MLED - Microlinux Enterprise Desktop - a full-blown production desktop (KDE or Xfce)
 

The Microlinux Enterprise Desktop is a full-blown production desktop based on Slackware Linux, with many enhancements. It is currently used by various small town halls, public libraries, schools and local radio stations in South France.

MLED is shipping in two different flavours:

• the standard KDE-based edition
• MLED Light, based on Xfce

MLED is not some derivative Linux distribution. It aims to provide all the stuff that's commonly missing in Slackware - popular applications, multimedia codecs, plugins, fonts, translations - through a series of package repositories that can be easily managed through Slackware's package manager. These package sets are installed on top of a trimmed-down but otherwise mostly unaltered Slackware base system. A handful of stock Slackware packages have been rebuilt for enhanced functionality or visual consistency. Elegant and sober artwork fit for use in a corporate environment is included.

Learn more about MLED here:

• MLED project page
• Step-by-step installation guide
• FAQ
• MLED package and source repositories

Use this thread for all MLED-related questions, bug reports and suggestions.

Have fun,

Niki

PS: I'm still taking feedback from previous MLED-related threads on LQ into account. Please use this one from now on.

Nice touch with additional repo desktop-extra.

I noticed, that, ironically, only Xfce edition has video editor. I assume KDE will get one later?

Still don't see a user-friendly way to format removable media.

As they say, third time's the charm (or is it already the fourth?). I hope you won't have to redo the whole MLED add-on all over again.

Yes, I'm planning to include Kdenlive in the days to come. I was unsure whether to include Openshot in both versions. But I wanted to update the project page and the installation guide before.

I've taken your remark about user-friendly formatting into account. It is on my TODO-list. Right now I'm building a more recent HPLIP, since the local school just purchased a brand-new HP laser printer, and according to Murphy's law, it is fully supported by hplip-$VERSION + 1.

Cheers,

Niki

Member Response
 

Hi,

I really like the idea of a trimmed customized Slackware Desktop that provides users with the two popular Desktop choice. KDE & XFCE are good choices that a new user can use out of the box.

KDE;Lightweight variant;Hopefully this MLED project will meet the needs for new users wanting a trimmed Slackware Desktop ISO. As seasoned Slackware users, we have seen many a post/thread with a request for small Slackware ISO that provides a workable system. Now that MLED is available, this task has been done for that class of members. Plus will have a good MLED package and source repositories available to enhance their install to suit future needs.

Great job Niki!
Hope new users/everyone are helped by this new project.
Have fun & enjoy MLED.
:hattip:

Thanks for the kind words, onebuck. I have to add a little precision though. From the MLED FAQ:

MLED is not a Slackware spinoff, nor will it ever be one. In a nutshell, the project aims to provide the most common things that are missing for a complete desktop experience: some popular applications, multimedia libraries, plugins and codecs, fonts, translation files. Initially I had the idea to create a spinoff with a separate ISO, but I rejected it in favour of a handful of repositories.

Member Response
 

Hi,

Great! Thanks for clearing things up.
Appreciate all the work you are doing.
Have fun & Enjoy!
:hattip:

Question: why is MuPDF in desktop-base, if desktop-kde provides Okular and desktop-xfce provides evince?

That's a very good question. Until very recently ( = this morning) I was convinced that MuPDF provided a PDF browser plugin for Firefox, that enabled it to open PDF documents directly. Now I was very puzzled to see that I had direct PDF rendering within Firefox on a machine that did not have MuPDF installed.

Question: how comes Firefox can suddenly display PDF files directly? Is this a builtin?

Yes it is. But I can't remember when it got added. Refer to:
using-the-built-in-pdf-viewer

Yes it is a builtin. Suddenly is relative; this feature appeared in Firefox 19 ;)

See also the initial annoucement.

Thanks for the heads-up, Didier and gegechris. As for "suddenly", well... Firefox 19 was last week, wasn't it? :D

Yeah, pdf.js is the name of that built-in Firefox feature.

And if you want to disable it (it's still awful at consistently identifying where the baseline is in PDFs compiled by pdflatex and xelatex, for instance, so it's currently useless for my purposes), you can set Firefox's "pdfjs.disabled" preference to "true" (globally, if you like) and fall back to whichever plugin you were previously relying on to display PDFs. Long-term I think pdf.js is the most secure option for in-browser rendering of PDFs, but I think it just renders too slowly and buggily for widespread use at the moment.

And here's today's batch of updates.

MuPDF and OpenJPEG2 have been removed, since they are no longer needed.

Kdenlive has been added to the desktop-extra repository. Version 0.9.8 unfortunately has a nasty localization bug in non-english versions, so I opted for the previous version, 0.9.6, which works fine.

All missing dependencies for Kdenlive (amrnb, dvdauthor, dvgrab) have been added to the desktop-base repository.

If you install Kdenlive, make sure to install xine-ui as well as recordmydesktop from Slackware's extra repository. I've modified the tagfiles accordingly.

Openshot has been moved from desktop-xfce to desktop-base. In my humble opinion, it's the most intuitive lightweight video editor, so I've finally decided to include it out of the box in both desktops.

Check out the ChangeLog.txt files at the root of each repository for details.

Cheers,

Niki

Hello. Everything seems to be fine when I start installing microlinux. I chose the desktop-xfce option

I manage to enter #setup and then I go to the point at which I show the path to tagfiles: /tag. Then the installation begins and finishes very quickly.

Well the problem is that after the installation of the tagfiles finishes the installation seems to be already complete and so goes directely to reboot time with ctrl+alt+del.

The installation process skips the following steps: 1) use utf-8 text console:yes; 2)confirm startup services to run; 3)select default window manager for x

I cannot understand what is happening. I am trying to install in /dev/sdc/

the result of #fdisk -l is: