 Today, I'm going to be doing an installation and first look at the recently released Newtix20.12.0. Newtix is a Linux distribution based out of Switzerland, and it is based on Linux from scratch. Now I have never done Linux from scratch. I've never taken a look at any distributions based on Linux from scratch. So this will be interesting. Now it looks like Newtix. They have several different ISOs that are available. There is an LXDE version. Well, LXDE is a dead project. So I don't think I want to grab that. There's also XFCE, KDE Plasma, and Mate. I haven't taken a look at Mate in a long time on the channel. So I'm going to grab their Mate ISO. It's 1.7 gigs in size. Now Newtix is a rolling release distribution, and it does have its own package manager called Cards. It's got some interesting aspects to it. One interesting aspect to it is that it uses the busybox utilities rather than the GNU Core Utils. So that's something a little different. So I'm going to spin up a quick virtual machine, and I'm going to run through an installation and check it out. So let me switch over to my desktop here. And today I'm going to be installing Newtix inside VirtualBox. I also have Vert Manager, which is typically what I use to install my virtual machines, but I was having some issues with Newtix inside Vert Manager. So I'm going to try VirtualBox here. I'm going to click Install here at the boot screen. And the installation for Newtix, I believe, is an incurses installer. So it's not a command line installer, but it is an incurses interface. Very similar to some of the old school Debian installers for those of you that are used to the old Debian incurses installation. Now the first thing I need to do, of course, is choose a country and language. Now I'm English, so I need to get down to the E's. It's actually alphabetized, but it's alphabetized in the right column. So English, when I finally get to English, I need to search for United States English and just hit Enter. All right, now this is very important. So they are telling me that this is a very basic tool, this installation tool. It says it will ask you which partition you want to install Newtix to. If there isn't a partition yet created, it will prompt you to create one. And it says Newtix goes on only one partition, so there's no reason to create more than one partition. We only need one partition. It says there is an exception. If you wanted to create a separate partition for Grubb, you could do that. But I'm just going to put Grubb also on the one partition I create. So yeah. All right, so install Newtix or advanced. I don't know what advanced is. I'm just going to click install Newtix. And it's going to say, please create and modify your partitions. All right. All right, partitioning of the disk. Do you want to use CFDisk or FDisk? Now these are two command line utilities that allow you to partition your drives. I'm comfortable, more comfortable with CFDisk. I could use either one, but I'll go with CFDisk because it's a pretty simple tool. First thing we need to do is select the partition table type. I'm going to do a DOS partition table. And then we need to create a partition. Now I gave this virtual machine 20 gigs of space, so I'm going to create one 20 gig drive. It needs to be primary partition. And we do need to make it bootable because it will be the only partition. So it's very important that we make sure it's bootable. Now let's write this partition table. And it says, are you sure you want to write and you need to type the full word? Yes. And then hit enter. And once that has been written, go to quit and quit out of that. All right. It says swap partition not found. Well, that's interesting. It told me to create one and exactly one partition. Now it's complaining that the swap partition was not found. I guess swap was not considered the one partition. I guess, but I don't need a swap in this VM. So I'm just going to skip it. That's very strange though. They should word that correctly. If the swap does not count toward your one partition, they should mention that, which makes sense. All right. And it's installing new ticks. This may take a minute. So I'm going to pause the recording until this is complete. And now it's asking about configuring the boot of the PC. Yes or no? Sure. Now it's saying a copy of the original MBR master boot record is saved in this folder slash boot slash grow. I guess that's just letting us know that that's there. There's nothing for us to do. It was just a message. All right. And now it looks like, I guess, did the machine reboot? We had some like initialization information. It looked like, you know, system D was loading up there. I'm not sure what was going on there, but we need to choose a keyboard layout. But I think what it did is I think it rebooted the machine and then got us into this in curses program again to choose things like my US QWERTY keyboard. We need to configure the network. So I'm on Ethernet. It has found the device. I just need to hit the space bar and tick that on and then hit OK. All right. And then IP address automatically set from DHCP server. Yeah, that's fine. Hardware clock is set to this date this time. It might be right. It might not be, but this is a VM. So I'm just going to go with it. We do need to create a user. Of course, I'm going to create the DT user. I'm going to call my user DT. We need to give a description of this user DT again. Enter a new password. So I need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then confirm it. All right. And yeah, and it just launches us straight into looks like light DM. And is this the Monte desktop? It is. So I think I was correct, you know, in between those two in curses interfaces. Yeah, the system did reboot. Now let me get a proper screen resolution if I can, because this is a very small screen resolution here. Let's see if I can find the terminal, the Monte terminal. I'm going to do it X render and see if 1920 by 1080 is available for the resolutions. It is not 1680 by 1050 though is pretty close. So I'm going to run it X render dash S 1680 by 1050. And now we have a little bit more screen real estate to check out. Although the wallpaper is a little wonky. Let's see if I can fix that if I right click on the desktop and I change desktop background. I'm just going to choose one of the other wallpapers. It looks like they're just using the standard Monte wallpaper pack. Yeah, that's just the standard Monte wallpaper pack that is available in pretty much every Linux distributions repositories. So let me go through the menu system just to show you what is installed by default on the system. So under accessories, we have cherry tree. I am not sure what cherry tree is. Is this some kind of text editor? It's a hierarchical note taking application. Ah, okay, very cool. So I guess that's the note taking application they're going with. There's the GNOME disk utility. We have our archive manager and that's for zip and unzip and that sort of thing. We have the Monte calculator, which is just a standard calculator. Nothing to see here. Although you do have various modes. You could go into advanced mode, financial mode and programming mode. We have the Monte font viewer, the Monte search tool, pluma. Pluma is an old school fork of G edit. That's just your plain text editor, but not a bad one. Under education, we have LibreOffice math. Under games, we have all riot solitaire and mahjong. Under graphics, we have the Eye of Monte image viewer. We have GIMP. Well, that's interesting. They install GIMP out of the box. Many distributions don't. And I think GIMP is an important program to actually be installed on every system. I know not every desktop Linux user knows about GIMP or uses GIMP, but it's such a powerful tool. I think every user should know about it. It's basically our free and open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Also under graphics, we have LibreOffice draw. We have the Monte color selection tool. So I could pick the eyedropper here. And I think if I just click on the desktop, yeah, it will give me exactly the hex value for that color. And that is a very nice thing to have, especially those of you that play around in graphics programs like GIMP. You know, you're wondering what a certain color of, you know, on a web page or photograph or something. Well, if you can click on it with that eyedropper, you can immediately get the value of that color you're searching for. Under the internet category, we have Firefox as our web browser. We have Thunderbird for our email client and transmission for our BitTorrent client. Under Office, of course, we have the document viewer, Atral is the document viewer, PDF viewer. And then we have the entire LibreOffice suite. So let me open up LibreOffice calc. This is the spreadsheet program. So this is your alternative to something like Microsoft's Office Excel. And what version of LibreOffice are we on? We are in version 7.0.3.1. I will say the theming and everything in LibreOffice really looks good. I don't know what kind of GTK themes they're using or anything. But I will say this old school GNOME 2 like Monte desktop environment does look good. Actually, when I first started using desktop Linux and when I switched to it full time, the very first desktop environment I used was the good GNOME 2 desktop environment. I'll be honest, I kind of hated it. But this is almost an exact clone with the two panels at the top and the menu with applications, places and system. Under the other category, we have some Hewlett Packard scanning stuff. I guess that's for your, if you have a HP printer slash scanner hooked up. We have a programming category, which has some cute stuff here. Most people are not going to be interested in that sound and video. We have cheese and that is a webcam program. I don't have a webcam currently hooked up. Well, I do. I have my, my camera here, but of course it's being occupied recording me in OBS. But if I had