tanglu

Here's DistroWatch's announcement of the the new, Debian-based distro from Germany, Tanglu:

Matthias Klumpp announced the release of Tanglu 1.0. Tanglu is a new Linux distribution, based on Debian's "Testing" branch, which attempts to bring a modern and cutting-edge operating system to the desktop: "We are happy to announce the release of Tanglu 1.0 (Aequorea Victoria) today. It has been an exciting development period where lots of new infrastructure was built and set up, new concepts and ideas have been discussed and implemented, new designs were created, texts were translated and blog posts were written. Lots of work went into making the Tanglu archive rebuildable. During this period, a small but very talented team has been formed. We found issues which affected Debian as well and these were reported, fixed or pending and we generally worked well together with Debian. Exploring systemd in Tanglu already yielded some hints which will help Debian with its own transition."

A link to the official release announcement: http://lists.tanglu.org/pipermail/tanglu-announce/2014-February/000021.html

Tanglu's page at DistroWatch: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=tanglu

Tanglu's web site: http://tanglu.org/en/

Very interesting project! Be sure to read the FAQ page at their site.

great tutorial

You'll want to bookmark this one: Steve's Bourne/Bash Shell Scripting Tutorial, by Steve Parker. You can also purchase the 72-page PDF or the eBook. In addition, there's Parker's book Shell Scripting: Expert Recipes for Linux, Bash, and More. Excellent work!

anniversary!

One year ago today, I downloaded the Xfce spin of Bridge Linux 2012.12; I installed it two days later. This was my introduction to the world of Arch Linux. That Bridge installation is still going strong here. Later, I installed ArchBang, and then I finally installed Arch itself. Arch has become one of my favorite distros -- right up there with Debian -- and I owe a huge "thanks" to the Bridge Linux developer, Dalton Miller (aka "Ninja-1" at the Bridge forums) for helping me to get started down this road.

Here's a link to the announcement of the latest release, Bridge Linux 2014.02, at DistroWatch.

"thumbs up" to the mepis community

 I continue to be impressed by the efforts of the Mepis Community -- still one of the best (although far from being one of the largest) Linux communities out there! For a look at what they've been doing over there, check out http://www.mepiscommunity.org/.

Great job, folks!

freedom

As one blogger notes:

...Freedom in the sense, you can use your system like the way you want to use it. Windows operating system doesn't allow you to edit its system files. But Linux does. It's flexible. In fact all of the Linux files can be edited with a simple text editor...

Link: Freedom. That's why I choose Linux.

second beta

I tried the MX-14 beta 2 in a live session, again from a flash drive created with UNetbootin. It's shaping up to be a very interesting little distro. This second beta was put up this past week, and members of the Mepis Community are busy testing it out.

For the second beta release (I posted a little about the first one in "mx-14 beta 1"), they've switched to the QupZilla web browser; Midori shipped with the first beta. Among other things, MX-14 includes: the LibreOffice office suite, GParted, Grub Customizer, Thunar file manager, Htop, Galculator, luckyBackup, Mirage image viewer, Synaptic package manager, UNetbootin, BleachBit, Catfish file search, the Claws Mail email client, VLC music player, and some goodies like the Whisker Menu, smxi and inxi, and the MX User Assistant. There are tools for live persistence. There's a metapackage installer for easily installing various apps. Restricted codecs can be easily added as well.

Another nice touch: the "Help" document, accessible from the panel, which includes a "Quickstart" guide and info about the default web browser, customization, file management, GRUB, smxi, persistence, and remastering.

I like QupZilla, but not as much as Chromium, so for the heck of it, I decided to try the metapackage installer to add Chromium in the live session. That seemed to work fine.

The Mepis Community website (http://www.mepiscommunity.org/) is undergoing a renovation process; seems that it's becoming more of a site for MX than for Mepis. Interesting, as the Debian-Stable based Mepis release seems to be stuck in a holding pattern, still in beta stage.

For my purposes, MX-14 seems to be excellent to use for live sessions; the system runs quite nicely from a flash drive, and all of the tools I usually need in a live session are present. I'm not planning on doing an installation -- I've got too many distros installed here already, including the Xfce spin of Debian Wheezy -- but I think MX-14 will turn out to be excellent for everyday use as an installed system. Great job so far!

A couple more screenshots: