MX Linux: A Mid-Weight Distro Focused on Simplicity

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April 6, 2018

There are so many distributions of Linux. Some of those distributions go a very long way to differentiate themselves. In other cases, the differences are so minimal, you wonder why anyone would have bothered reinventing that particular wheel. It’s that latter concern that had me wondering why antiX and MEPIS communities would come together to create yet another distribution—especially given that the results would be an Xfce edition of antiX, built by the MEPIS community.

Does building antiX with an Xfce desktop warrant its own distribution? After all, antiX claims to be a “fast, lightweight and easy to install systemd-free linux live CD distribution based on Debian Stable.” The antiX desktop of choice is LXDE, which does certainly fit the bill for a lightweight desktop. So why retool antiX into another lightweight distribution, only this time with Xfce? Well, as anyone within the Linux community knows, variance adds flavor and a good lightweight distribution is a worthwhile endeavor (especially in preventing old hardware from making its way to the landfill). Of course, LXDE and Xfce aren’t quite in the same category. LXDE should be considered a true lightweight desktop, whereas Xfce should be considered more a mid-weight desktop. And that, my friends, is key to why MX Linux is an important iteration of antiX. A mid-weight distribution, built on Debian, that includes all the tools you need to get your work done.

But there’s something really keen within MX Linux—something directly borrowed from antiX—and that is the installation tool. When I first set up a VirtualBox VM to install MX Linux, I assumed the installation would be the typical, incredibly easy Linux installation I’d grown accustomed to. Much to my surprise, that antiX installer MX Linux uses could be a real game changer, especially for those on the fence about giving Linux a try.

So even before I began kicking the tires of MX Linux, I was impressed. Let’s take a look at what makes the installation of this distribution so special, and then finally have a go with the desktop.

You can download MX Linux 17.1 from here. The minimum system requirements are:

A CD/DVD drive (and BIOS capable of booting from that drive), or a live USB (and BIOS capable of booting from USB)
A modern i486 Intel or AMD processor
512 MB of RAM memory
5 GB free hard drive space
A SoundBlaster, AC97 or HDA-compatible sound card
For use as a LiveUSB, 4 GB free

Installation

Out of the gate, the MX Linux installer makes installing Linux a breeze. Although it may not be the most modern-looking installation tool, there’s little to second-guess. The heart of the installation begins with choosing the disks and selecting the installation type (Figure 1).

Figure 1: One of the first installer screens for MX Linux.

The next important screen (Figure 2) requires you to set a computer name, domain, and (if necessary) a workgroup for MS Networking.

That ability to configure a workgroup is the first bit to really stand out. This is the first distribution I can remember that offers this option during installation. It also should clue you in that MX Linux offers the ability to share directories out of the box. It does, and it does so with aplomb. It’s not perfect, but it works without having to install any extra package (more on this in a bit).

The last important installation screen (that requires user-interaction) is the creation of the user account and root password (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Setting up your user account details and the root user password.

Once you’ve taken care of this final screen, the installation will complete and ask you to reboot. Upon rebooting, you’ll be greeted with the login screen. Login and enjoy the MX Linux experience.

Usage

The Xfce desktop is quite an easy interface to get up to speed with. The default places the panel on the left edge of the screen (Figure 4).

If you want to move the panel to a more traditional location, right click a blank spot on the panel and click Panel > Panel Preferences. In the resulting window (Figure 5), click the Mode drop-down to select from between Deskbar, Vertical, or Horizontal.

Figure 5: Configuring the MX Linux Panel.

The difference between the Deskbar and Vertical options is that, in the Deskbar mode, the panel is aligned vertically, just like in the vertical mode, but the plugins are laid out horizontally. This means you can create much wider panels (for widescreen layouts). If you opt for a horizontal layout, it will default to the top—you will have to then uncheck the Lock panel check box, click Close, and then (using the drag handle on the left edge of the panel) drag it to the bottom. You can then go back into the Panel Settings window and re-lock the panel.

Beyond that, using the Xfce desktop should be a no-brainer for nearly any experience level … it’s that easy. You’ll find software to cover productivity (LibreOffice, Orage Calendar, PDF-Shuffler), graphics (GIMP), communication (Firefox, Thunderbird, HexChat), multimedia (Clementine, guvcview, SMTube, VLC media player), and a number of tools specific to MX Linux (called MX Tools, that range from a live-USB drive creator, a network assistant, package installer, repo manager, live ISO snapshot creator, and more).

