 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 831, 9 September 2019 |
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Welcome to this year's 36th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
There are a lot of Linux distributions which strive to deliver features, ease of use, and customized desktop environments. There are a few, though not as many, which strive for strict standards compliance and flexibility. This week we begin with a look at a young project on the DistroWatch waiting list called Adélie Linux. The project is still in its beta stages, but already supports multiple CPU architectures and features the super fast APK package manager. Jesse Smith shares his observations on Adélie in our Feature Story. In our News section we talk about the Linux Mint team polishing their desktop's look, its icons, and especially its system tray. Plus we have an update on the PinePhone, a mobile device which is able to run KDE Plasma Mobile and UBports. We have more on the PinePhone's schedule and progress below along with a report from elementary OS on changes coming to the GNOME desktop and related packages. Then we share tips for working with the command line, including an example showing how to build more complex command line tools by stringing programs together. One of our examples explains how to find out which processes are consuming the most memory on a computer running Linux and, in our Opinion Poll, we ask which is the largest application in your computer's memory. Plus we are pleased to share the releases of the past week and list the torrents we are seeding. Finally, we are thrilled to add FreedomBox, a Debian-based distribution for home servers, to our database. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
Content:
- Review: Adélie Linux 1.0 Beta
- News: Linux Mint team polishes system tray, PinePhone coming soon with Plasma Mobile and UBports, elementary OS gives a preview of desktop features, Manjaro takes "the next step"
- Tips and Tricks: Command line tips - using ffmpeg, awk and renice
- Released last week: Condres OS 19.09, Tails 3.16, Kali Linux 2019.3
- Torrent corner: Arch, Archman, AUSTRUMI, Bluestar, Clonezilla, Condres, Container, GParted, IPFire, Kali, Septor, Tails
- Opinion poll: Largest process in memory
- New additions: FreedomBox
- New distributions: TTOS Linux
- Reader comments
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (15MB) and MP3 (11MB) formats.
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Adélie Linux 1.0 Beta
Adélie Linux is a young project which was recently added to the DistroWatch waiting list. The project strives for a minimal, clean and portable design that uses free software exclusively. The project's website describes Adélie as follows:
Adélie Linux is a free, libre operating environment based on the Linux kernel. We aim for POSIX compliance, compatibility with a wide variety of computers, and ease of use without sacrificing features, setting us apart from other Linux distributions.
Adélie uses the musl c library instead of the more commonly used GNU C Library. It also uses the classic SysV init software with the OpenRC service manager instead of the widely adopted systemd init suite. Adélie makes use of the APK package manager, which is very light and fast. APK is also used by Alpine Linux, though the two projects do not appear to share any specific code or utilities apart from the package manager.
As mentioned above, Adélie's website claims the project uses only libre software. This makes it possible to audit and modify any part of the operating system. Adélie also supports a wide range of CPU architectures, including: PPC, PPC64, ARM64, PMMX (i586), and x86_64. The distribution is available in two builds: Full and Live. Live is smaller and can download packages from the network during the installation. The Full edition includes all required packages, suitable for off-line installs. The Live edition for 64-bit x86_64 is a mere 128MB in size while Full is 321MB. Both are relatively small for a modern OS. I downloaded the Full edition for my trial.
The live media boots to a text console very quickly. Adélie displays login information for the root account and an unprivileged account called "live". Neither of these two accounts are password protected on the live media. When we sign in we are told we can get useful information by installing a handbook package (adelie-handbook) First we need to get on-line though as the network is not connected by default. Once on-line, I could not find any package called adelie-handbook or any package with "handbook" in the name.
Installing
According to the project's documentation, there is an installer planned for Adélie Linux, but it is not yet complete. The official documentation has an entry for installing the distribution, but it's mostly empty at the time of writing. This left me a bit lost as to how to get Adélie on my hard drive. Luckily, I found two resources, a mailing list post and a guide in the wiki which explains more steps, and includes a guide for installing a boot loader. Both explain how to set up Adélie on a free disk partition. First though we need to create the partition, which can be done with cfdisk, a utility which is available on the live media. We will also need to format the partition and connect to a network before starting the installation.
It takes a while to get through all the install steps since they each need to be typed manually and there is sometimes some translation to be done between the device names and locations in the guides and what we have available locally. In other words, trying to install Adélie manually is not for newcomers, it will take some experience and a strong comfort with working from the command line.
In the end, I was able to complete the steps and reboot the system. My new copy of Adélie booted to a command line where we can sign in with the root account or as a user we created during the set up process. The distribution connects to the local network automatically and we are all set to dive into what Adélie has to offer.
Early impressions
When we first sign into Adélie a banner appears on the console letting us know where we can find on-line documentation and we are given a URL to the project's bug tracker. Digging through the system I soon found Adélie ships with GNU core utilities and manual pages. There are no compilers or network services installed. The distribution runs on version 4.14 of the Linux kernel and uses a combination of SysV init and OpenRC to start and manage services.
The overall design of the distribution appears to focus on being lightweight and clean. Very little runs that is not needed and an effort appears to have been made to avoid larger technologies such as GNU's C library and systemd.
Hardware
I played with the distribution in VirtualBox, where Adélie performed well and without problems. I also tried using the operating system on a laptop. Adélie performed quickly on the laptop, but was unable to make use of the computer's wireless card, probably due to excluding non-free firmware from the install media.
In either environment, a fresh install of Adélie consumed 504MB of disk space and used a mere 26MB of RAM. Memory usage went up gradually over time as I added more services. However, even with a web server and OpenSSH running, Adélie still consumed less than 100MB of RAM.
Desktop environments
The Adélie documentation mentions there are several desktop environments we can install, though a few popular ones (such as GNOME and Cinnamon) are not packaged. I decided to try setting up the KDE Plasma desktop. Installing Plasma did not pull in display server packages and I ended up also installing the X.Org server package and X.Org drivers. We may also want to install a display manager to provide a login screen. After these steps were done I could not get a graphical environment to start. I asked members of the community about this, but so far have not come up with a solution or explanation as to why graphical sessions are not starting.
Shifting gears and deciding to use Adélie as a server distribution yielded better results. I was able to set up the OpenSSH service to allow remote logins and file transfers. I also installed Apache and PHP through the APK package manager. APK runs surprisingly fast and worked well. It is a terse package manager, but runs runs so quickly compared to other package managers I sometimes questioned whether it had done anything at all.
Later on I was able to install a compiler and some build tools. These toolsets are less robust than Debian's or Fedora's. By that I mean most mainstream distributions bundle compilers with other commonly used developer tools, which makes building small projects straight forward. Adélie does not bundle these extras and it means even very simple projects require us to hunt down extra include files and libraries. Still, I managed to build and run a few small projects.
Conclusions
At the moment Adélie Linux is still in its early stages. It doesn't have a system installer, the documentation still needs to be fleshed out, and it would probably benefit from having some editions with pre-installed desktop environments. There is still a ways to go before I would recommend it to people.
However, I think Adélie presents a lot of promise based on what is already in place. The website is unusually clear in its information and design, the distribution has a clear set of goals which promise a lean operating system with great performance running on multiple architectures. I also like that the developers are maintaining a clean, minimal design that requires very little memory and places more focus on being standards compliant than having a lot of features.
While Adélie doesn't share much technology with Alpine Linux, apart from the APK package manager, the two projects do feel a lot alike. Both are minimal, fast, use some alternative technologies, and will probably make excellent bases for containers and servers. Adélie may not be ready for the general public yet, but I like its design and am hopeful the remaining pieces will fall into place soon as I want to run it again once a few more features are implemented.
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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
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Linux Mint team polishes the system tray, PinePhone coming soon with Plasma Mobile and UBports, elementary OS gives a preview of desktop features
The Linux Mint team is working on polishing the desktop experience for their users. In the project's monthly newsletter, a number of plans were presented, including improving the look of icons on HiDPI screens and polishing the system tray: "We also looked at Gtk.StatusIcon, which is the technology used by the system tray icons. They're not only blurry in HiDPI, they have a significant number of problems: They were designed with 16px icons in mind. They are rendered by the application, not by the applet. They rely on obsolete technology such as Gtk.Plug and Gtk.Socket which won't be around in the future or compatible with what's coming next (GTK4, Wayland etc.). This is something that isn't supported by GNOME and which we're lucky to still have in GTK3. Without exaggeration I think it's quite a miracle we even managed to have this in Cinnamon." The newsletter also mentions Compulab is working on a computer that ships with Linux Mint called the MintBox 3. The new MintBox will likely be released later this year.
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In a blog post titled The PinePhone Is Real & Shipping Soon, PINE64 announced that the PinePhone's hardware has been finalized and devices will begin shipping to developers in October 2019. After that, the team plans to make last minute adjustments and improvements and deliver their mobile phone to customers in the early months of 2020. "Developer pre-orders are now live and it won't be long before core enthusiasts get their hands on the PinePhone too. This is just the start of our journey with the PinePhone, but with both software and hardware progressing at Warp 10 speed I am confident that in early 2020 everyone interested in a Linux phone will be able to purchase one." The blog post includes pictures and videos of the PinePhone in operation, running UBports and KDE's Plasma Mobile.
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Members of the elementary OS team attended this year's GNOME User And Developer Conference (GUADEC). The conference gives developers a chance to show off what they are working on and plans for changes to the GNOME desktop and related technologies. Some of the key elements discussed on the elementary blog are enhanced Flatpak features and session management components being migrated from GNOME into systemd. "Red Hat and GNOME engineer Daiki Ueno shared future improvements to the 'secrets' API that manages things like passwords and encryption keys in GNOME, elementary OS, and other desktops. He focused specifically on the implications of sandboxing with Flatpak, and how a new version of the API could be designed for this more secure future. Much of the content was above my level of knowledge, but it was encouraging to see some of the remaining questions around Flatpak being actively worked on, and this is work that will benefit elementary OS in the future. Red Hat engineer Benjamin Berg and Canonical engineer Iain Lane shared their work with moving much of the session management out of GNOME Session and into systemd. This is an area we've begun exploring in elementary OS, but it was good to hear about their experiences, some cool side-effects, and issues they had to overcome."
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Finally, a piece of interesting news from the Manjaro Linux project as published over the weekend. As the popularity of the distribution continues to grow, the project leaders have decided to look into a way to sustain the distribution for the long term and to assure its survival, while maintaining its current structure and development model. The changes include setting up a non-profit foundation as well as a commercial company: "For some time, Philip has been investigating ways to secure the project in its current form and how to allow for activities which can't be undertaken as a 'hobby project', and, along with the rest of the team, a plan of action has been created. Most importantly: Manjaro itself is not changing and the project will continue to run in its current form. The two main changes are: 1. To transfer donation funds to a non-profit 'fiscal host 56' which will then accept and administer donations on the project's behalf. This secures the donations and makes their use transparent. 2. A new established company, Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG, to enable full-time employment of maintainers and exploration of future commercial opportunities." See the full blog post for further information.
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These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Tips and Tricks (by Jesse Smith) |
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Command line tips - using ffmpeg, awk and renice
The Linux command line is a powerful tool for finding, manipulating and displaying information. This week let's look at some ways in which the command line can be used to our advantage.
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When it comes to dealing with video files, one of the most powerful tools in the Linux toolbox is FFmpeg. The ffmpeg program can convert one video format to another, extract the audio from a video file, and scale videos. Here are a few examples of ffmpeg in action.
First, to convert one video format to another, all we need to do is provide ffmpeg with the name of the original video file and the name of the new file. The program can figure out what format the new file should be in based on its extension. For instance, here we convert original-file.avi to new-file.mp4, adjusting its format in the process from AVI to MP4:
ffmpeg -i original-file.avi new-file.mp4
The "-i" flag tells ffmpeg the first file is the original (or input) file. The process for extracting the audio stream from a video file is exactly the same. We provide ffmpeg with the name of a video file (video.mp4 in this example) and it saves the audio to a new file, which we will call audio.mp3:
ffmpeg -i video.mp4 audio.mp3
Sometimes a video file does not have the resolution we want. It may be too large, or too small, for our tastes. The ffmpeg program can resize a video file using the "-vf" flag and adding the ratio to scale. In the following example we get ffmpeg to scale down our original video file to have a width of just 640 pixels.
ffmpeg -i original-video.mp4 -vf scale=640:-1 smaller-video.mp4
The scale parameter can take a width and height value (640:-1 in this case). The first number is the width. The second value is the video's new height. In this case we specified the height to be "-1" which tells ffmpeg to decide the height of the new video for us, based on the file's original ratio. This avoids changing the width:height ratio when the video is scaled down.
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Now let's put together a more complex tool using a series of common command line programs. For instance, the ps program lists processes we are running. When modified by the "aux" flags, ps will display all running processes it can see on the system:
ps aux
Next, we can add the awk program to manage the output from ps. The awk program actually provides an entire scripting language we can use to view and manipulate data. Entire books have been written about awk and we will barely scratch the surface of what it can do today. For now, we will just use awk to display select fields of the ps output. The ps command on its own prints out eleven fields of data about processes. We want to narrow that down to show just the owner of the program, the program's process ID, the amount of RAM the program is using, and the name of the program. We can do that as follows, creating an awk mini-script that just prints desired fields. Here we print the first, second, sixth, and eleventh fields displayed by ps:
ps aux | awk '{print $1, $2, $6, $11}'
Now there are two problems with the output of this command. The first is there is a header across the top which indicates what each field is. This will get in the way later when we go to use the process data. We can ask awk to skip printing the header of each column by telling it to only print rows after the first one. The awk script keeps track of which row of data it is working on in the "NR" variables, so we add an "if" statement to awk and our new command looks like this:
ps aux | awk '{if (NR > 1) print $1, $2, $6, $11}'
Now the process list we get has no header at the top, the output is pure process-related data. Earlier I mentioned there are two problems with the output we need to fix. The first was removing the column headers. The second is that many of the processes listed have an indicated RAM usage of zero. These are generally kernel services which are not of interest to us. We can remove any lines that show zero RAM usage by checking to see if the RAM usage field (field #6 in this case) has a value of zero. Then we end up only printing rows where field #6 is not equal (!=) to zero:
ps aux | awk '{if ((NR > 1)&&($6!=0)) print $1, $2, $6, $11}'
The "&&" symbol means "and". In this case we are asking awk to print rows after the first row "NR > 1" and when field #6 is not equal to zero "$6!=0".
This gives us nice, clean process information with no kernel services included. At the moment the processes are ordered by process ID (PID), which is not particularly useful. What would be more helpful is if the data was sorted based on RAM usage. The sort command will do this for us. Here we tell sort to reorder the process list, arranging the information in order based on the third field (key 3, also known as k3). The data is numeric, so we need to specify the "-n" flag to sort:
ps aux | awk '{if ((NR > 1)&&($6!=0)) print $1, $2, $6, $11}' | sort -k3 -n
This puts the processes in order, from the least RAM-hungry process, to the most. Ideally, it would be better to see the processes consuming the highest amount of RAM first. We can do this by asking sort to reverse the order of the list using the "-r" flag:
ps aux | awk '{if ((NR > 1)&&($6!=0)) print $1, $2, $6, $11}' | sort -k3 -n -r
Now our list is organized and sorted, but there are a lot of entries in the process list. On my laptop the above command prints out over a hundred processes, most of them using relatively little RAM. Adding the head command at the end of our instructions will shorten the list, displaying only the top ten RAM-consuming processes on the system:
ps aux | awk '{if ((NR > 1)&&($6!=0)) print $1, $2, $6, $11}' | sort -k3 -n -r | head
The list now shows which processes are consuming the most RAM, how much memory is used by each process (listed in kilobytes), and who is running those hungry processes.
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Often times when I am working from the command line I am performing actions which I want to have done quietly in the background. The time it takes to perform these commands is typically less important than making sure the scripts or programs I am running do not interfere with the performance of other applications I am running. One way to do this, as I have written before, is to prefix command lines with the nice program. For instance:
nice sort my-file
Typing "nice" in front of several commands in a row is repetitive and we may forget sometimes. One way to make sure each new command we run is assigned a nice value and runs with a lower priority is to give our command line shell itself a nice value. A nice value assigned to our shell is inherited by each program we run from that shell.
To assign a new nice value to a running Bash shell we can run renice and pass it the "$$" variable, which is short-hand for the process ID of the current shell. For instance, here I assign my Bash shell a nice value of 15 (the maximum on Linux is 19) insuring it, and future programs run from the shell, operate with a lower priority.
renice -n 15 $$
This should keep all future programs run from the command line out of our way and avoid impacting system performance.
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Additional tips can be found in our Tips and Tricks archive.
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| Released Last Week |
Condres OS 19.09
The project's latest snapshot is Condres OS 19.09 which introduces the Condres Control Center. An effort has been made to support Snap and AppImage portable applications out of the box. "Today we are proud to release Condres OS 2019.09 with the flavours KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce, and Condres Control Center. They are enhanced with some useful packages and scripts and a custom patched version of desktop and filesystem. KDE Plasma stands at version 5.16.4, while GNOME comes in at 3.32 and Xfce at 4.14, while Cinnamon comes in at 4.2 and MATE at 1.22.1. This release comes with the name 19.09. Important news regarding the release of this version which introduces native support for default Snap and AppImage applications. Some bugs regarding hplip that required the installation of the pyqt5 package have been fixed. Added multiple support to almost all PHP versions for those who develop websites in order to have greater compatibility with future versions. The control center now also supports printer management." Further details can be found in the release announcement.
Kali Linux 2019.3
Kali Linux is a Debian-based distribution with a collection of security and forensics tools. The project's latest snapshot is Kali Linux 2019.3 which includes updates kernel packages, improved ARM support and meta-packages for better control over which tools are installed in an environment. "We are pleased to announce that our third release of 2019, Kali Linux 2019.3, is available immediately for download. This release brings our kernel up to version 5.2.9, and includes various new features across the board with NetHunter, ARM and packages (plus the normal bugs fixes and updates)." The release announcement goes on to talk about wider ARM device support and a corrected Bluetooth configuration: "For ARM devices this release, we have added support for the Pinebook as well as the Gateworks Ventana machines. The Raspberry Pi kernel has been bumped to version 4.19.66, which includes support for all of the RAM on 64-bit versions of the Raspberry Pi 4. The Raspberry Pi Zero W has seen improvements as well. Bluetooth firmware that was accidentally dropped has been added back in, and the rc.local file has been fixed to properly stop dmesg spam from showing up on the first console. All of the Raspberry Pi images have had their /boot partition increased, which is required due to the size of the new kernel packages."
IPFire 2.23 Core 135
Michael Tremer has announced the available of a new release of IPFire, a Linux distribution often used on firewalls and routers. The distribution's latest release is IPFire 2.23 Core Update 135: "This is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.23 - Core Update 135, which is packed with a new kernel, various bug fixes and we recommend to install it as soon as possible. The IPFire Linux kernel has been rebased on 4.14.138 and various improvements have been added. Most notably, this kernel - once again - fixes CPU vulnerabilities. On x86_64, the effectiveness of KASLR has been improved which prevents attackers from executing exploits or injecting code. DNS: unbound has been improved so that it will take much less time to start up in case a DNS server is unavailable. Scripts that boot up IPFire have been improved, rewritten and cleaned up for a faster boot and they now handle some error cases better. Updated packages: dhcpcd 7.2.3, nettle 3.5.1, squid 4.8, tzdata 2019b." Additional information can be found in the distribution's release announcement.
Tails 3.16
The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails) is a Debian-based live DVD/USB with the goal of providing complete Internet anonymity for the user. The product ships with several Internet applications, including web browser, IRC client, mail client and instant messenger, all pre-configured with security in mind and with all traffic anonymised. The project's latest release is Tails 3.16 which features updates to the Linux kernel and Tor Browser while removing some unnecessary components. "Changes and upgrades: Remove LibreOffice Math. You can install LibreOffice Math again using the Additional Software feature. Remove our predefined bookmarks in Tor Browser. Remove the predefined I2P and IRC accounts in Pidgin. Update Tor Browser to 8.5.5. Update Linux to 4.19.37-5, which fixes the SWAPGS variant of the Spectre vulnerability. Update most firmware packages. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, etc.). Fixed problems: Fix opening the persistent storage of another Tails USB stick from the Files browser." Additional information can be found in the release announcement and changelog.
Archman GNU/Linux 2019-09
Archman GNU/Linux is an Arch Linux-based distribution featuring the Calamares system installer, Pamac package manager and a selection of pre-configured desktop environments. The just-released version 2019-09 comes with a customised Xfce 4.14: "In this release you will see a 70% centered panel at the bottom of the screen. With this panel's smart hiding feature, the entire screen will be available for use. We also grouped window tasks as icons only in the panel. We have made many other cosmetic changes. We set the Papirus icon set aside and decided to use the Surfn Arc icon set. In Archman Sample Files, we put information and visual files about Şanlıurfa - Lake With Fish (Balıklıgöl) which we introduced in this release. We've fixed many bugs which you detected in earlier releases. We have also considered your recommendations and we tried to include your suggestions in this release. As an alternative package installer, we have added TkPacman to Archman repositories and we recommend that you try it." Read the rest of the release announcement for further information and screenshots.
Archman GNU/Linux 2019-09 -- Running the Xfce desktop
(full image size 2.2MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 1,596
- Total data uploaded: 27.8TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
Largest process in memory
In this week's Tips and Tricks article we shared one method for finding out which processes are using the most RAM on a Linux distribution. We would like to hear from our readers which is the biggest memory consuming device on your computer? Is it your web browser, an e-mail client, media player, or an office suite? Let us know what your top RAM-consuming processes are in the comments.
You can see the results of our previous poll on SELinux and AppArmor in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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| Website News (by Jesse Smith) |
New projects added to database
FreedomBox
FreedomBox is a Debian-based distribution, primarily used as a server operating system for home users. FreedomBox supports point-n-click settings up a number of services ranging from a calendar or jabber server to a wiki or VPN through a web interface. Firewall, domain names, user accounts, backups, and Btrfs snapshots can also be managed through a simple web-based control centre.
FreedomBox 2019-07-10 -- Browsing a list of available web applications
(full image size: 652kB, resolution: 1237x1024 pixels)
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Distributions added to waiting list
- TTOS Linux. TTOS Linux is a Debian-based desktop distribution. The main edition features the KDE Plasma desktop, though other desktop environments are available. By default, open source software is used exclusively, but non-free repositories can be enabled.
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DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 16 September 2019. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Article Search page. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews/submissions, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, donations, comments)
- Bruce Patterson (podcast)
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Largest procest (by DaveW on 2019-09-09 00:56:47 GMT from United States)
Firefox, by far. At 2.5GB (with 6 tabs open) it uses ten times the memory of the next largest programs, which are Thunderbird and LibreOffice Calc.
By the way, this command puts the header back on the 'ps aux' output:
ps aux | awk '{print $1, $2, $6, $11}' | head -1; ps aux | awk '{if ((NR > 1)&&($6!=0)) print $1, $2, $6, $11}' | sort -k3 -n -r | head
2 • Largest (by Bill S on 2019-09-09 01:48:12 GMT from United States)
Firefox
3 • ffmpeg (by Tim on 2019-09-09 02:03:59 GMT from United States)
Just a plug for ffmpeg, it's a phenomenal piece of software. I record a fair amount of video for my science classes, and depending on the class and level I'm often mixing video from different devices and resolutions, and audio of different volumes. Ffmpeg makes this possible on very modest hardware.
My advice for any new user is to search the web for what specifically you want to do with an ffmpeg command and then once you've tweaked the command to your satisfaction, run it and copy the command into a text file. Then you've got a library of commands that have been useful to you.
4 • Largest Process (by Terry R. on 2019-09-09 02:41:50 GMT from United States)
Web Browser for for sure.
5 • Adélie (by pin on 2019-09-09 04:13:17 GMT from Sweden)
Nice to see a review of Adélie, a very interesting distro that I've been following for a while. My expectation was that it would become some sort of "Alpine geared towards desktop use", but the direction might be slightly different.
I do hope it matures, as I would be happy to see a few more musl based systems. apk is also really fast, just wish they would consider runit over SysV+OpenRC. On the other hand, maybe that's just because I'm using Void on musl :)
Anyway, thanks for reviewing Adélie this week!
6 • Should merge with alpine (by Dave on 2019-09-09 07:44:42 GMT from Australia)
I wonder if it would be more useful for Adelle to use Alpine as a base to build on top off. That way the projects could benefit each other and reduce deuplication iof work, they could even share packages, for the most part.
Same with Void, just merge it into Alpine, their philiosphies are similar enough, why have two seperate and small projects? I'd love to see this with other distros too, merge them there are waaaaaay too many. Imagine more devs sharing code rather than re-inventing the wheel.
Same with package managers, there should be just one or two. My opinion anyway..
7 • Adelle, Alpine, VOID (by mike_3city on 2019-09-09 08:23:29 GMT from Poland)
Merge? Gather scattered forces and develop distribution together? Well, that is not going to happen.
Let's go back in time to a place where different tribes of primates (our ancestors) "invented" independently how to make and sustain fire. They passed it within their tribe, but not to other scatterred families around. They co-developed, progressed in parallel. I believe there is a similarity between this and distros. With an except when it comes to upstream changes to root distribution. Anyway, free linux world would be useless without input of big players like intel, google, ibm, microsoft and nvidia to kernel developement that serves their interests.
8 • @6 & @7 (by pin on 2019-09-09 08:55:16 GMT from Sweden)
Adélie devs do contribute to Alpine, just look at aports and git.
Alpine is interesting, but its not Void. Void used gnu-utils and Alpine uses busybox. Void uses runit, which I prefer over Alpines SysV/OpenRC. Void is partially inspired on NetBSD and has xbps-src to build from source, just like pkgsrc on NetBSD, My point is, yes, Alpine and Adélie could very well be based together, but they're already working together. Void is different from both those project.
9 • Largest process (by OstroL on 2019-09-09 11:14:08 GMT from Poland)
Largest process? Web browser, what else these days! Practically everything can be done in a web browser, word processing, spreadsheets, image editing and so on...
10 • Largest process (by tom on 2019-09-09 11:23:06 GMT from United States)
The largest process was my vpn.Google-Chrome came in second.
11 • Should merge with alpine (by Dave on 2019-09-09 12:00:08 GMT from Australia)
Hehe, yeah I know I've heard this before and similar. And it's not necessarily wrong either, but say there a two init systems, bang, there's two distros (not 100% always, but you know what I mean)
Yes different people come up with stuff in parallel, but the world's gradually getting smaller. But generally one or two standard ways of doing things will tend to dominate in the end, otherwise everything's a mess. I've distro surfed a bit and often find the differences (not always of course) are such that you can tweak one into the other.
Even package managers, if it installs searches and uninstalls, that's what most people need. An obscure bespoke package manager might have one unique advanced option that no-one uses. So, add that feature to the 2 or 3 main package managers and move on.
Same as mobile distros, just dump ubports, postmarketsos, pureos etc into one mobile distro that works intuitively. Drop the duplicate features, ruthlessly pick one option, drop the egos and opinions and get evryone pooling their resources into one awesome thing. When it's really good, then diverge into different options etc, using the good stable base.
Choice and options can be fun and cool, but sometimes you just want stuff to work, and work to a standard, because we only live for so long ;-)
12 • alpine void (by inter33 on 2019-09-09 12:33:30 GMT from Australia)
apk add man man-pages mdocml-apropos less less-doc
export PAGER=less
voila, void ±10%
13 • Firefox mem hog (by Jordan on 2019-09-09 13:56:17 GMT from United States)
I have tried palemoon and many others but they just can't show pages as I need them shown. There are tweaks in FF to make it more secure/safe and to use less memory, but it's still a hog. So, there's a tradeoff.
14 • pinephone (by dogma on 2019-09-09 14:29:34 GMT from United States)
I’m glad that it seems that pinephone is coming along reasonably smoothly. We so need options that aren’t google and apple.
15 • Program to use most memory (by Tom on 2019-09-09 14:47:32 GMT from United States)
Xorg-without browser
Firefox-with browser
So the poll would not be accurate.
Anyone reading this and checking would put Browser.
16 • Largest Process in Memory (by Lawrence H. Bulk on 2019-09-09 15:15:18 GMT from United States)
The program that I use which consumes the most processing power is, by far, HandBrake.
On a computer with 16GB RAM and an 6th Generation i7 processor, the Xfce CPU graph reads generally over 90% while HandBrake is converting a video (depending, of course, on just how complex the video actually is - and mine almost always are quite complex).
17 • @12 (by pin on 2019-09-09 15:21:48 GMT from Sweden)
Not going into "my distro its better than yours" thing, but I would say your suggestion is equals to Void -20%. How does what you wrote make building from source, with the recognition of the package manager, possible? Also, again I prefer runit over OpenRC.
18 • Is merging projects viable? (by Jason Hsu on 2019-09-09 18:12:26 GMT from United States)
Some of you think that Adelle and/or Void Linux should merge with Alpine Linux. I don't think mergers are viable. These distros have different ways of doing things. If two distros merge, there will be conflicts over which way to do things. Reconciling the two ways would take up a lot of time and effort.
Is there a history of successful software project mergers? Were Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Manjaro, or MX Linux the result of separate teams merging together?
LXDE and Qt merged to form LXQt. I've used SparkyLinux 4 (with LXDE) and SparkyLinux5 (with LXQt). I liked SparkyLinux 4, and its ability to promptly provide a release based on the newly-stable Debian Stretch convinced me to switch to it from MX Linux. LXQt in SparkyLinux 5 doesn't seem ready for prime time and prompted me to go back to MX Linux, even with the longer wait for the first release based on the stable Debian Buster. In fact, SparkyLinux 5 with Xfce feels far more like SparkyLinux 4 than SparkyLinux 5 with LXQt. I normally recommend using the "main" DE for a given distro, but I'm making an exception for SparkyLinux. If you want to try SparkyLinux, I recommend the Xfce edition but not the LXQt edition.
