 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 776, 13 August 2018 |
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Welcome to this year's 33rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Last week we discussed a Linux distribution called Secure-K OS which runs from a USB thumb drive and can be used as a portable operating system for secure on-line communication. This week we jump over to the BSD community and explore another live, portable system called NomadBSD. NomadBSD is based on FreeBSD and strives to provide a live desktop environment for basic computing tasks and data recovery. Read on to hear more about this portable flavour of FreeBSD. In our News section we talk about Debian finding and preparing to squash more bugs while openSUSE extends life support for openSUSE 42.3. The team behind the Librem 5 phone, which is designed to run a GNU/Linux operating system, has been working with upstream projects to improve the mobile user interface and we have details on their progress. Plus we cover NAS4Free changing its name to XigmaNAS. In our Questions and Answers column we discuss the theoretical upper limits of Linux memory and storage capabilities. Plus we are happy to share last week's releases and the torrents we are seeding. The Opinion Poll this week asks, since we have already reviewed Linux Mint 19 this year, whether our readers are interested in hearing about Linux Mint Debian Edition 3, which is expected to be released soon. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
Content:
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
NomadBSD 1.1
One of the most recent additions to the DistroWatch database is NomadBSD. According to the NomadBSD website: "NomadBSD is a 64-bit live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery."
The latest release of NomadBSD (or simply "Nomad", as I will refer to the project in this review) is version 1.1. It is based on FreeBSD 11.2 and is offered in two builds, one for generic personal computers and one for Macbooks. The release announcement mentions version 1.1 offers improved video driver support for Intel and AMD cards. The operating system ships with Octopkg for graphical package management and the system should automatically detect, and work with, VirtualBox environments.
Nomad 1.1 is available as a 2GB download, which we then decompress to produce a 4GB file which can be written to a USB thumb drive. There is no optical media build of Nomad as it is designed to be run entirely from the USB drive, and write data persistently to the drive, rather than simply being installed from the USB media.
Initial setup
Booting from the USB drive brings up a series of text-based menus which ask us to configure key parts of the operating system. We are asked to select our time zone, keyboard layout, keyboard model, keyboard mapping and our preferred language. While we can select options from a list, the options tend to be short and cryptic. Rather than "English (US)", for example, we might be given "en_US". We are also asked to create a password for the root user account and another one for a regular user which is called "nomad". We can then select which shell nomad will use. The default is zsh, but there are plenty of other options, including csh and bash. We have the option of encrypting our user's home directory.
I feel it is important to point out that these settings, and nomad's home directory, are stored on the USB drive. The options and settings we select will not be saved to our local hard drive and our configuration choices will not affect other operating systems already installed on our computer. At the end, the configuration wizard asks if we want to run the BSDstats service. This option is not explained at all, but it contacts BSDstats to provide some basic statistics on BSD users.
The system then takes a few minutes to apply its changes to the USB drive and automatically reboots the computer. While running the initial setup wizard, I had nearly identical experiences when running Nomad on a physical computer and running the operating system in a VirtualBox virtual machine. However, after the initial setup process was over, I had quite different experiences depending on the environment so I want to divide my experiences into two different sections.
NomadBSD in VirtualBox
When running Nomad in a virtual environment, the operating system offered slightly different results almost every time it booted. The first time, Nomad booted to a blank graphical environment with a working mouse pointer. There were no desktop elements and both left- and right-clicking produced no results. I could switch to a text console which showed a stream of messages saying "pushing table, processing notify events, popping table" over and over. The text consoles did not respond to keyboard input.
On the second boot, Nomad loaded a minimal desktop environment. A panel at the bottom of the screen presented me with a logout menu and a system tray. Right-clicking on the desktop brought up an application menu. Trying to open more than one application caused the system to lock up.
NomadBSD 1.1 -- The default desktop and application menu
(full image size: 634kB, resolution: 1280x800 pixels)
On the third boot, the desktop was displayed again, but the mouse pointer did not work at all.
The fourth time I launched Nomad the system booted and displayed the desktop. The graphical environment worked for about a minute, then the operating system froze and would not respond to any input.
I eventually found that Nomad would never run for more than a few minutes before locking up. Trying to run more than one application at a time would also bring the system immediately to a halt.