Figure 6: Sharing out a directory to your network.

Samba

Let’s talk about sharing folders to your network. As I mentioned, you won’t have to install any extra packages to get this to function. You simply open up the file manager, right-click anywhere, and select Share a folder on your network. You will be prompted for the administrative password (set during installation). Upon successful authentication, the Samba Server Configuration Tool will open (Figure 6).

Figure 7: Configuring the share on MX Linux.

Click the + button and configure your share. You will be asked to locate the directory, give the share a name/description, and then decide if the share is writeable and visible (Figure 7).

When you click the Access tab, you have the choice between giving everyone access to the share or just specific users. Here’s where the problem arises. At this point, no users will be available for sharing. Why? They haven’t been added. In order to add them, there are two possibilities: From the command line or using the tool we already have open. Let’s take the obvious route. From the main window of the Samba Server Configuration Tool, click Preferences > Samba Users. In the resulting window, click Add user.

A new window will appear (Figure 8), where you need to select the user from the drop-down, enter a Windows username, and type/retype a password for the user.

Once you’ve clicked OK, the user will be added and the share will be accessible, to that user, across your network. Creating Samba shares really can be that easy.

The conclusion

MX Linux makes transitioning from just about any desktop operating system simple. Although some might find the desktop interface to be a bit less-than-modern, the distribution’s primary focus isn’t on beauty, but simplicity. To that end, MX Linux succeeds in stellar fashion. This flavor of Linux can make anyone feel right at home on Linux. Spin up this mid-weight distribution and see if it can’t serve as your daily driver.

Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.

This Week in Open Source News: Dominating Themes at ONS, OpenContrail Evolves into Tungsten Fabric & More

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The Linux Foundation

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April 6, 2018

This week in Linux and open source news, Juniper Network’s OpenContrail is rebranded as a Linux Foundation project, the FierceTelecom Senior Editor reviews dominant themes at ONS North America 2018 & more!

1) “Juniper Networks’ open-source network virtualization platform OpenContrail has finished migrating to the Linux Foundation and rebranded itself as Tungsten Fabric.”

Juniper OpenContrail Evolves Into the Linux Foundation’s Tungsten Fabric– RCRWireless News

2) “The themes laid out at [ONS] will likely continue to evolve throughout the year as service providers move forward with their virtualization plans.”

Editor’s Corner—AI, Open Source, White Boxes and Vendor Openness Dominated ONS 2018’s Headlines– FierceTelecom

3) “Valve has posted a spirited defence of both Steam Machines and the future of gaming on Linux on its Steam Community forums.”

Valve Insists There’s Still Life in Steam Machines and Linux Gaming– techradar

4) Linus Torvalds got the “normal and entirely boring release cycle” he wanted.

Linux 4.16 Arrives, Bringing More Spectre and Meltdown Fixes– ZDNet

5) Forbes provides tips for those wanting to “win the long game in [open source] computing”.

Leadership Is The Secret To An Open Source Business Model– Forbes

Regular Expressions: How Do They Work?

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Dev.to

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April 6, 2018

Dear programmer! I think it’s time we talk about regular expressions. What do you think?

Yes, I understand you know them and can use in most common real-life situations. It’s great! I know some programmers, for whom more complicated regular expressions are quite a black magic. Even though they may have quite a few years of experience. But I don’t want to preach you about how to build a regexp¹ to get your problem solved. I intend to explain how they work internally and what consequences it might have for us.

So, where do we start? It actually begins with mathematics.

How Linux Became My Job

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OpenSource.com

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April 6, 2018

IBM engineer Phil Estes shares how his Linux hobby led him to become an open source leader, contributor, and maintainer.

I’ve been using open source since what seems like prehistoric times. Back then, there was nothing called social media. There was no Firefox, no Google Chrome (not even a Google), no Amazon, barely an internet. In fact, the hot topic of the day was the new Linux 2.0 kernel. The big technical challenges in those days? Well, the ELF format was replacing the old a.out format in binary Linux distributions, and the upgrade could be tricky on some installs of Linux.

How I transformed a personal interest in this fledgling young operating system to a career in open source is an interesting story. …This journey—from my first use of Linux to becoming a leader, contributor, and maintainer in today’s cloud-native open source world—has been extremely rewarding.

