Distrohoppers’
Digest Episode 007
MONTHLY
FOIBLES
...wherein
we discuss what did and didn’t work for us this month…
Moss
I
have been extremely blessed with two new machines, both System76
models, a Galago Pro 2 and a Kudu 3. I now have better machines than
I’ve ever owned, and look forward to using the Kudu in reviews
starting next month. Both these machines came from listener Jackie
Moore in Nashville, who has been supportive of me since I began being
a co-hosting mintCast. I have managed to get Linux Mint 19.2, Ubuntu
Budgie 19.10, Pearl Desktop 8, Q4OS, and Bodhi 5.0.0 (just yesterday,
still have a tweak or two to do) on the Galago Pro, plenty of room
but I think I’ll leave it there. The Kudu is being used as my
Distrohopping machine from midway through October into the future, as
we suggested back when I was hoping to get a new machine.
I
had an interesting excursion through Grubland on the Galago Pro 2
this month, when I attempted to add Unity Desktop to the Ubuntu MATE
install. This resulted in some very wacky behavior, and I decided it
was time to install Ubuntu Budgie 19.10 instead. The result of this
was, my boot menu looked good but gave an error that I needed to load
the kernel first. Because of my prior experiences in Grub, I knew to
hit the <Esc> key, which brought me to a grub> prompt… and
I typed exit. Amazingly, this brought me to an old saved Grub menu
from the earlier Ubuntu MATE 19.04 installation. It took a while and
some fumbling around, but finally I tried booting to the Ubuntu MATE
19.04 selection on the alternate Grub menu just mentioned, and, after
much thought, it managed to load Ubuntu Budgie 19.10 instead. I then
installed Grub Customizer from the repo, saved it, and the newly
generated Grub menu worked on reboot.
Also,
my wife and I both have been having problems where PIA locks us out
of a website we’re trying to load, and we have to change nodes.
This has been going on for the entire 2 months we’ve had the
service. We have decided to go back to Mullvad, which is still a bit
cheaper on month-to-month billing, when the current month runs out
November 2.
Tony
Well
the last month has had it’s ups and downs, the major up was being
able to attend the Friday night and all day Saturday of OggCamp, I
got to meet so many people from the Linux community including Oliver
who guest hosted on mintCast a few months ago, and is a big supporter
of our shows. The down note was that due to several family
bereavements I had to miss the Sunday as I needed to travel home to
go up to Glasgow for 2 funerals the following Monday and Tuesday. I
seem to be at that point in life where the times I meet up with
family is at a funeral rather than a wedding. As they say, “That’s
Life”.
On
a more pleasant note, I've developed a new passion for watching
YouTube videos of people refurbishing old diecast model cars and the
like. There are some fantastic videos out there, but one of my goto
channels is ‘Marty's
Matchbox Makeovers’
he isn’t the most followed channel only having just over a 103,000
followers but he is true to the spirit of the old Matchbox toys of my
childhood. As a result of this I’ve been buying some of the old
models on ebay, and recently sent him a couple for a possible
restoration video.
Currently
recovering i’m from a heavy cold and my back decided to pop over
the weekend, resulting in difficulty walking and lots of pain. Hoping
to get through the show without coughing too much making the edit a
‘further’ pain.
UPDATES
- Where we discuss what we have learned about distros we’ve
already reviewed
Pearl
Desktop 8 had lost its server and website, but it has been replaced.
I may have been somewhat instrumental in that, but my friendly web
host avers it was not his hosting.
Fedora
31 was released the day before this is being recorded. One of us will
probably downloaded it and have a look in a VM.
Bodhi
5.0.0 has had a couple updates. Remember my problem getting the
ARandR settings for my external monitor use to load at boot? Now
there is a button in ARandR, “Save to Bodhi Startup”. And with
my new installation of Bodhi on the Galago Pro 2, I have learned that
the updater program, Eepdater, seems to have all -- or at least a lot
more -- of its bugs worked out, and functions well on my system,
putting it ahead of KDE’s Discover (last I used it).
One
listener to the show has installed Solus with SoftMaker Office,
Mullvad, and MFC-J491DW printer support. Perhaps soon I will try
Solus again.