Despite the project's website mentioning VirtualBox integration, and the existence of a display configuration tool in the application menu, I could not get Nomad to display a desktop at a resolution above about 800x600 pixels. I noticed that when Nomad was displaying its minimal desktop, my host computer's CPU was always running at 100%, but when Nomad was displaying a text console my host's CPU idled around 5%.
Physical desktop computer
At first, Nomad failed to boot on my desktop computer. From the operating system's boot loader, I enabled Safe Mode which allowed Nomad to boot. At that point, Nomad was able to start up, but would only display a text console. The desktop environment failed to start when running in Safe Mode.
Networking was also disabled by default and I had to enable a network interface and DHCP address assignment to connect to the Internet. Instructions for enabling networking can be found in FreeBSD's Handbook. Once we are on-line we can use the pkg command line package manager to install and update software. Had the desktop environment worked then the Octopkg graphical package manager would also be available to make browsing and installing software a point-n-click experience.
Had I been able to run the desktop for prolonged amounts of time I could have made use of such pre-installed items as the Firefox web browser, the VLC media player, LibreOffice and Thunderbird. Nomad offers a fairly small collection of desktop applications, but what is there is mostly popular, capable software.
When running the operating system I noted that, with one user logged in, Nomad only runs 15 processes with the default configuration. These processes require less than 100MB of RAM, and the whole system fits comfortably on a 4GB USB drive.
Conclusions
Ultimately using Nomad was not a practical option for me. The operating system did not work well with my hardware, or the virtual environment. In the virtual machine, Nomad crashed consistently after just a few minutes of uptime. On the desktop computer, I could not get a desktop environment to run. The command line tools worked well, and the system performed tasks very quickly, but a command line only environment is not well suited to my workflow.
I like the idea of what NomadBSD is offering. There are not many live desktop flavours of FreeBSD, apart from GhostBSD. It was nice to see developers trying to make a FreeBSD-based, plug-and-go operating system that would offer a desktop and persistent storage. I suspect the system would work and perform its stated functions on different hardware, but in my case my experiment was necessarily short lived.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications:
- Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU
- Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive
- Memory: 6GB of RAM
- Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card
- Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card
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Visitor supplied rating
NomadBSD has a visitor supplied average rating of: 7.6/10 from 16 review(s).
Have you used NomadBSD? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Debian tackles bugs, openSUSE extends life of 42.3 release, update on the Librem 5 phone, NAS4Free renamed to XigmaNAS
The Debian team has become very good at finding bugs and potential problems in their software packages. While discovering these issues is good, it means that more effort is required to get the distribution fixed up and ready for release. There is some concern this will delay the release of Debian 10 "Buster" unless volunteers put more effort into squashing bugs. A post titled Buster is headed for a long hard freeze states: "We are getting better and better accumulating RC bugs in testing. This is unfortunate because the length of the freeze is strongly correlated with the number of open RC bugs affecting testing. If you believe that Debian should have short freezes, then it will require putting effort behind that belief and fix some RC bugs - even in packages that are not maintained directly by you or your team and especially in key packages." Some statistics on the current list of known bugs are also provided.
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The openSUSE team is extending the life cycle of their distribution's 42.3 release. openSUSE 42.3 was originally scheduled to reach the end of its supported life in January 2019, but this date has been pushed back to June 2019. A post on the openSUSE News page reads: "The last minor version of the Leap 42 series was scheduled to be maintained until January 2019, but that has changed thanks to SUSE committing to additional months of maintenance and security updates. Leap 42.3 is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Service Pack (SP) 3 and SUSE has agreed to keep publishing updates for Leap 42.3 until June 2019. This means the extended End of Life for Leap 42.3 will increase the total lifetime of the Leap 42 series to 44 months. Users of the openSUSE Leap 42 series are encouraged to use the additional months to prepare the upgrade to Leap 15, which was released in May."
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The Librem 5 is a smart phone being designed to run open source software, such as a GNU/Linux distribution with a GNOME-based desktop interface. The Librem 5 is still in development and is expected to be released sometime in 2019. At the moment the developers are testing new designs and filling in gaps in functionality which will hopefully be included in the corresponding upstream projects. "Some more bugs were fixed in libhandy too as well as more preparation for GTK+4. One of the issues found and fixed was memory leak was found and fixed. Also there was a bug found and fixed in HdyColumn where the wrong width was being used for column height calculation. If you are following the librem-5-dev email list, then you may have seen that libhandy v0.0.2 has been released too! Nobody likes unsolicited ads so Better ad blocking was suggested to upstream to be used with Epiphany and is undergoing discussion. The phone will ship with an SMS app which also has E2EE messaging. We are working with the Fractal project upstream to get encryption implemented, but it’s not clear whether the Fractal 1-1 successor app (GNOME Messages) will have all the things we need by launch." More details can be found in this blog post.
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The NAS4Free project makes a network attached storage (NAS) operating system based on FreeBSD. The project is in the process of changing its name to XigmaNAS. The wiki and forums have already been moved to their new domain and the project's main website will soon follow. Details on the process and the reason behind the name change can be found in this forum thread.
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These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Maximum storage limits on Linux
Filling-up-all-available-space asks: What is the maximum upper limit for disk and swap space? Just how much stuff can Linux hold?
DistroWatch answers: There are theoretical limits on the amount of disk, memory and swap space you can access with a Linux distribution. In reality though we are likely to run into practical limits (such as the cost of equipment or physical room size) before we run into the theoretical restrictions of the Linux kernel.
The amount of memory Linux can access can vary from one processor architecture to another, so you will run into different memory size restrictions depending on the number of registers in your CPU and how big they are. On a x86_64 processor, which most modern desktop and laptop computers have, I think the maximum amount of memory Linux can access is defined by 44 bits. Which should provide an upper limit of about 16TB of RAM. Or about a thousand times more than the average laptop has at my local electronics store.
The amount of data we can write to disk storage will vary quite a bit depending on which file system we are using. The commonly used ext4 file system has an upper limit of around 1EiB, which if memory serves is a million terabytes. Another file system, called XFS, is often used by enterprise-class distributions and can store up to 8EiB of data. If that's still not enough, the advanced Btrfs format provides up to 16EiB of storage. In this arena ZFS probably has the highest theoretical limit with 256 trillion YiB of storage. A yobibyte (YiB) is a trillion, trillion bytes. At this point one might wonder if the ZFS developers were just making up new numbers to drive home just how much storage space their file system could handle.
I'd like to point out that the above file system storage limits are for just one file system. We could mount multiple massive file systems and/or attach additional storage over the network via a NAS. You're probably going to run out of money for new hard drives before reaching the upper limit of data we can write to attached file systems.
The maximum limit of swap space is a little less mind boggling. The maximum amount of swap space we can use will again vary by hardware architecture, but the mkswap manual page offers some pretty good estimates. The maximum number of swap areas (files or partitions dedicated to swap space) is 32. The maximum number of pages in a swap area is about 4 billion. A page's size can vary, but will typically be 4,096 bytes. So the maximum amount of swap space is probably 4,096 bytes per page, multiplied by about 4 billion pages in a swap partition, multiplied by 32 swap spaces: 512TB.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
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: 978
- Total data uploaded: 21.1TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll |
Review of Linux Mint Debian Edition 3
The Linux Mint project maintains two main branches of its distribution, one based on Ubuntu and the other based on Debian. Earlier this year we reviewed Mint 19 which is based on Ubuntu 18.04. With a new version of Linux Mint Debian Edition due to be released soon, should we review the Debian-based edition too, or is covering the available features in one branch of Mint enough?