a webcam, you know, you would see me in cheese here. Also in sound and video, we have the dead beef music player. Well, you know what new ticks? I'm loving this distribution. The choices of applications that they've installed is really good. This is my favorite minimal, gooey audio player is dead beef and failed to load. Helpful. Let's see. I was trying to get some about information, but the about information actually doesn't load dead beef. You're letting me down. It is a VM though. Anyway, let me close out dead beef. We really don't have any music to play anyway. And then we have sound settings and then we have VLC for our multimedia player. And this would be your video player. Although you could play both audio and video and VLC if you wanted to. And what version of VLC are they on? They are on 3.0.11.1 veterinary. All right. And how do I close this window? There are no close controls on that window. Well, that is really weird. I guess I can right click on the title bar. That's an interesting little bug there. Under system tools, we have Kaja. Kaja is the file manager for the Monte desktop environment. Just a standard file viewer there. Also under system tools, we have FiCards package manager. So this would be, I guess, our GUI front end to Newtix Cards package manager. Their package manager is called Cards. So if we actually we got into the command line here, let me pull up a terminal. And I don't want X term. Let's pull up the Monte terminal. Although the Monte terminal is not themed very well either. Let's see if I can change that profile preferences. Let's see colors. Do we have any built in color schemes that look better than black on white? Solarized. Yeah, let's go with that. And close. The background is still not what I was expecting though. Why is this? I don't use the system color schemes. All right. There it is. That's a solarized. And can I zoom in? I think it's a control shift plus. There we go. So the Cards package manager. If I just do Cards search and I could search for any package or maybe a description of a package. I don't know browser. And hopefully it would give me every package that either had browser as part of the name or browser appears as the description. And you see obviously I get quite a bit of stuff returned there. Now if I wanted to install something, I think I'd got to be a pseudo obviously to install and remove software that's standard on all Linux distributions. So pseudo cards install and Firefox was already here. But maybe I want nitrogen. I see nitrogen is available in the repos. I don't really need it, but hey, it's a very small program. And let's just see. Yeah, it installs just fine. Yeah, that just took a couple of seconds. And if I was unsure about all the commands with the Cards package manager, which I am, I think I could just do Cards space help. And it looks like when you get your like man page information printed out here in the terminal. So that is the command line interface for Cards. And this here I think is the GUI front end to Cards. So if I wanted to install W3M, which is a terminal based web browser, I could click on it and see right click on it, install, hit apply. I've never used this tool before, but it's dead simple, right? That wasn't hard to figure out. And so you have the command line interface that works just fine for installing and removing packages and updating the system. I think Cards update, or is it Cards sync? I'd have to pull it up, but Cards sync, pseudo Cards sync to update the system. So do they have control alt T hot key to bring up a terminal? No, they don't. Let me go back to the Monte terminal here and zoom back in. So pseudo Cards. Why am I not typing? There is some input lag here, but it's a VM. So pseudo Cards sync, give it a root password and that should update all the programs on the system, which this was just released like 48 hours ago. So there really shouldn't be anything to do here. And it doesn't look like there is because I just get another prompt here. So take a little drink of my coffee and stop by a gas station and get a 20 ounce coffee today because I felt like I needed it. Now let's do a you name. So you name space dash R. And let's see the kernel we're on. We are on 4.19.162. And that is not a very recent kernel on Archive month 5.9. What is 4.19? Why are they on that kernel? Because this is kind of a rolling release or I was under the impression it was a rolling release. Maybe it's not. Maybe I downloaded the wrong ISO. I know kernel 4.19 is an LTS release. So maybe they're going with LTS kernels, but there's a much more recent LTS kernel because I believe 5.4 was an LTS. 5.9 I think is also an LTS, isn't it? Or is it 5.10 will be the next LTS? I can't remember. Anyway, let's see if H top is on the system and let's see what kind of system resources we're using. The Mate desktop is very light. We're only using 357 megs of the 4 gigs of RAM that I gave this VM. That's to be expected. Mate is a pretty minimal as far as RAM