LinuxQuestions.org - Microlinux Enterprise Desktop 13.37

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- - Microlinux Enterprise Desktop 13.37 - first alpha if you're curious (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/microlinux-enterprise-desktop-13-37-first-alpha-if-youre-curious-4175427091/)

Microlinux Enterprise Desktop 13.37 - first alpha if you're curious

As some of you already know, my company (http://www.microlinux.fr) installs 100 % GNU/Linux and FOSS based solutions for professional clients like schools, town halls, public libraries and small companies (as well as individuals who consider their PC as more than a gaming console ;)).

For the last year, I've been using a patchwork mix of Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu LTS and Slackware for the job, since I wanted to actually experience which distribution was "best" for me. Only recently have I answered that question for myself, and I've decided to concentrate my various desktop and server configurations on Slackware. That being said, if I had to work with any of the other three, I wouldn't be too unhappy. But Slackware is a clear winner for a number of reasons.

Over the last few years, I've had a more or less clear idea of what the "perfect" Linux desktop would look like. Your mileage may vary, of course, but here's mine:

Slackware-based
Xfce desktop environment with bells and whistles
Choice selection of best-of-the-breed applications, one per task
Complete collection of codecs, plugins, fonts, etc.
Intuitive and user-friendly default settings, so even Joe Sixpack can be immediately productive
Integrate some elegant and professional artwork (icon themes, GTK themes, mouse pointer themes)
Must run reasonably fast on ten-year-old hardware

Now as far as I understand, there are roughly two different "schools" to achieve this:

Install Slackware with Xfce, then install everything that's missing (apps, codecs, fonts, plugins, roughly 150 to 200 extra packages) either from SlackBuilds.org and/or write some scripts yourself.
Use any of the Slackware derivative distros with similar goals like Salix, Zenwalk, Vector...

I'm now suggesting a third approach, which is quite close to what the folks from gnomeslackbuild.org offer, only it's not based on GNOME, but Xfce. Here's the idea:

Install a base Slackware system using an existing set of tagfiles
If you're lazy, download and install 150 extra packages, and you're more or less immediately ready for work
If you prefer to do so, build all the packages yourself. Sources are all available, and you can use the single master build script to download and build everything automagically, the result being exactly the same as the step above

Maybe a nice name for this project would be "Beyond Linux From Slack" ;)

Anyway, here's the first public alpha of the project, based on Slackware 13.37:

Code:

$ svn co svn://svn.tuxfamily.org/svnroot/microlinux/slackware/13.37

For the moment, there is no online source and package repo available, since I have yet to decide where to host it.

What do you get? Short answer: this.

http://www.microlinux.fr/images/myslackwarerig.png

Longer answer: Slackware 13.37 with a full-featured Xfce 4.8.3 desktop and a load of carefully integrated applications (Openshot, Inkscape, Brasero, Asunder, Audacity, Geany, Apache Open Office, Evince, lots more apps as well as fonts, codecs, plugins).

If the "alpha" in "public alpha" scares you: the exact same setup is already in use in our local school here, with more than fifty users hacking away on these desktops all day long. It's also in use at my office, and works quite nice.

Quick and dirty installation instructions:

Copy the tagfiles/ directory to a USB disk and install Slackware using this set of tagfiles. If you don't know how to do this, take a peek in Daniel de Kok's excellent Slackbasics (online). Or wait until I can find the time and write a nice HOWTO for docs.slackware.com :study:
Boot into your configured system and download all the scripts from SVN to an appropriate directory like /root or /usr/share, whatever.
Launch the 'build.sh' script. This script parses the 'packages' file. It downloads the sources for every package automatically, builds it, installs it and puts a copy of the package in the slackware/$ARCH directory.

On my battered AMD64 with 2GB RAM and a low bandwidth Internet connection, the whole process of downloading and building everything takes a bit less than six hours.

A few caveats:

Build everything before eventually installing the proprietary NVidia drivers. Otherwise some builds will fail
Do use the set of tagfiles for installation. This is important.
You might want to uninstall the user-settings-seamonkey package before creating your first user. This is still a workaround for my own use.
The user-settings-desktop package contains a small utility called 'cleanmenu' that "rewrites" most of the desktop menu entries. For now, these rewritten entries are only available in english, french and german.

Much of this work is really just an assembly of the great work that's been done before by some excellent folks, and here's the place to give them credit:

Robby Workman for his excellent work on Xfce
All the crew from SlackBuilds.org for their really precious work
Eric Hameleers for his "impossible" SlackBuild scripts
And of course, Patrick Volkerding, for creating such a fine system

I think if some people are interested in this, I'll probably write a dedicated section for it on my company's website, similar to the gnomeslackbuild.org site, with a more fine-grained presentation and more detailed instructions. Let's see.

For now, enjoy.

After some years tweaking and building things with Gentoo and then using Ubuntu, I'm coming back to Slackware when I build my next PC. I'd much rather get a system up and running quickly with little fuss and this looks great. I'll have to try this out on my next build. Looks real nice kikinovak.

Really exciting project... and thanks a lot for sharing in this LQ community. Definitively will give it a go.

and...

Quote:

Yes, please do it. I reckon that at the end of the day this will help to close the breach between the pure-slack approach and the all-easy-for-end-user approach of other distros. I prefer to use KDE (I have come to really nice terms with it), and I do have a decent machine to have speed even out of KDE. I suppose this does not conflict with the final result from your Slackware-compiled-"DISTRO", does it?

Quote:

Originally Posted by kikinovak (Post 4779569)

Over the last few years, I've had a more or less clear idea of what the "perfect" Linux desktop would look like. Your mileage may vary, of course, but here's mine:

Slackware-based
Xfce desktop environment with bells and whistles
Choice selection of best-of-the-breed applications, one per task
Complete collection of codecs, plugins, fonts, etc.
Intuitive and user-friendly default settings, so even Joe Sixpack can be immediately productive
Integrate some elegant and professional artwork (icon themes, GTK themes, mouse pointer themes)
Must run reasonably fast on ten-year-old hardware

very commendable goals, kiki. Despite running stock Slackware at home I have turned to Salix in the past when doing a really carefree installation elsewhere. Will keep an eye on Microlinux. Do you include sub-pixel-rendering? One more serious question: do you really have the time to maintain yet another distro? Why not use Salix and done with it? :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by caduqued (Post 4779624)

I prefer to use KDE (I have come to really nice terms with it), and I do have a decent machine to have speed even out of KDE. I suppose this does not conflict with the final result from your Slackware-compiled-"DISTRO", does it?

I've been using KDE4 exclusively for a year or so, and I really like it. There's a few personal reasons I've come to prefer Xfce. KDE's release cycle is very fast, with new features galore. Since I'm looking for something "enterprise-class" (think: long support cycles), I really appreciate Xfce for their approach of taking time between releases, polishing them up, and introducing new features only in small incremental steps. Another reason is that here in South France, I'm often confronted with low-end hardware. If I was the only person to use this system, I'd probably have opted for KDE as main desktop environment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Martinus2u (Post 4779646)

One more serious question: do you really have the time to maintain yet another distro? Why not use Salix and done with it? :)

I tried Salix, and I think it's by far the best Slackware derivative distro. Yes, I could have chosen Salix, but I prefer to support Slackware directly. The point in my project is that it's not another distro, but an addon to Slackware. Currently there's 153 packages for the 13.37. Contrary to projects like gnomeslackbuild.org, I don't replace any core stuff - except one update for the vte package maybe - and since 14.0 has a very nice packaging of Xfce 4.10 ready, the addons for 14.0 will be much easier to handle.

Some more detail. Here's the content of the 'packages' file, e. g. stuff that gets built, in this order.

Code:

# Custom shell configuration

user-settings-console



# Some basic command-line utilities

sbopkg

recode

unrar

p7zip



# Eye candy

aero

faenza-icon-theme

faenza-xfce

murrine

murrine-themes

slack-wallpapers



# Fonts

webcore-fonts

google-droid-fonts



# Basic multimedia stuff

lame

a52dec

xvidcore

libdvdcss

opencore-amr

x264

libdv

libmp4v2

faac

live555

speex

libvpx

orc

schroedinger

dirac

libdca

gsm

openjpeg

twolame

libmusicbrainz

libmusicbrainz3

libdc1394

faad2

rtmpdump

celt

frei0r

ffmpeg

mjpegtools

libquicktime

libmpeg2

transcode

vcdimager

libmpcdec

mplayer-codecs



# Xfce reqs

ORBit2

GConf

libtasn1

libgnome-keyring

gnome-keyring

libatasmart

sg3_utils

udisks

upower

glade3

libdaemon

libunique

avahi

nspr

js185

libproxy

glib-networking

libsoup

gnome-disk-utility

gvfs

lua

keybinder

media-player-info

perl-extutils-depends

perl-extutils-pkgconfig

perl-glib

vte



# Application reqs

dconf

libburn

libisofs

libisoburn

gst-ffmpeg

gst-plugins-bad

gst-plugins-ugly

totem-pl-parser

sound-theme-freedesktop

libcanberra

libgnomecanvas

libgnomecups

libgnomeprint

libgnomeprintui

soundtouch

wxGTK

gc

gsl

libsigc++

glibmm

atkmm

cairomm

pangomm

mm-common

gtkmm

pysetuptools

Cython

BeautifulSoup

lxml

numpy

mlt

goocanvas

pygoocanvas

pyxdg

scons

tolua++

imlib2

libevent



# Xfce desktop

xfce

thunar-volman

Terminal

orage

xfce4-mixer

xfce4-power-manager

xfce4-notifyd

xfce4-clipman-plugin

xfce4-volumed

xfce4-notes-plugin

xfce4-screenshooter

xfce4-taskmanager

xfce4-weather-plugin

xfce4-xkb-plugin

xarchiver

thunar-archive-plugin



# Login manager

slim



# NetworkManager

NetworkManager

network-manager-applet



# Internet apps 

transmission

flash-player-plugin

user-settings-seamonkey



# Office apps

openoffice

openoffice-langpack

evince



# Graphics apps

simple-scan

gcolor2

inkscape



# Multimedia apps

MPlayer

smplayer

audacity

asunder

openshot



# Utilities

leafpad

brasero

galculator

catfish

conky



# Development

geany

geany-plugins



# Desktop defaults

user-settings-desktop

And here's a screenshot of the Xfce desktop in its default tweaked configuration.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kikinovak (Post 4779700)

Another reason is that here in South France, I'm often confronted with low-end hardware.

well, you've got the good weather and the good food, so it's only fair you're confronted with low-end hardware. :D To be honest, I'm impressed with the wisdom of your local schools stretching their budget by going for low-end hardware and open source software.

Regarding the other sub thread, I can follow your reasoning why you opted for a Slackware add-on. Keep up the good work. :)

Looks interesting. Can it be modularized, so that say if I just want a quick and dirty way to get the multimedia portion?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Martinus2u (Post 4779783)

It's a private school, with a very tight budget. The first year (2010) I made the initial install using a beefed-up version of CentOS 5.3 on both servers and desktops. A year later I was quite fed up with CentOS for a variety of reasons (6.x didn't boot on some of my machines anymore, text installer crippled down to something next to unusable, unreasonable update delays), so I went for Slackware 13.37 with KDE 4.6.5. Though this install meant a lot more work than, say, the equivalent made with Debian or Ubuntu LTS, it has also turned out to be the most hassle-free. So during the last days and weeks, I've been busy migrating these client machines to the new Xfce-based environment. A significant part of the work I do there is for free.

As for public schools in France, their IT policy is just about as stupid as in most parts of the planet. It's basically Microsoft products everywhere. Though there's hope in Spain nowadays, I read.

http://ostatic.com/blog/in-spain-hun...-ubuntu-access

Quote:

Originally Posted by damgar (Post 4779938)

Looks interesting. Can it be modularized, so that say if I just want a quick and dirty way to get the multimedia portion?

I will think about that. In the meantime, you can download the SVN, open the package file, comment out the packages you don't want to build, and then fire up build.sh.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kikinovak (Post 4779960)

As for public schools in France, their IT policy is just about as stupid as in most parts of the planet. It's basically Microsoft products everywhere. [/url]

Pity. At least at my kids' school here in Germany they started using the Windows version of OpenOffice or LibreOffice...

that's really cool!

That's really cool how your getting Slackware out and noticed.

I got Slackware Case Plates on all my Slackware computers, maybe you could do the same.

Quote:

Originally Posted by glorsplitz (Post 4781154)

I got Slackware Case Plates on all my Slackware computers, maybe you could do the same.

I've ordered the complete gear about a month ago: case plates, bumper sticker, t-shirts, baseball cap. I've been checking my mail daily since, but it looks like the whole load will ship along with the DVDs from the subscription.