Tony’s
Distro this Month
DISTRO
NAME:
MX
Linux 19 Beta 2.1, MX Linux 19
INSTALLATION
So
for information this months installation was done as a sole install
on my Toshiba Portege Z30 the specification is as follows, this is
the same machine I used for last month's EndeavourOS review:
Intel®
Core™ i5-4210U CPU 2cores and 4 threads @ 1.70GHz to 2.7GHz 128Gb
M2 SSD and 8Gb DDR3 Ram.
Also
during the test period the Beta moved to full release and is now
installed alongside the the beta on the same machine, giving me the
opportunity to report on dual booting friendliness. Another point to
note is that MX is also available as a 32Bit system so although I
tested the 64Bit iso if you have older 32Bit PC’s around this is
one distro that still supports that hardware.
So
installation is fairly straightforward if using the whole drive,
after starting the installation process you get the option to set
your keyboard to your local variant, the next screen gives you the
option to use the partition manager or use the whole disc. if you
wish to do a dual boot and have not already set up a partition for
this then you will need to use the partition manager option to create
a partition to install MX along side the existing OS. If you choose
this option you open GPartEd and would need knowledge of using this
disc partitioning utility to enable a dual boot, by shrinking the
current partition, and using the freed space to create a partition
for the MX19 install. If you have not already backed up the data on
the existing OS this could be a risky operation. Also new or those
fairly new users to Linux may not be familiar with manual
partitioning so I wonder why the maintainers have not moved to a more
new user friendly way of repartitioning the drive.
Warning,
any repartitioning of a drive to create free space can result in data
loss, so if wanting to dual boot with another OS backup all your data
on the current install before embarking on the install.
After
setting up your install drive you move on to choosing where to put
the bootloader, if you are unfamiliar with this just go with the
default options. The following screens are setting up the network ID
name for the PC, location and user name and password, while setting
the user name etc there is an option to retain any changes you made
in the live session. This is handy if using WiFi and you have made
changes to the desktop layout to suit you, as when ticked you will
have these saved to the install when you reboot. After this your
done, it will take a minute or so to install the boot loader then you
see the finished message and you can restart and boot into your new
installation of MX.
POST
INSTALLATION HARDWARE FACTS & ISSUES
On
reboot of the OS after install, you should be presented with a
Welcome menu which has a number of options one of which is to tweak
settings including your panel, you can also access the tools menu
from the welcome menu and this has lots of tools for configuring the
system including a Grub customiser which is called Boot Options.
While most of these tools are available in other distros, this just
makes them very easy to access out of the box, so a great choice on
the MX maintainers to include this. Note if you switch off the ‘show
this at start up’, just type welcome in the search on the menu and
you will find it. One other thing you can do is add any audio and
video codecs not included by default for licensing or other reasons,
they are just a click away.
As
for hardware during the 5 weeks or so running MX on this PC
everything just worked, although as you know I have no fancy graphics
or other hardware that may be problematic on this or other Linux
distributions, my only problem during the whole month was with a bug
in the Beta, which when in the non-systemd boot, on starting a reboot
resulted in the system jumping to the login screen and hanging for a
few seconds before starting the reboot cycle. When I was in the
systemd boot option (yes you can decide to be systemd free or not at
boot) this bug did not occur. This was reported and a response
recognising this as an issue was received. While they would like to
fix it they were honest enough to admit they weren’t sure how, so
as it was not a critical bug it’s on the todo list. Well they did
figure it out as this is no longer an issue with this laptop on the
full release iso.
EASE
OF USE
Well
it’s Debian under the hood, so as a long term user of Debian based
systems it was a very easy OS to use. All the Command line tools are
as you would expect are APT based and you get Synaptic out of the
box. So if you are used to a Debian based system you won’t have any
issues with MX19.
APPLICATION
ISSUES:
I
didn’t have any when booted into the systemd option but if using
the non systemd boot you will not be able to install snapd and run
snap packages. Other than that I was able to run all my software that
I use on a regular basis, if installing from the Debian repositories
then as this release is based on Debian Buster, all your software
will be the version available for Buster, however if you do need the
latest version of a package for new features, then you can probably
find it as a snap or flatpak package.
MEMORY
USE:
On
first boot the system is using about 650Mb of my 8Gb of RAM, so I’m
happy that this. Also a clean install only used about 5Gb of an 8Gb
virtual HDD and 450Mb of 4Gb Ram in Virtualbox, so this is an OS that
is definitely old hardware friendly.
EASE
OF FINDING HELP
As
the only problem I came across was a bug, which as I’ve already
stated I reported, I didn’t use the community. But from the
comments of other users and knowing that they aim to be very user
focused I don’t think you will have any issues if you ask for help
on the forums.
PLAYS
NICE WITH OTHERS
Setting
up a dual boot was easy for an experienced user but I would worry
that this might put off an inexperienced person wishing to start
using Linux with MX19, I would love to see one of the slider style
repartitioning tools as with Mint to create the space for the dual
boot on the drive, rather than using the GPartEd GUI to do this.
STABILITY
It’s
Debian, what can I say, other than it’s as solid as Mount Everest.
RATINGS:
Ease
of Installation new user friendly install scores 6/10
experienced
Linux users 10/10
Hardware
Issues 10/10
Ease
of Finding Help (Community, Web) 8/10
Ease
of Use 10/10
Plays
Nice With Others 8/10
Stability 10/10
Overall
Rating 9/10
SIMILAR
DISTROS TO CHECK OUT
Linux
Mint Debian Edition 3
antix
Debian
Buster
Deepin
Q4OS
FINAL
COMMENTS
Apart
from my niggle with the installer and it’s handling of dual
booting, this is a fantastic spin on Debian Buster. Also you get the
option to run systemd or not, so this solves an issue of having it
available if wanted and those that still have an issue with systemd
can choose not to run it.
This
is definitely a keep in the tool bag distro for me, great job by the
maintainers and all who are involved in the project. Keep up the
great work.
So
unless Moss has any further comments on MX19, let’s speed on over
to him, and let him tell us about our other distro review this month,
OpenMandriva Lx 4.
Moss’s
Distro this Month
DISTRO
NAME: OpenMandriva Lx 4
MY
HARDWARE:
I
ran OpenMandriva Lx 4 on my Lenovo IdeaPad 110-15acl-80TJ with 4 Gb
RAM and a 500 Gb hard drive.
INSTALLATION
For
me, an installation includes the full installation and all updates.
If I can manage it, I then replace LibreOffice (if provided) with
SoftMaker Office, install my preferred VPN (PIA), and set up Grub
Customizer (if available) or other Grub management, and then install
my printer (Brother MFC-J491DW), a simple matter on .deb and .rpm
distros, not so much on others. I usually try to install Stacer so
that I can get good stats and a few extra controls.
OpenMandriva
is a second-level derivative from Mandriva, being developed from
Rosa. It is a community edition, as opposed to the developer edition
Mageia or the professional Rosa, and has the desktop user firmly in
mind. As such, it has more in common with PCLinuxOS, which left the
Mandriva project before the original went away.
I’ve
spoken before about my issues with Lx 4. I now have the machines I
need to be doing a single installation, so I wanted to try OM4 first.
I did a normal installation, and it went well… until I rebooted,
and there was no boot sector. I burned a disk of Super Grub2 and
booted from that, which then allowed me to use OpenMandriva fine. I
tried using SuperGrub2 to write a new Grub, but couldn’t find the
right tool to do that. I approached the OpenMandriva Forum, got a few
ideas and tried them, still nothing. So I threw in the towel and
loaded Linux Mint 19.2 as a dual-boot, and it found OM4 and I could
boot to it. I then acquired Grub Customizer and moved OM4 to the
first boot.
POST
INSTALLATION HARDWARE ISSUES
10/5/19
- At 11:56 I started to attempt a full install of OpenMandriva LX 4.
I first tried to install without seeing the there was not a Wi-Fi
connection. I made the Wi-Fi connection, and it took several minutes
looking for some file.
I
stopped the install, rebooted, set the Wi-Fi, started the install. It
found the file. I told it to overwrite everything. Everything else
was in place. I got the error that it failed to create a partition.
At
12:11 I got my GPartEd disk out, rebooted to it, set the partitions:
4096 linux-swap, remainder Ext4. Finished 12:23.
Started
OM4 again. Did manual partition, selected sda2 (swap is sda1).
Completed at 12:35. Rebooted.
But
it didn’t boot; the boot manager can’t find the Grub. So I
downloaded SuperGrub2, burned it to a CD, booted to that and loaded
OM4. I can’t see how to write Grub from the disk, but at least I
can boot.
Finally,
after a few days and trying a few suggestions from forum users to get
a GRUB written, I installed Linux Mint 19.2 as dual boot. That fixed
everything. The boot found both distros at reboot, and I installed
Grub Customizer and got the boot sequence set to boot to OM4 by first
preference.
On
the Kudu3, I had installed Linux Mint and told OM4 to overwrite it
for a single-boot experience. It got to the part of writing the
changes to the disk, and, exactly like it did on the IdeaPad before I
ran GPartEd, said it could not create the partition. It did not wipe
the Linux Mint partition at this point, so I still had that running.
After trying several things with the help of friends, I once again
gave up and installed it as a dual-boot, leaving Linux Mint on the
machine. It worked fine. I have boot, in the beautiful OM4 boot
screen. The odd part about the installer not wanting to install as a
single-boot system is that the IdeaPad is set up for Legacy Boot, but
the Kudu3 is set up UEFI.
I
have most things installed. The printer install process went well but
no test print. This is an issue I had in the past with OM 3, and
there is a fix I know exists. I
have not been able to install Telegram or Discord.
Installing PIA went as planned, but it can't seem to connect
to any of its nodes. I also tried setting up the Firewall, but none
of the options looked like any other firewall I’ve seen so it could
be very easy to mess up if I haven’t already.
EASE
OF USE
OM4
is as nice as a distro can be. However, if you’re a Debian/Ubuntu
user, you will need to learn how to use dnf in terminal or the
installer dnfdragora. (Fedora users should already know how to do
this.) The syntax is quite different from apt/aptitude, but it’s
learnable. After that, it should be a piece of cake. Any difficulties
I have experienced are a combination of my own ignorance and the fact
that I have not taken the time to go to the forum and ask questions.
Further, Snapd and Flatpak are not supported; I still managed to get
Telegram Desktop installed properly with the help of a few listeners
(cryptodan, Peter Jones, Gabe R, and Leo Chavez), and finally got
Discord installed.
MEMORY
USE:
On
the Kudu 3, Stacer reports 622 Mb RAM usage and 8.2 Gb of disk space
used. Who says Plasma is a heavy desktop? (Discussion)
EASE
OF FINDING HELP
The
OpenMandriva Forum has 9 active Admins, 10 Moderators, and a total
forum membership of 354. Unlike many other forums, this number seems
to only include current members, so you should be able to get quick
answers for your issues. If you find yourself really liking
OpenMandriva, you should get involved in the community -- more busy
hands can only make this great distro better..
PLAYS
NICE WITH OTHERS
OpenMandriva
is one of the best distros out there, but is best used as a single
installation or no more than dual. Over the past two months I’ve
already talked too much about my issues trying to install this in a
multiboot situation, some of which is why I have my new computers. On
the positive side, the boot menu is one of the loveliest out there,
and if OM4 was your last boot, you’ll be quite happy.
STABILITY
No
stability issues have been noted. This is the latest version of one
of the earliest distros, forked from Red Hat before Fedora was even a
thing, so there should be no stability issues.
SIMILAR
DISTROS TO CHECK OUT
Rosa
PCLinuxOS
Mageia
Other
distros which may be nearly as beautifully designed include Pearl
Desktop 8 and Deepin.
RATINGS:
Ease
of Installation new user 4/10
experienced
user 7/10
Hardware
Issues 9/10
Ease
of Finding Help (Community, Web) 9/10
Ease
of Use 9/10
Plays
Nice With Others 5/10
Stability 9/10
Overall
Rating 7/10
FINAL
COMMENTS
As
I’ve said many times, Mandrake was the first Linux distro I ever
was successful at running, so it’s always good to revisit later
versions and see where it is going. OpenMandriva only suffers from
lack of users, but those users are committed and very active so it
should continue to have a great development path. For whatever
reason, I had fewer issues with 3.03, but once you get 4 running, it
is by far a better experience. I will continue to revisit this over
time and hope to install it again in the future.
NEW
RELEASES THIS MONTH:
from
our September 26 to October 31
Fedora
31
Arco
19.11.3
ALT
9.0
BSDRP
1.95
GhostBSD
19.10
Voyager
19.10
ArchBang
2510
SmartOS
20191024
Clonezilla
2.6.6-10
KDE
neon 20191024
ExTiX
19.10
Primtux
5
Septor
2019.6
MX
19
Archman
2019-10
Tails
4.0
Alpine
3.10.3
4MLinux
30.1
Pop!_OS
19.10
Volumio
2.657
PCLinuxOS
2019.10
Ubuntu
Kylin 19.10
Ubuntu
Budgie 19.10
AntiX
19
Lubuntu
19.10
Kubuntu
19.10
Ubuntu
MATE 19.10
Xubuntu
19.10
Ubuntu
Studio 19.10
Ubuntu
19.10
OpenBSD
6.6
NuTyX
11.2
Zevenet
5.10.1 "Community"
NixOS
19.09
SparkyLinux
5.9
SolydXK
10
FEEDBACK
Cubicle
Nate
I
appreciate the honest review of openSUSE. I just wanted to add some
notes. The aptitude compatibility package is called,
"zypper-aptitude". It has translated all the commands I
threw at it but I wouldn't consider myself an Aptitude power user.
When it comes to desktop selection, they are almost all available in
openSUSE and accessible from the installer itself. Although it does
not present the options as easily as some of the others, you can
customize the package selection before committing and select a
desktop pattern for alternative desktops or if you want a more
"minimal" installation.
There
is not a graphical "AppCenter" as you might see on some
distros for openSUSE. You can use Discover in Plasma but an even
better option would be to use https://software.opensuse.org/explore
Here
you can search for applications and use the "Direct Install"
option for whatever applications it is you would like that are
available. It should also be noted that you are able to use Snaps and
Flatpak as well as AppImages. Consequently, you have access to a
pretty wide breadth of software. For better or worse, you didn't get
a chance to get to know the community through the forums. It is
almost unfortunate (I think...) you didn't have a problem you
couldn't take there because the Forum is chock-full of incredibly
technically proficient, kind and helpful people.
If
you are up for it, I wouldn't mind digging into the issue you are
having with Discord on openSUSE. I can't replicate the problem but
problem solving is a fun activity. So... hit me up on Discord? ;)
Thanks
for the podcast.
Tony
- I responded via Discord
Hi
Nate, thanks for the feedback on the show regarding OpenSUSE
Tumbleweed, we always aim to be as fair and open minded as possible
on the reviews and I'm glad you thought it was so. As for the issue
with Discord, unfortunately I have already nuked the instillation and
installed MX 19 beta 2.1 to review for the next episode as I am
aiming to use the same hardware for each of my reviews (as Moss does)
to give a fair comparison. As for Snaps and Flatpaks yes I used Snap
to install Get-Iplayer as on OpenSUSE this is the easy way to install
(I’m not into self compiling) but you are correct, and I should
have made that clear that these were options in OpenSUSE. As for the
DE I knew I could get Mate if I wanted from the repoes, but I am
beginning to feel quite at home in XFCE, and have stuck with it in MX
as well so it wasn't a major issue for me.
This
wasn’t the end of the conversation but far too much to reproduce
here and probably not that relevant.
From
Anonymous about episode 2
I
think got a proper printer information from your article. Because I
faced different issues but could not solve the issues in my printer.
but your tips was so informative for me. I had a new issue that was
Canon Printer Error 5200 pop-up notification shown in my system
screen. Can I got any solution for this error?
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
We
are still hoping to produce a User-Only show, Distrohopper’s Digest
User Edition. We have posted the criteria to be used in your review
on the blog at https://distrohoppersdigest.blogspot.com.
We did not get any submissions in October.
Please
submit your review in .flac format if you can, but we can accept .mp3
if that’s the best you can do. Submitting a script of what was said
will also help our listeners, but is not required. Please send your
submission to distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com.
Moss
- I am really grateful for the response I’ve had to my pleas of
poverty. I am now using two System76 machines for future episodes.
I
have an account at Sponsus, which is open source and is kinda like
Patreon; Michael Tunnell uses this. My Sponsus is at
https://sponsus.org/zaivala
. I have no sponsors as yet, and have no idea what premiums to offer;
you tell me what you want and I’ll see what I can do. Please tell
me if you want your name used on the show, whether you make a
Sponsus, PayPal or direct donation.
Our
next show will be recorded on December 4th or 5th, 2019. Visit our
website at https://distrohoppersdigest.blogspot.com
and follow us on MeWe, Discord and Telegram at our mintCast groups,
and please contact us at distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
if you have any comments or distro suggestions.
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