Partclone supports ext2/3/4, HFS+, reiserfs, reiser4, btrfs, vmfs3/5, xfs, jfs, ufs, ntfs, fat(12/16/32), and exfat.

I like this approach: they don't make much noise about Linux; they just present a useful tool any sysadmin would be grateful to be able to use. It is tightly focused on providing a single service and doesn't get wrapped up in troubles related to inevitable "feature creep". It does one thing, and does it well. I know my openSUSE box has recovery tools built into its YaST management system, but my brief test shows B&R is way easier, user-friendly, and hassle-free. I will be continuing to use it as recovering from an image is way easier and undoes the inevitable trouble I get into by downloading and experimenting with software packages that eventually combine to hose my system. Give it a look for yourself, and sleep a bit easier.

My current fetish, if you can call it that, is lightweight distros. Once you decide you don't need a heavyweight desktop like Gnome or KDE, down the slope you go, asking, "How light a system can I really get?" Depending on how much you're willing to compromise, the answer is, "pretty far!" And well at the far end of lightweight is SliTaz Linux. It's a marvel of engineering. What you get is a full graphical desktop, web server, Firefox, and database tools, all configured to run in less than 256MB of memory with no need to even hit the hard drive when running! The whole distro fits easily on 30MB on a (small!) USB stick.

The compromises aren't that drastic, but you need to know them. But one is that the distro is built on busybox, which is a reduced set of basic *nix utilities. You get the JWM window manager, the lighttpd webserver, SQLite, Firefox and Midori. You don't get stuff like LibreOffice or much selection of graphical software. There's a packaging system, but it uses a custom format (TazPKG) with repositories that are a bit lean. But the idea isn't to be your new desktop. Put SliTaz on a USB stick and you can quickly get to a command prompt to shell into your servers, FTP some files around, set up quick HTTP access to some files somewhere, listen to some music (it's got ALSAplayer), or browse the web. And you can do so without much script fu: when the system boots you're sitting at a JWM desktop (or openbox, if you want). And not only does it boot quickly, but your machine is super-fast when running since the entire system can run in memory &emdash; and not much memory, at that!

Increasingly, this kind of system has huge appeal to me. All my stuff is on network storage, and my mail and calendar are on hosted internet services. I don't need much in a desktop box a lot of the time. Naturally, it runs on a Raspberry Pi. Want to check it out? Read another review at Dark Duck or check out the DistroWatch page. There are some screenshots at LinuxScreenshots.org.

Grml Linux is a bit of a unique distro whose vision and focus have shifted over the past ten years. It represents the personalities of its developers, who prefer the zshell, focus on sysadmin tasks (deployment, disk cloning, backup, forensics, and rescuing borked systems). Lastly, one of the developers is visually handicapped. Thus: grml focuses on scripting, tools managed from the command prompt, and has chosen zsh as the basis for its innovations. Its Distrowatch page is here.

These days grml is a live CD or USB-stick based on Debian. You're not supposed to install it. It requires little more than 256MB of memory, and though it's intended to be mostly a command line environment, they've packaged Fluxbox and you can get there via startx. That's useful if you want to launch a browser to read up on a issue, but most of your day you'll be sitting at the command prompt in a zsh. Have a look at their zsh introduction page or their reference card then to get a sense of the shortcuts, command aliases, and scripts that help you administer your systems, or the dpkg package list showing installed packages.

I find the package list to be limited, and to my knowledge, there are no tools available that you can't find on other distros. But I find grml's advantage to be that they love and have put a lot of energy into the zshell, and if you're interested in the zsh this is a good place to see it showcased. It's also an easy distro to carry around on a USB stick if you're a command prompt warrior and want to quickly boot up to a useable command prompt from where you can do other things. For example, you simply run the grml-network script from the command prompt to discover, configure, and connect to a wireless network. And of course it's based on Debian's excellent hardware recognition and configuration system. This is a niche distro that won't appeal to everybody, but odds are better than average you'll soon find yourself at the ZSH Reference page looking into additional resources for using the amazing zshell (For starters, try the 429 and dense page ZSH Manual and this 14 page zshell reference card from the guys at bash2zsh. Have fun.