You can see the results of our previous poll on using portable operating systems in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Review of Linux Mint Debian Edition 3
| Yes - review LMDE 3: | 2060 (80%) |
| No - do not review LMDE 3: | 162 (6%) |
| No preference: | 353 (14%) |
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| DistroWatch.com News |
DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 20 August 2018. 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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| Archives |
| • Issue 841 (2019-11-18): Emmabuntus DE3-1.00, changing keys in a keyboard layout, Debian phasing out Python 2 and voting on init diversity, Slackware gets unofficial updated live media |
| • Issue 840 (2019-11-11): Fedora 31, monitoring user activity, Fedora working to improve Python performance, FreeBSD gets faster networking |
| • Issue 839 (2019-11-04): MX 19, manipulating PDFs, Ubuntu plans features for 20.04, Fedora 29 nears EOL, Netrunner drops Manjaro-based edition |
| • Issue 838 (2019-10-28): Xubuntu 19.10, how init and service managers work together, DragonFly BSD provides emergency mode for HAMMER, Xfce team plans 4.16 |
| • Issue 837 (2019-10-21): CentOS 8.0-1905, Trident finds a new base, Debian plans firewall changes, 15 years of Fedora, how to merge directories |
| • Issue 836 (2019-10-14): Archman 2019.09, Haiku improves ARM support, Project Trident shifting base OS, Unix turns 50 |
| • Issue 835 (2019-10-07): Isotop, Mazon OS and, KduxOS, examples of using the find command, Mint's System Reports becomes proactive, Solus updates its desktops |
| • Issue 834 (2019-09-30): FreedomBox "Buster", CentOS gains a rolling release, Librem 5 phones shipping, Redcore updates its package manager |
| • Issue 833 (2019-09-23): Redcore Linux 1908, why Linux distros are free, Ubuntu making list of 32-bit software to keep, Richard M Stallman steps down from FSF leadership |
| • Issue 832 (2019-09-16): BlackWeb 1.2, checking for Wayland session and applications, Fedora to use nftables in firewalld, OpenBSD disables DoH in Firefox |
| • Issue 831 (2019-09-09): Adélie Linux 1.0 beta, using ffmpeg, awk and renice, Mint and elementary improvements, PureOS and Manjaro updates |
| • Issue 930 (2019-09-02): deepin 15.11, working with AppArmor profiles, elementary OS gets new greeter, exFAT support coming to Linux kernel |
| • Issue 829 (2019-08-26): EndeavourOS 2019.07.15, Drauger OS 7.4.1, finding the licenses of kernel modules, NetBSD gets Wayland application, GhostBSD changes base repo |
| • Issue 828 (2019-08-19): AcademiX 2.2, concerns with non-free firmware, UBports working on Unity8, Fedora unveils new EPEL channel, FreeBSD phasing out GCC |
| • Issue 827 (2019-08-12): Q4OS, finding files on the disk, Ubuntu works on ZFS, Haiku improves performance, OSDisc shutting down |
| • Issue 826 (2019-08-05): Quick looks at Resilient, PrimeOS, and BlueLight, flagship distros for desktops,Manjaro introduces new package manager |
| • Issue 825 (2019-07-29): Endless OS 3.6, UBports 16.04, gNewSense maintainer stepping down, Fedora developrs discuss optimizations, Project Trident launches stable branch |
| • Issue 824 (2019-07-22): Hexagon OS 1.0, Mageia publishes updated media, Fedora unveils Fedora CoreOS, managing disk usage with quotas |
| • Issue 823 (2019-07-15): Debian 10, finding 32-bit packages on a 64-bit system, Will Cooke discusses Ubuntu's desktop, IBM finalizes purchase of Red Hat |
| • Issue 822 (2019-07-08): Mageia 7, running development branches of distros, Mint team considers Snap, UBports to address Google account access |
| • Issue 821 (2019-07-01): OpenMandriva 4.0, Ubuntu's plan for 32-bit packages, Fedora Workstation improvements, DragonFly BSD's smaller kernel memory |
| • Issue 820 (2019-06-24): Clear Linux and Guix System 1.0.1, running Android applications using Anbox, Zorin partners with Star Labs, Red Hat explains networking bug, Ubuntu considers no longer updating 32-bit packages |
| • Issue 819 (2019-06-17): OS108 and Venom, renaming multiple files, checking live USB integrity, working with Fedora's Modularity, Ubuntu replacing Chromium package with snap |
| • Issue 818 (2019-06-10): openSUSE 15.1, improving boot times, FreeBSD's status report, DragonFly BSD reduces install media size |
| • Issue 817 (2019-06-03): Manjaro 18.0.4, Ubuntu Security Podcast, new Linux laptops from Dell and System76, Entroware Apollo |
| • Issue 816 (2019-05-27): Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, creating firewall rules, Antergos shuts down, Matthew Miller answers questions about Fedora |
| • Issue 815 (2019-05-20): Sabayon 19.03, Clear Linux's developer features, Red Hat explains MDS flaws, an overview of mobile distro options |
