Saturday, February 23, 2013

takin' it to the bridge


I downloaded the latest Bridge Linux (Xfce) (bridge-xfce-2012.12-i686.iso), a "rolling-release" disro based on Arch Linux. Here's what the live session looks like when you boot into it:



On the desktop, there's a README text file containing some instructions for after the installation has been completed.

Here are few screenshots of the menu to show some of Bridge's default applications:







Installing Bridge Linux basically gives you an Arch system, but with an easier installation. However, I didn't think that the installer would be as simple as some others for someone new to Linux.

Once I got Bridge installed and booted into the desktop, a post-installation script started, which updated the system and downloaded some packages. I noticed that the script installed LibreOffice without giving me a chance to decide whether I wanted it installed or not (Bridge comes with Gnumeric and Abiword by default). I referred to the README to get some other stuff, like the flashplugin package.

Like Arch, Bridge uses the pacman package manager. I think there are some GUI front-ends for it, but there isn't one installed by default, so I've been using pacman from the command line. pacman seems fairly easy to use once you take a look at man pacman. I tried my luck at finding and installing a few apps, like Geany, Mirage, SpaceFM, and xfce4-terminal (Bridge comes with Terminator by default).

For the few questions I had, I was able to find solutions at the Bridge forums and/or at the Arch forums, or in the Arch wiki.

Bridge looks like a very good distro. I feel like after installing it, I'm running Arch Linux. The repos are Arch's. I had no problem using pacman to find the apps I wanted/needed, and I found a list of available apps at the Arch wiki. This is my first time around with an Arch distro, however, and I'm still just getting my feet wet.

Here's a screenshot after I finished setting things up:



The Bridge Linux home page can be found at: http://millertechnologies.net/index.html

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