Ahoy there. Let's say you'll be wantin' a Linux distro that's been blessed by his ownself the Grand Admiral of the GNU revolution, Richard Stallman. Arrr. And supposin' you can't abide by the wretched bilge that's binary blobs infectin' yer own GNU/Linux system, foisted upon ya by the likes of those lowly bastards Adobe and NVidia, whose scurvy, un-transparent and despicable rot goes against your very bein'. Well then, you'll be wantin' to make sure yer own good ship Linux hoists the latest version of Trisquel GNU/Linux, and smartly at that.

Off with ya then, to the grimy bastards at Distrowatch, with some right fine background for ya. Trisquel hails from Spain, a piratin' and thievin' port of call if ever there was one. Arrr. But they've chosen what's proper over what's easy. Turn away if you've got an Nvidia graphics card, or if ya can't stand the likes of a distro based on the latest Ubuntu. Trisquel is a fine lookin' ship if ever I've laid my eyes on one, hoistin' aloft clean versions of LXDE, XFCE, and KDE desktops, but believe you me when I tell ya they've been stripped bare of any software that isn't cut from the purest, GPL cloth. I sailed that ship in a virtual machine while hittin' no reefs, aaar, but I do reckon if your hardware isn't the plainest of vanilla, you may find it chafes your britches when you install 'er.

That said though, avast, she's a smart little distro, she sails a beaut, and she's right easy on the eyes, if I do say so myself. As for the package selection, aaar, when I'm at the tiller and the mainsail's drawin' wind, most of the packages I use I found sittin' sweet as a lily in the repos. Your own position at sea might be affected, though, if you find yerself needin' something exotic.

I myself am as pure as the next Linux captain, who be supportin' the cause of throwin' all those lily-livered binary blobs in the brig. But not if it means I can't sail my ship. That's why you won't be findin' this pirate sailin' Trisquel myself. But if ideological purity be yer cup-o-rum, well then, aaaarrr: raise the plank on Trisquel, and may fine winds be at yer back. Drop in at the Trisquel tavern where you can break yer jaw askin' yer questions, and tell 'em Captain Zafiro17 sent ya, like the devil himmself. Aaaar haar haar har har har.

Richard Brown reported on Google Plus that Attachmate has entered into an agreement with Micro Focus, a UK enterprise software company. Under the terms of the agreement, both institutions will merge. You might already know that Attachmate is the company that owns and manages SUSE Linux out of Nurenburg, Germany. So what does this mean for SUSE and OpenSUSE? Maybe nothing! That's great news. From the letter sent by Attachmate to the Board of Directors of SUSE Linux:

* Business as Usual: There are no changes planned for the SUSE business structure and leadership. There is no need for any action by
the openSUSE Project as a result of this announcement.

* Commitment to Open Source: SUSE remains passionately committed to innovation through Open Source. This has always been the foundation of our business and that will continue as we grow and innovate in new areas.

* Commitment to openSUSE: SUSE is also fully committed to being a sponsor and supporter of an open, highly independent and dynamic openSUSE community and project. We are proud of openSUSE and greatly value the collaborative relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE community.

* The combination of the Attachmate Group and Micro Focus creates a larger, global enterprise software entity, operating at a greater global scale. This provides an even stronger foundation for the continued investment in SUSE and our continued innovation through Open Source."

That's good news for fans of the openSUSE Linux distro, as well as SUSE customers everywhere. I would argue that Attachmate's purchase of SUSE from Novell was the best thing that happened to SUSE in years; glad this isn't going to have an impact on a great distro.

Sad days for fans of Bodhi Linux¹: project lead Jeff Hoogland has announced he will be stepping down, and the project is in search of a volunteer or supporter to take over the leadership role of this unique distro.

There's more information - and a fair bit of anxiety - over at the Bodhi Linux forums.