Efforts to Standardize Tracing Through OpenTracing

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SD Times

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April 6, 2018

Industry efforts toward distributed tracing have been evolving for decades, and one of the latest initiatives in this arena is OpenTracing, an open distributed standard for apps and OSS packages. APMs like Lightstep and Datadog are eagerly pushing forward the emerging specification, as are customer organizations like HomeAway, PayPal and Pinterest, while some other industry leaders – including Dynatrace, NewRelic, and App Dynamics – are holding back from full support. Still, contributors to the open-source spec are forging ahead with more and more integrations, and considerable conference activities are in store for later this year.

The fc Command Tutorial With Examples For Beginners

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OSTechnix

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April 6, 2018

The fc command, short for fix commands, is a shell built-in command used to list, edit and re-execute the most recently entered commands in to an interactive shell. You can edit the recently entered commands in your favorite editor and run them without having to retype the entire commands. This command can be helpful to correct the spelling mistakes in the previously entered commands and avoids the repetition of long and complicated commands. Since it is shell-builtin, it is available in most shells, including Bash, Zsh, Ksh etc. In this brief tutorial, we are going to learn to use fc command in Linux.

List the recently executed commands

If you run “fc -l” command with no arguments, it will display the last 16 commands.

Linux Kernel Developer: Steven Rostedt

By

Amber Ankerholz

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April 5, 2018

Linus Torvalds recently released version 4.16 of the Linux kernel. These releases typically occur every nine to ten weeks, and each one contains the work of more than 1,600 developers representing over 200 corporations, according to the 2017 Linux Kernel Development Report, written by Jonathan Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman. In this series, we’re highlighting some of the developers who contribute to the kernel.

Steven Rostedt, Open Source Programmer at VMware, maintains the Real Time Stable releases of the Linux kernel, among other things. Rostedt is one of the original developers of the PREEMPT_RT patch and began working on it in 2004…

Cybersecurity Vendor Selection: What Needs to Be in a Good Policy

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ZDNet

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April 5, 2018

Operating a company in the modern enterprise landscape requires a reliance, to some degree, on third-party vendors. It’s unavoidable. But the addition of each new vendor brings with it a certain amount of risk.

Starting small is key. Company leaders should work with their CISO or CSO to determine their minimum acceptable security standards, and use that as a baseline criteria, according to Gartner research director Mark Horvath. This should be done even before a request for proposal (RFP) or request for information (RFI) is written, Horvath said.

“Every organization will have a set of requirements which are informed by the relevant industry standards and the unique needs of the organization. These should be written as a policy long before any vendor inquiries are made, so that they can be addressed up front with the vendors. The goal is to avoid the problem of buying a product and then discovering later that it violates privacy or security policies in a way which hinders the business case for the purchase.”

5 Things to Know Before Adopting Microservice and Container Architectures

By

The New Stack

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April 5, 2018

I spend a lot of time with existing and potential customers answering questions about how we use and manage containers to create a platform composed of dozens of microservices.

We definitely consider ourselves early adopters of containers, and we started packaging services in them almost as soon as Docker released its first production-ready version in the summer of 2014. Many of the customers I talk with are just now beginning — or thinking about beginning — such journeys, and they want to know everything we know. They want to know how we make it work, and how we architected it. But part of the process, I like to stress, is that they need to know what we learned from where we struggled along the way.

With that in mind, here are five key takeaways I’d like to share with anyone pondering containers and microservices:

1. Never Stop Developing

Take your adoption project seriously, and treat it like a product. Give it a name, some internal branding even and a clear product vision. It should be managed and given a life.

Why You Should Use Column-Indentation to Improve Your Code’s Readability

By

freeCodeCamp

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April 5, 2018

I think that the most important aspect of programming is the readability of the source code that you write or maintain. This involves many things, from the syntax of the programming language, to the variable names, comments, and indentation. Here I discuss the last one of these, indentation.

It’s not about indentation size, or the choice between tabs and spaces, or if it should be required in a language such as Python. A lot of people like to use a maximum line length for each line of code, usually 80 or 120 characters. With this idea, there is no maximum length, and sometimes you’ll need to use the horizontal scrollbar. But don’t freak out, it is not for the whole code — it’s just for some parts of it.