back to the 'buntu world

I kinda gave up on Ubuntu this past summer, feeling that I'd finally had enough of Canonical's relationship with Amazon, and of having Amazon stuff on my computer. Whatever. Ubuntu, anyway, is a great distro (with great repositories!), and most of the Ubuntu "flavors" or derivatives I've tried (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Linux Mint, etc.) have been, in some ways, better than the parent. The Ubuntu repos, which (as I understand) draw a lot of packages from the Debian Sid repos, turn out to be great for other distros to use as a base.

With all that in mind, I'd been considering adding one of the 'Buntu derivatives to my lineup. Yesterday, I downloaded Kubuntu 17.10.1 ("Artful Aardvark") and tested out the live session. A couple of shots:

Kubuntu 17,10 ships with KDE Plasma 5.10.5, Firefox 57, LibreOffice, VLC media player, and the great KDE apps and tools we've come to know and love.

Here's a shot of my empty desktop, after a good amount of tweaking:

With the application menu opened up and the cursor highlighting Synaptic on the Favorites bar:

My desktop right-click and left-click menus, respectively:

The Discover Software Center -- the user could get lost for hours digging around in here:

Kubuntu also ships with the Muon Package Manager:

I don't know if Muon is any better than Synaptic, which is available in the repos:

My Compaq Presario CQ56 notebook has kinda weak specs; I've turned off most of KDE Plasma's special effects, and Artful performs well, but with a few minor graphical glitches that I haven't yet figured out how to fix.

I've used Kubuntu off and on over the years; it is never perfect, but it's always something I can work with. After some tweaking, I always seem to end up with a solid, dependable system. As I mentioned above, 17.10 ships with an excellent collection of apps and tools; I added a few more, and I think that the end result gives me a great Plasma setup to work with over the next several months. Looking forward to the LTS release!

nineteen sixty-four

I listened to this today, on public radio, KUNM in Albuquerque:

"Newly Discovered 1964 MLK Speech on Civil Rights, Segregation & Apartheid South Africa"

Great speech! London, December 7, 1964. Follow the link above for video from Democracy Now!, with audio of the speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, and also the transcript of the show.

Host Amy Goodman:

In 1964, Dr. King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Days before he received that award in Oslo, Norway, Dr. King traveled to London. On December 7th, 1964, Dr. King gave a speech sponsored by the British group Christian Action about the civil rights struggle in the United States, as well as the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. The speech was recorded by Saul Bernstein, who was working as the European correspondent for Pacifica Radio. Bernstein’s recording was recently discovered by Brian DeShazor, director of the Pacifica Radio Archives.

impressive, polished release

Dedoimedo's very positive review of the excellent MX-17 ("Horizon") release:

"MX Linux MX-17 Horizon - Shaping up beautifully"

january shots

A couple of wintry views of my Openbox setup in SalentOS 2.0 ("Neriton"):

trying neofetch

It seems that there's some kind of bug that causes a weird conflict between gnome-terminal and screenfetch. Before I realized that the problem had anything to do with screenfetch, I mentioned it in "gnome-terminal work-around". It turns out that with screenfetch being used, gnome-terminal might run okay at first, but it won't start up again after it has been closed, except maybe following a reboot.

My workaround was to use the dbus-launch gnome-terminal command instead of the gnome-terminal command. Another workaround: Edit /usr/bin/screenfetch, commenting out the following lines:

LANG=C
LANGUAGE=C
LC_ALL=C

However, I decided to try something else. I installed neofetch to use instead of screenfetch. Looks like neofetch doesn't conflict with gnome-terminal and might be a better option anyway.

neofetch gave me a configuration file at ~/.config/neofetch/config, making it fairly easy to tweak some of the output. See: https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch/wiki

another nice openbox distro

As I'm still waiting for the Stretch-based release of BunsenLabs to come out, I decided to take a look at SalentOS, another little-known Debian Stable-based distro that uses Openbox for the default desktop setup. Here's a shot of the SalentOS 2.0 ("Neriton") live session:

SalentOS 2.0 was released in November, and is based on Debian Stretch. The live session booted quickly and came with a nice set of useful tools, including GParted. The installer looks like the Debian installer, slightly modified. Installation was quick and easy. I found that the sources.list file contained one line for the "SalentOS Official Repository," to go along with the lines for the Stretch repos.

Among the tools that "Neriton" shipped with: Firefox ESR, Thunderbird, Transmission, Thunar, Mousepad, Nitrogen, gnome-calculator, GParted, the LibreOffice suite, the LiveUSB Install tool, lxterminal, Screenshot (GNOME), Synaptic, the tint2 panel, VLC, lxtask, and inxi. Seems to make for a nice mix of LXDE, Xfce, and GNOME elements, along with other open source tools, blended into the Openbox setup.

SalentOS includes the Yanima wallpaper changer, (apparently) created for the distro by SalentOS community members. I found the shell script for it at /usr/local/bin/yanima. The name comes from "Yet Another NItrogen MAnager." Works nicely.

I decided, of course, to tweak the Openbox setup. I replaced the tint2 panel and dock with a vertical tint2 panel along the left side of the screen. I added a few apps, like Pale Moon web browser, Midnight Commander, Double Commander, and Geany, and customized the Openbox menu a little bit. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Applications section of the menu dynamically added entries for all of the newly installed apps.

I'm a long-time fan of distros based on Debian Stable. SalentOS 2.0 ranks up there with the best of any of them, both for live sessions and for installed systems. I'll keep it in a dual-boot setup with BunsenLabs on one of my old notebooks.

Website: http://www.salentos.it/
At DistroWatch: https://www.distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=salentos