This isn't necessarily the end of the distro, but there's no mistake this distro was very much his baby, and his vision and leadership have made it what it is. If you've never tried it, give it a spin. BodhiLinux starts with the Ubuntu base and installer, but strips out anything Gnome and replaces it with the Enlightenment 17 (E17) desktop environment. E17 is an amazing bit of work - a total rewrite from E16 that took years in the making. It's graphically very enticing, with carefully designed accents (animations, eye candy) that serves a useful purpose. You don't get wobbly windows, which is bling for the sake of bling. Instead, everything is very subtle and very useful. And on your E17 desktop you can download and install from Bodhi's - which are essentially Ubuntu's - repositories.

One of E17's most useful tricks is configuration profiles that provide different functionality for different machines or situations: there's a desktop, laptop, and tablet configuration, each with defaults that make sense for your likely hardware and situation. I'd love to try it on a tablet. You can get E17 on other distros, including Ubuntu, but by installing Bodhi you got a clean, useful, and well-configured Enlightenment desktop minutes after installing with no fuss. Lastly, E17 is phenomenally resource-conserving, so it runs blisteringly fast even on lightweight machines, and its install footprint is very small. It ran great on my Intel Atom netbook, and almost-as-great on a Pentium 4 with a gig of RAM.

This is a reminder that distros are a lot of work, and consist of long, thankless hours that you don't necessarily get to spend with your family or lounging in front of the TV. Many thanks to Jeff for a fantastic Linux distro, and thanks in advance to whichever hero decides to step up to the plate and continue where he left off.

¹ [Ed. note: and I'm one of them! Bodhi has been one of my favorites since it came out.]

It's long been the case that the world of Linux distributions offers at least one compelling choice for virtually every taste and purpose, but -- much like those dissatisfied with the weather in New England -- users who don't see a distro they like need only wait a few minutes. The open source nature of Linux means that users not only can fork and create entirely new distros of their own at will, but also take advantage of others' efforts to do so -- and those efforts are ongoing.

What makes one distro last and another give up? Linux Insider takes a closer look.

In the Hindu pantheon, Kali represents death and change, the dispelling of evil and the devouring of the unwanted. She is forbidden, and even death itself, but therefore also an element of salvation. In the Linux world, she is like opening a can of whoop-ass on your server.

Kali Linux (appropriately named, if I may say so) is a Linux distro focused on penetration and exploit testing, and therefore the element of change that will get you to shore up all those gaping configuration gaps in your systems: it's perhaps your salvation! But enough metaphors. Practically, Kali Linux installs on a DVD or pendrive, and contains dozens and dozens of specialized penetration testing tools to test your system. It's developed by the folks at Offensive Security, and grew out of the well-acclaimed Backtrack Linux, which had the same focus.

It's based on Debian rather than Ubuntu so you get a dated version of the Gnome 2 desktop, but who cares? It's not really a desktop, just a platform for launching tools. Over three hundred of them, from information gathering to vulnerability analysis, password attacks, wireless attacks, spoofing, stress testing, reverse engineering, hardware hacking, forensics, and more. As mentioned, you can run it from a DVD, pendrive, or even remote-boot from PXE or install to Amazon cloud. To make it as useful as possible they support ARM aggressively including ARMEL and ARMHF (and of course Raspberry Pi and cousins), plus as many different wifi devices as humanly possible.

They're innovating, too, producing opensource products like the ISO of Doom (hardware backdoor), custom images, the Evil Wireless Access Point, and more.

Fun stuff if you want to ensure your system is as safe as possible; scary stuff if you don't want to bother. Kali's Distrowatch page has more information including a link to their excellent documentation (the best place to start if you want to know what else Kali does), but ZDNet has a good review and LinuxBSDOS has another cursory review with some decent screenshots.

