Development Release: AntiX 'Bullseye' Alpha 1 - Noice

This is it, the first round of development releases based on the upcoming Debian 11 'Bullseye' has started now that is nearing the freeze, or has it already? Not sure, as everyone knows I am more partial to the non-systemd side of things. AntiX, just like Devuan, fits right in there. Both provide good alternative ways to install and arrive at a Debian system. Debian is nonetheless still an important distribution, even though I wished they had made different choices, but both are standing on the shoulders of this giant.

AntiX 13.2 - More Modern But Still Some Quirks

Blimey, it's been a long time since I reviewed antiX already and it's about time to give it a second look. The overall judgement may have been a bit harsh last time around and I'm going to see whether we can write a more positive piece this time. Some of the issues raised seems were valid though as the distribution has changed a bit since then. Enough of that, let's hop right in.

Inspecting the Gentoo 12.0 Live DVD

Following a recent request I downloaded the Gentoo 12.0 Live DVD for a test drive. I tried Gentoo many years ago but gave up after a few hours due to the time involved, and my knowledge back then was a lot more rudimentary than today. Gentoo is a source distribution that is supposed to be configured and compiled from stage 2 or stage 3 tarballs, although images are available that allow you to cheat and skip the early part of kernel compilation etc. via minimal install images.

Three Spins You May Not Have Heard Of

Always on the lookout for something interesting I found three more esoteric spins of major distributions and set out to give them a quick test run.
This was helped by a streak of bad luck recently which resulted in me suddenly having two partitions available.

antiX M11 in Review - Sadly Not So Great

As most readers will already know antiX is a light weight distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux and SimplyMEPIS, or just Mepis if you prefer, which is itself based on Debian. antiX sports a custom IceWM as default window manager and environment with tools from the ROX desktop. It is supposed to mainly be used on older machines and as a consequence there is no x86_64 edition, only two 32-bit optimized for i486 and i686 processor instructions.

Meet Grml 2011.12, Basic Debian Respin for Sysadmins

Today we're looking at another more specialized distribution spin called grml that apparently has its origins in Austria, not that it mattered much when technology allows us to work pretty much from anywhere. Is it grml because those mountain folks up in the Alps are always grumbling and grumpy, or is it that life as a sysadmin is turning people into muttering zombies?

Sabayon 6 Roundup - Fluxbox and XBMC

Having looked at the two main editions of Gnome x86 and KDE x64 I've come to the conclusion, that the best way to use Sabayon 6 on the desktop is... to log into Fluxbox. When talking about the installer I briefly mentioned that it launches in a Fluxbox environment if you choose install directly from the boot menu, which it falls back into if things go wrong, and believe me they do.