19 • Resource hogs and DE's (by Friar Tux on 2019-09-09 20:28:55 GMT from Canada)
For me, I don't even keep track IF I have any resource hogs. With today's computers it doesn't seem an issue. Older computers, maybe. My laptop is about 5 years old and the only slow app/programme I've experienced is Facebook - on Firefox, Chromium, and Brave browser. But, that's Facebook. Everything else works fine. (Linux Mint/Cinnamon on a cheap HP laptop.) As for desktop environs, my preference is Cinnamon. I have tried XFCE, LXDE, and LXQT and find them all lacking. Cinnamon is a nice balance. By the way, @11 (Dave) is dead on.
20 • Merging (by Tim on 2019-09-10 00:34:29 GMT from United States)
@18
Yes, MX Linux is a collaboration between antiX and MEPIS developers
21 • Memory consumption (by Rooster12 on 2019-09-10 11:14:31 GMT from United States)
Out of curiosity would systemd have an impact on how applications use memory. For instance Debian netinstall amd64, stretch installs on Asus Ryzen 7 2700X with WD1000GB drive, w/64GB ram desktop, memory is right @ 280MB at login. Devuan ASCII amd64 same setup, memory usage is 195MB of ram.
There is also a noticeable difference in how well the keyboard and mouse actions respond in Devuan's favor.
Is this normal?
22 • Run GUI in Adélie Linux 1.0 Beta (by Pavel Gladilov on 2019-09-10 12:22:44 GMT from United States)
I was run XFCE4 (and partially KDE) in QEMU upon Adélie Linux 1.0 Beta. Picture - https://gladilov.org.ru/img/osdetect/AdelieLinux.png, blog record - https://gladilov.org.ru/blog/all/new-virtual-os-10-09-2019/
23 • Manjaro Project (by Jimbo on 2019-09-10 13:10:59 GMT from United States)
Looks like Manjaro is all geared up to go down the Mandriva/Xandros road of bad commercialization leading to rapid decline and obscurity. You could see this coming when they announced the plan to start forcing bundled proprietary software onto users. Looks like it's time to start making a migration plan. Too bad there's no other way to get an Arch installation up and running without a 2 day build and config process.
24 • @23 (by Jim Michaels on 2019-09-10 14:20:29 GMT from United States)
Try EndeavourOS, currently at #93. It's awesome.
25 • Merging projects? Good luck! (by Johnathan on 2019-09-10 15:02:50 GMT from United States)
Merging resources sounds good in theory, but you're forgetting that often, the different projects exist exactly because some people wanted to do things differently. (E.g. MATE as a continuation of Gnome2.) And you want *those* people to give up their ideas and "unite"? This is folly. (And yes, such mergers do happen, but not as frequently as forks and divisions.)
26 • Firefox mem hog (by Jordan on 2019-09-10 15:53:28 GMT from United States)
Incidentally, the Firefox in Debian 10 is a bit lighter on resources than in other distros.
27 • Anarchy Linux vs. Manjaro Project (by David on 2019-09-10 18:44:16 GMT from United States)
@23
You may want to consider this one -
https://www.anarchylinux.org/ - https://www.anarchylinux.org/features/ - 99.9% pure Arch.
A minimalist 607 MB .iso Arch installer with an expansive universe of bootloaders, kernels, drivers, etc.
No useless bloated proprietary repos whatsoever, as with most of the Arch-based re-spins.
This will save you a lot of config time.
JMHO
28 • Re: Adélie (by msi on 2019-09-10 19:43:48 GMT from Germany)
Thanks for the review of Adélie. Here are a few comments and questions:
"Adélie performed quickly on the laptop, but was unable to make use of the computer's wireless card, probably due to excluding non-free firmware from the install media."
Non-free firmware can be obtained from the apkfission repository: apkfission.net. I got WiFi to work on my laptop using a firmware package from there.
"Later on I was able to install a compiler and some build tools. These toolsets are less robust than Debian's or Fedora's."
In what sense?
As for init and service management, s6 and s6-rc are in the works and will become the default eventually.
29 • Adélie / Merging (by awilfox on 2019-09-10 20:26:20 GMT from United States)
Project lead of Adélie here. Thank you so much for the feature! :)
Regarding merging distros into each other: Adélie and Alpine definitely have widely separate goals. Alpine is more focused on containers. We're more focused on portability and correctness. For instance, last I checked Alpine has packages that are not built for ARM or PowerPC because they were unable to make them build there. We won't ship a package until it runs on all our Tier 1 CPUs (PPC, ARM, x86). They also have different ideas about workflow than we do. And hey, whatever works for them is good for them - and what works for us is good for us.
I think the broader Linux community is stronger with separate distros having separate goals. It lets communities form around those goals, then when we contribute back to the projects we package, that software gets the benefits of *all* the different distros' goals.