These two XKCD comics about installing FreeBSD are increasingly out of date (but just as funny). But getting FreeBSD on your system has gotten easier than ever, and PC-BSD is a big part of that. Started as a hobby by FreeBSD enthusiast Kris Moore¹ in 2005, PC-BSD's goal was just to make a pleasant, well-constructed desktop with a good installer on top of a FreeBSD system. They succeeded so wildly that not only did FreeBSD system provider iXsystems decide to buy them, but rival project Desktop-BSD essentially gave up the ghost (they're back now, and thinking about striking off in a new direction.

What's PC-BSD? It's not a "distro" in the Linux sense. It's FreeBSD with a better installer, configured to build you a desktop, not a server (although you can do that too). It's a project that makes it easier to use FreeBSD's systems and architecture to create a great desktop experience. Put in the installer disk, pour yourself a coffee, and twenty minutes later you are at a KDE4 desktop and online. But PC-BSD pioneered another technology that makes it easy to use: the PBI installer packages. PBIs ("push button installer") are essentially the equivalent of Mac OSX Applications, which install into a top-level "Applications" directory and include within all the relevant libraries. That makes them bigger than your typical Unix package installs, but you can also delete, upgrade, or install them without touching any other part of your system, which is useful. Because iXsystems also bought the FreeNAS project, FreeNAS installs now benefit from the technology too: with a single click, FreeNAS will create a FreeBSD jail and install a PBI into it, giving you compartmentalised functionality on your NAS (the Plex media server is one of them, for example).

Why would a Linux user bother with something like PC-BSD? The old adage, "Linux is for those who hate Microsoft; BSD is for those who love Unix" is probably appropriate. But because PC-BSD is FreeBSD, you get all of the benefits of FreeBSD too: fantastic documentation, and system components that were all designed, managed, packaged, and tested together. You also get FreeBSD's quirks and hardware compatibility challenges too (the installer never noticed my USB wifi, for example) but if you can get past the hardware issues, you are sitting at a tight, well-designed system that is pretty easy to tinker with and pretty hard to mess up. obviously, if you manage a FreeBSD server, this makes it easy to test things off your production system, too.

More about PC-BSD at their webpage, and at distrowatch.org. I also wrote about my first impressions with PC-BSD in 2006 here.

¹Kris Moore is the guy behind the BSDNow podcast, too.

Earlier this year the folks at PC-BSD announced they would be developing a new desktop environment by the name of Lumina. The official PC-BSD blog <recently posted a progress update on the Lumina desktop that shows they are making huge progress. There are screen shots and a list of updated features.

PC-BSD is a popular desktop-oriented BSD flavor that is really just FreeBSD with extras.
Lumina is a new light weight window manager built on Fluxbox using the Qt toolkit. The development is spearheaded by Ken Moore of the PC-BSD project.

There's lots more about Lumina at their Lumina FAQ. Most important of all is the question "Why a new desktop environment?" Their answer is related to the fact that because the other desktops are built first on Linux they must be ported, which is taking more and more time and energy; furthermore, many desktops now depend on Linux-specific functionality that makes the port almost impossible.

The Lumina desktop will also provide BSD-specific features through its file manager, like full ZFS snapshot restore capability.

[Ed. note: sneak preview, but I was planning on doing this one for Distro Friday tomorrow. Stay tuned.]

Some say, "Linux should reduce complexity by standardizing on a specific subset of tools, packages, and desktop environments." To that, the guys at LinuxBBQ respond, "Sorry, can't hear you, too busy having fun!" LinuxBBQ is a riot of diversity, but not complexity, and guarantees you can have not just the workspace you want but that it will be your very own.

Check out their website, "Get Roasted!", where they boast an environment of 100 different specific editions (micro-editions, really, in my opinion) and an unprecedented choice of 70 different window managers. The haters might say, "Too many!" I say, "Sounds like fun." Turns out, at the base, LinuxBBQ isn't that complicated: it used to be based on Debian Sid, but now starts with Ubuntu 13.10, and has integrated some scripts, kernels, and tools from the guys at GRML, Siduction, and Linux Mint. Then they add in the window managers. Offhand, I can only name about 13, so these guys have dug deep: everything from KDE to Razor-QT, WMii, Monsterwm, Herbstluftwm, xmonad, nullwm, oroborus, tmux, spectrwm, and another 30 beyond what's on their wiki page.

Then they break it up into editions. Here's where you can tell these guys are just hackers having fun, and they're well removed from the starchiness of some of the big, 'classic' distros, who have to look over their shoulders at their lawyers and worry about being politically correct. Check out just a sample of what they produce:

1. RMS: (No X, compiled for 486 with a full emacs
2. Psychedelic shitstorm: based on windowlab
3. gangbang: 53 window managers on a live CD
4. neckbeard: ratpoison and emacs
5. cameltoe: based on the jwm window manager

There's more, and yes you could probably get most of these packages on another distro with some effort, but you know when you can download the "clit", "noob-killah", or "pringles" editions, you are fully in the realm of hackers having fun. So, where to begin? Start with Cream, their June 2014 release, including netsurf and firefox as browsers, mc, ranger, and pcmanfm as file managers, and cmus for listening to music. Or as they say, "Follow that crap on G+" where you can see a screenshot or two. Finally, here's their own introduction to the distro, and I think it reveals their philosophy very well:

Why is LinuxBBQ not recommended for me?

We do not say that LinuxBBQ is the best distro under the sun - quite the opposite. It will most probably not fit the average users needs. There are many, many reasons not to come to BBQ-Land.
1) LinuxBBQ is more or less default Debian Unstable
2) You will probably not have "plug-and-play" out of the box, for example your printer needs to be set up via CUPS (and CUPS is also not pre-installed) - in our opinion not everybody needs to have all services and daemons ticking in the background. If you need additional services, you will have to set them up by yourself. Of course the BBQ staff is happy to help you. But think twice if you want to get your hands *greasy*.
3) You have to edit configuration files to make things look like you want them and you will
need to spend countless hours customizing the look & feel. Believe us, you will probably want to go back to the "fast-food" distros, and enjoy the defaults there.
4) The BBQ philosophy is: provide the meat, let the user season. So, you will have to download your favourite applications. They are partly coming from experimental sources and carry much
higher version numbers than what you find in Debian Stable. If you don't want to run the newest GIMP, Inkscape, Iceweasel browser or WINE, look somewhere else.

Curious? Visit LinuxBBQ here.

Getting ready to purchase a laptop before classes start - for yourself or your kid? Considering a chromebook instead of a regular laptop? Over at ZDNet, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN) reviews six of the top Chromebooks and provides a couple of recommendations.

Chromebooks are increasingly well-suited to the classroom, with little maintenance or management overhead, a low cost, and much of what the typical user needs. In fact, now that Microsoft Office is an online web service, you can even access them from a Chromebook! This post was submitted using a Chromebook I intended to reformat and use with a Linux distro but haven't needed to re-image. If you can stomach being harnessed to Google's software ecosystem and services, there are lots of good reasons to check out Chromebooks, and the low price is just one of them. Over to SJVN with the rest.

This Friday's distro is
Securepoint Security Solutions, a firewall and VPN distro that offers a full-featured suite of firewall tools designed for enterprisewide deployment. Not only can it protect an internal network from outside attacks, it also helps segregate parts of your internal network and define custom protection rules for each. Securepoint lets you create and manage VPN tunnels for remote users and define traffic filters, reports, and alerts for your entire network. Securepoint Freeware is a very secure and free firewall solution for protecting your Internet gateway. Securepoint can as well be used with existing firewalls and to protect interconnected locations or divisions.

These days a lot of distros are built off of Debian or Ubuntu. This isn't one of them. In fact it appears the distro is simply the software side of a hardware solution they sell at http://www.securepoint.cc/ along with VPN clients, email archiving storage, and other products aimed for the modern corporation or enterprise.

I've tried building a system like this myself though and realized it's not easy. If they are making it easier to build and manage segregated networks they are probably going to find a ready market interested in this software.