| • Issue 814 (2019-05-13): Fedora 30, distributions publish Firefox fixes, CentOS publishes roadmap to 8.0, Debian plans to use Wayland by default |
| • Issue 813 (2019-05-06): ROSA R11, MX seeks help with systemd-shim, FreeBSD tests unified package management, interview with Gael Duval |
| • Issue 812 (2019-04-29): Ubuntu MATE 19.04, setting up a SOCKS web proxy, Scientific Linux discontinued, Red Hat takes over Java LTS support |
| • Issue 811 (2019-04-22): Alpine 3.9.2, rsync examples, Ubuntu working on ZFS support, Debian elects new Project Leader, Obarun releases S6 tools |
| • Issue 810 (2019-04-15): SolydXK 201902, Bedrock Linux 0.7.2, Fedora phasing out Python 2, NetBSD gets virtual machine monitor |
| • Issue 809 (2019-04-08): PCLinuxOS 2019.02, installing Falkon and problems with portable packages, Mint offers daily build previews, Ubuntu speeds up Snap packages |
| • Issue 808 (2019-04-01): Solus 4.0, security benefits and drawbacks to using a live distro, Gentoo gets GNOME ports working without systemd, Redox OS update |
| • Issue 807 (2019-03-25): Pardus 17.5, finding out which user changed a file, new Budgie features, a tool for browsing FreeBSD's sysctl values |
| • Issue 806 (2019-03-18): Kubuntu vs KDE neon, Nitrux's znx, notes on Debian's election, SUSE becomes an independent entity |
| • Issue 805 (2019-03-11): EasyOS 1.0, managing background services, Devuan team debates machine ID file, Ubuntu Studio works to remain an Ubuntu Community Edition |
| • Issue 804 (2019-03-04): Condres OS 19.02, securely erasing hard drives, new UBports devices coming in 2019, Devuan to host first conference |
| • Issue 803 (2019-02-25): Septor 2019, preventing windows from stealing focus, NetBSD and Nitrux experiment with virtual machines, pfSense upgrading to FreeBSD 12 base |
| • Issue 802 (2019-02-18): Slontoo 18.07.1, NetBSD tests newer compiler, Fedora packaging Deepin desktop, changes in Ubuntu Studio |
| • Issue 801 (2019-02-11): Project Trident 18.12, the meaning of status symbols in top, FreeBSD Foundation lists ongoing projects, Plasma Mobile team answers questions |
| • Issue 800 (2019-02-04): FreeNAS 11.2, using Ubuntu Studio software as an add-on, Nitrux developing znx, matching operating systems to file systems |
| • Issue 799 (2019-01-28): KaOS 2018.12, Linux Basics For Hackers, Debian 10 enters freeze, Ubuntu publishes new version for IoT devices |
| • Issue 798 (2019-01-21): Sculpt OS 18.09, picking a location for swap space, Solus team plans ahead, Fedora trying to get a better user count |
| • Issue 797 (2019-01-14): Reborn OS 2018.11.28, TinyPaw-Linux 1.3, dealing with processes which make the desktop unresponsive, Debian testing Secure Boot support |
| • Issue 796 (2019-01-07): FreeBSD 12.0, Peppermint releases ISO update, picking the best distro of 2018, roundtable interview with Debian, Fedora and elementary developers |
| • Issue 795 (2018-12-24): Running a Pinebook, interview with Bedrock founder, Alpine being ported to RISC-V, Librem 5 dev-kits shipped |
| • Issue 794 (2018-12-17): Void 20181111, avoiding software bloat, improvements to HAMMER2, getting application overview in GNOME Shell |
| • Issue 793 (2018-12-10): openSUSE Tumbleweed, finding non-free packages, Debian migrates to usrmerge, Hyperbola gets FSF approval |
| • Issue 792 (2018-1203): GhostBSD 18.10, when to use swap space, DragonFly BSD's wireless support, Fedora planning to pause development schedule |
| • Issue 791 (2018-11-26): Haiku R1 Beta1, default passwords on live media, Slax and Kodachi update their media, dual booting DragonFly BSD on EFI |
| • Issue 790 (2018-11-19): NetBSD 8.0, Bash tips and short-cuts, Fedora's networking benchmarked with FreeBSD, Ubuntu 18.04 to get ten years of support |
| • Issue 789 (2018-11-12): Fedora 29 Workstation and Silverblue, Haiku recovering from server outage, Fedora turns 15, Debian publishes updated media |
| • Full list of all issues |
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the Star Lite, Star LabTop and more. Available with a choice of Ubuntu, Linux Mint or Zorin OS pre-installed with many more distributions supported. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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| Random Distribution | 
Raspberry Slideshow
Raspberry Slideshow is focused on being a quick-to-set-up platform for displaying image and video files. The distribution is built for the Raspberry Pi exclusively. Insert a USB key with image/video files or a text file with image/video URIs and boot the OS: the system will display a slideshow of the media in a full-screen view using the Omxplayer.
Status: Active
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