30 • @23, @24 yes (by vern on 2019-09-10 21:42:54 GMT from United States)
Yes agreed @24. Endeavouros is striped to the bone. Great distro!
"systemctl list-unit-files --state=enabled --no-pager" revealed just 10 services active. Ubuntu had well over 50!
31 • Adélie / Merging (by Dave on 2019-09-11 01:45:56 GMT from Australia)
Wow, didn't expect to hear from the project lead, thank-you for your response!
What I do love about Alpine (which I think applies to Adélie too?) is the minimalism. Kernel + some standard tools + package manager. That's it. You need something else, install it rather than looking for another distro.
I like openbsd and it's emphasis on correctness, which I hope is part of what you mean. Problem with openbsd is while philosophically nice, there's just not enough hardware support. So an openbsd-like linux, which can run on more hardware - is great!
I completely understand where you're coming from. In my opinion (and that's all it is) Linux distros in general would benefit by being more pragmatic and pooling resources. When a project is ultra stable and very mature, then spin off new projects which can go off and be creative and follow their goals. Then down the track, compare notes, trim the fat, recombine and start the process again. Let an empire become great first, then let it collapse and split apart.
But I'll definitely be keeping my eye on Adélie, I love the idea of something like this for desktop use :-D
32 • I don't see any harm. (by Garon on 2019-09-11 13:06:33 GMT from United States)
@23,
You said, " the plan to start forcing bundled proprietary software" and I never saw where it said that. Also you said, "Looks like Manjaro is all geared up to go down the Mandriva/Xandros road of bad commercialization leading to rapid decline and obscurity." Commercialization is not always a bad thing, and what makes you thing they are doing it all wrong. I think it's great when a good distro can make something good happen in the business world. We'll have to wait and see.
33 • Distro/community strength (by Friar Tux on 2019-09-11 13:41:17 GMT from Canada)
@29 (awilfox) While I quite agree with you, I also think that ALL tools could/should be available on ALL distros. This could save having to load on different distros for different purposes. If my favourite distro could do everything and do it well... ahhhh bliss. (Hopefully, this will eventually happen with flatpak and snap.)
34 • Memory hogs (by Nathan on 2019-09-12 00:27:02 GMT from United States)
Firefox, though neither Falkon nor Epiphany are any better. On one hand it's good that some program makes use of otherwise underutilized RAM if that'll speed things up, but modern web browsers just seem to be hogs. Though nothing compares to the time I tried to run a gitlab server.
35 • @33 (by pin on 2019-09-12 03:36:08 GMT from Sweden)
"Hopefully, this will eventually happen with flatpak and snap."
Hopefully not! Personally, I really dislike those forms of software distribution. Multiple copies of required libs for each application, system bloat and security.
36 • flatpak etc (by nanome on 2019-09-12 19:52:13 GMT from United Kingdom)
@33,35: agreed that flatpak etc are admission of failure to deal with the real problem: software/packages have become so complicated in their interactions that even the best package managers cannot keep hundreds of applications and their hundreds of dependent [shared] libraries consistent.
The alternative of statically linking applications to libraries has [sadly] become out of favour.
The solution may rest with reconciling the disconnect between upstream sources and distribution repositories.
Personally, I would throw it all away and start again if I had the energy and resources..
37 • Resource Hog (by Magical on 2019-09-12 23:34:11 GMT from United States)
I preface my remarks by saying I run KDE 95% of the time...
My #1 resource hog is Firefox.
The only time I reboot is after a kernel upgrade.
I have at least 6 tabs open at any one time.
The worst offending site is accuweather.
I switched to using Brave browser and my resource usage dropped.
I no longer use accuweather, now I use hamweather, (aeris).
I have the same 6 tabs open.
When I switch and use Xfce, my resource usage drops even further.
38 • ps-awk commands (by mechanic on 2019-09-13 10:46:55 GMT from United Kingdom)
But how do I stop the field s11 (the program name) being truncated in the printout? Sometmes one needs a long path to track the process/program down. The output from the ps -> awk commands are useful but the output is severely truncated.
39 • ps-awk commands (by mechanic on 2019-09-13 11:22:37 GMT from United Kingdom)
...and how to shorten these commands? 'alias' has problems with complicated strings which already have inverted commas in them.
40 • ps-noawk (by Marcos Pereira de Sousa on 2019-09-13 13:33:13 GMT from Brazil)
alias psm='/bin/ps -eo user,%cpu,%mem,cmd --sort=-%mem --cols 153 | head -n20'
JMTC
Number of Comments: 40
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RIPLinuX
Recovery Is Possible (RIP) was a Slackware-based CD or floppy boot/rescue/backup/maintenance system. It has support for a lot of filesystem types (Reiserfs, Reiser4, ext2/3, iso9660, UDF, XFS, JFS, UFS, HPFS, HFS, MINIX, MS DOS, NTFS, and VFAT) and contains a bunch of utilities for system recovery. It also has IDE/SCSI/SATA, PCMCIA, RAID, LVM2, and Ethernet/DSL/cable/PPP/PPPOE network support.
Status: Discontinued
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