This Friday's distro is KaOS Linux, and the K stands for KDE. But this isn't just a "lean KDE distro," as is their motto: the focus is quite a bit better defined even than that:

The idea behind KaOS is to create a tightly integrated rolling and transparent distribution for the modern desktop, built from scratch with a very specific focus.
Focus on one DE (KDE), one toolkit (Qt), one architecture (x86_64) plus a focus on evaluating and selecting the most suitable tools and applications. ... It targets users who have tried many Operating Systems/Distributions/Desktop Environments and have found they prefer a Distribution that uses all its available resources to work on one DE to make that the best it can be, and know that after their searches, the best for them is KDE.

The KaOS Linux website was my first reference point for familiarizing myself with this distro, but we're lucky in that it's recently gotten quite a bit of press, too. ZDNet looked at it and called it "solid and focused: The reviewer wasn't thrilled with the installer but found it a reasonable package selections (that even transcends the "QT only" philosophy by also providing LibreOffice and GIMP). And HecticGeek also gave it a spin, though the site was down as I write this.

For me, the killer decision point is really the choice of the Calligra office suite as primary productivity suite. And the fact that LibreOffice is in the repos tells me that it is still not totally baked as an office suite; too bad because I've always rooted for what was once called Koffice and would love to see it blossom, though it always seems to let me down: font kerning was still a mess the last time I tried it in 2012.

Anyway, the folks behind KaOS admit this distro isn't going to be for everyone. But for people that have tried the other options and decided on KDE, this is a distro that promises you that all its effort has gone into ensuring this KDE-centric distro gives you a great experience. I'm looking forward to giving it a whirl.

The Tails Linux distro gained a lot of publicity when Edward Snowden noted it as his operating system of choice. But while TAILS goes to great pains to ensure maximum anonymity when using online services, it is not impenetrable. In fact, the software's design is seriously flawed, says Loc Nguyen, a researcher at Exodus.

Tails is comprised of numerous components working in interchange," he said. ... however because there are numerous inter-locking mechanisms in play on the system, it's difficult to readily pinpoint a particular weak area."

Nguyen and team had identified a number of zero-day vulnerabilities in the distro that have gone unaddressed and remain open even as TAILS releases an update to the software. Exodus said it would release details about the zero-days in a series of blog posts next week. For the Tails platform, privacy is contingent on maintaining anonymity and ensuring their actions and communications are not attributable. Thus, any violation of those foundational pillars should be considering highly critical," added Nguyen. This affects every user of Tails, who should all "diversify security platforms so as not to put all your eggs in one basket", he added. Exodus sells to private and public businesses hoping to use the findings for either offensive or defensive means. Those unconcerned about governments targeting their systems might not be concerned about the Tails zero-days. Others will likely be anxious one of their trusted tools to avoid government hackers contains vulnerabilities that could be exploited to spy on any user of the OS."

More on the vulnerabilities at the Register and Forbes.

Yes, Android is based on the Linux kernel, but until the Linux and Android platforms and application ecosystems have been separate things. MicroXwin hopes to change that with a new Linux distro called VolksPC that runs both Debian and Android apps in fully native mode.

"We created a unified distribution that allows both Android and Debian LXDE/XFCE applications to run simultaneously at native speeds. On ARM, our distribution is based on a modified ARMHF Debian Wheezy rootfs", the developers write. As Phoronix reports, the developers claim that apps under both environments run "at native speeds"; the only changes to Android are in startup scripts, providing full compatibility with existing applications; and MicroXwin provides a high-speed X-Windows framework for the system.

The distro hopes to provide the best of both worlds, and a Linux desktop environment with full support for the entire Debian app repository while providing Android's simplicity and ease of use where things like HD video are concerned.

This week's Friday distro is Alpine Linux, a surprisingly interesting distro specialized for Routers, VPNs, VOIP service, and firewalls that takes an aggressive, proactive approach to security. It's therefore minimalist, so you can install it on a router, and includes the absolute minimum (no Perl, for example). It began life as a branch of the LEAF project, which wanted a router/vpn system that could be booted from a floppy disk and run from memory: the Alpine hackers decided that config was a bit too minimal and chose instead a slightly larger package set that also provided squid, samba, dansguardian, and some other heavier applications. I thought for sure I'd learn it was developed by a bunch of Swiss or Austrian hackers, but no: it simply stands for "A Linux Powered Integrated Network Engine." Distrowatch reports it comes originally from Norway.

Most interesting of all, Alpine incorporates two security enhancements I haven't yet found on any other distro: PaX and Buffer Overflow Protection (Stack Smashing Protection). PaX is a Linux kernel patch that implements least privilege protection for memory pages. It flags data memory as non-executable, program memory as non-writable and randomly arranges the program memory. Inclusion of these two systems kept Alpine Linux protected from the vmsplice 0-day Linux kernel vulnerability: even though the attack would crash the OS, there would be no system compromise.

If you're interested in trying it, it's easy: you can run it from a USB stick, back up your config to a single file, and its simple package management and init systems make it possible to be up and running in under 10 minutes.

I got the idea when writing up that article about Distrowatch: they cover so many distros and so many of them are so obscure; I decided to check some of them out. Conveniently - as though they're tempting me - there's a "Random Distribution" button on the front page of Distrowatch, which makes it easy. Every Friday I propose a roll of the dice, and a quick look at some distro you've probably never heard of. I'll try to give equal coverage to the BSDs too.

If this is annoying or not interesting to you, quick! Flame me to a cinder in the comments. Otherwise, enjoy what will hopefully be a weekly feature that will lead to interesting commentary and comparison. I'll be skipping the big guys (RedHat, openSUSE, Ubuntu, etc.) since the purpose is to give some exposure to the obscure/niche stuff. These aren't reviews since I don't have time to install and try each one.

Today's distro is GALPon MiniNo, which gets my vote for the "least memorable name for a distro, ever." But it can be explained: GALPon is the Linux User's Group of Pontevedra, Spain, in the region of Galicia. And they're actively working to get Linux in schools, especially where equipment is old or low-powered and often recycled. No surprise then that GALPon MiniNo emphasizes low system requirements: it installs on machines with 128M of RAM and 4GB hard drives, and uses IceWM or Openbox, RoxFiler, and the like to stay light. It also supports Galician and Catalan - regional languages of Spain - out of the box. Looks like it will install nicely on a netbook or liveCD.

I'm a big fan of lightweight distros to counter the otherwise endless bloat of the big guns. I might have to try this one out and give Puppy a run for its money. Read more (in Spanish) at their homepage, their help and documentation (also Spanish/Galician), or their Google group forum.

Like KDE? Looking for something new and innovative? Have a look at KaOS. As described on its home page, KaOS is "A lean KDE Distribution", and it gives these as the ideas and principles behind the distribution:

• Rolling distribution
• Built from scratch (not derived from some 'larger' distribution)
• KDE desktop / Qt toolkit only
• x86_64 architecture only

Interesting to have a distro that's not just a remash of some version of Ubuntu, and the narrow focus of the distro means there are fewer moving parts to worry about. I'll be giving it a look over the weekend. Here is KaOS' page on Distrowatch. But J.A. Watson over at ZDNet does a pretty reasonable job of reviewing it this week, too.

oSC 14 , held April 24-28 in the lovely Mediterranean port town of Dubrovnik, Croatia , has come and gone . If you like openSUSE , expect more of the same. Don't expect any radical changes upcoming for this steady-and-predictable distro!

The conference focused on high level questions of packaging, approach, distro lifecycle management, and marketing. There were some interesting presentations on specific topics of interest as well, including [the following are all video links]:

• Where KDE is and where it is going
• What's cooking in Gnome
• Developing for Sailfish OS
• LibreOffice and the Document Foundation

The rest of the presentations are available here [youtube], and conference photos are here .

SUSE has been my go-to distro since 2001. I'm raising a glass to the openSUSE team and hoping for more green!