usage. Yeah, I'm just double checking the distro watch link that I had grabbed. And that is the same link that is available from the newtix.org website because it's the same URL. So and it says rolling. So I guess this is a rolling release. But just because it's a rolling release, I was thinking, you know, it's rolling like arch, you know, very bleeding edge, but not all rolling releases, you know, or shipping with the latest and greatest software. That's not really what rolling means. Rolling means that you never really have to update to the next version of, you know, your operating system. But it doesn't mean that they're always pushing out the bleeding edge versions of that software. Now, one interesting thing that I mentioned is, you know, we're using some of the busybox utils instead of the GNU core utils. So for those of you that are not familiar with busybox, let me see if I can pull up a list of busybox utils for you guys to see. And this is from the busybox.net website. And these are currently the available applets within busybox. So if you're using a busybox distro, things like a cat and awk and Chimad and change ownership and Charoot and, you know, all your standard GNU Unixy commands that they are implemented in busybox as well. The only thing is the busybox version of these utilities is not exactly like the GNU implementation of those utilities. The GNU implementation typically has more options, more flags. Now, of course, the busybox guys would probably say, well, the GNU utils are bloated, but I actually like the GNU core utils. I don't have a problem with them. I've never understood why people are trying to replace the GNU core utils, but I'm sure the busybox utils are just fine as well. Now, as far as themes and wallpapers and things like that, we've already taken a look at the backgrounds, the wallpapers. This is the standard mate wallpaper pack. So there's no nutix wallpapers, right? These are just all the wallpapers that just ship with mate, a vanilla version of mate when you install vanilla mate on Arch or Gen2 or something like that. There's nothing really to see with the wallpapers. As far as theming, if I go to the system menu here and I go to preferences and I go to look and feel, let's see, appearance, customize the look of your desktop. All right, well, you do have some theming. We have the black mate theme, for example, which would look really good if I had a light wallpaper, but I have a dark wallpaper. So really, I want a lighter theme. So let's see. Was that the default one? I think that was the one that was enabled by default. We have some other options. Green Laguna as a greenish yet to it. That looks, yeah, I'm not a huge fan of that. Menta is not bad. Let's go with that for now, since we have that dark wallpaper. Now, one of the things that I would have to consider, you know, if I wanted to use Newtix, because it's based on Linux from scratch and it's kind of doing its own thing in a lot of ways, it's more of an independent Linux distribution. So does it have all the software that I want? So if I did cards, search, I wanted to install Xmonad. Is it in the repos? It doesn't look like it. And if I wanted Qtile, if it doesn't have Xmonad, I doubt it has Qtile. Yeah, I wouldn't expect that either. How about awesome? Surely the awesome window manager. Is there no awesome? How about I3? How about we just search for window manager? Let's just see what's available. JWM and IceWM are available. Fluxbox is here. BSBWM is here. Rat Poison is here. But who the hell wants to use Rat Poison, right? Enlightenment, OpenBox. That's it. I don't see any tiling window managers other than BSBWM. Not a single one. Well, Rat Poison. So that would be a problem. I imagine it would also be a problem. If I was searching for a lot of, you know, standard, like command line utilities I often use. For example, is VIFM available? No. Wow, that is weird because that is such a common program, VIFM, which is kind of like the VIM file manager. What about links, which is the terminal web browser? I would hope it would be there. It is. What about IRC, which is the command line IRC chat client? It's available. So some of the stuff is here. WeChat, I would think would also be here. WeChat is actually not in the repositories. So it's missing a lot of really common software that I would expect to be in most Linux distributions repos. And I kind of expected that. That would probably prevent me from using NewTex, especially since all the window managers I have installed on my system, I have like 12, maybe 15 window managers installed on my system. And with the exception of BSBWM and OpenBox, it doesn't look like any of the other window managers that I use are actually available. So that is unfortunate. But other than that, I will say NewTex is a sharp looking distribution. It looks good. I like the Cards package manager, the syntax and everything. Cards search, Cards install, Cards sync. It looks like it's a fine package manager. The GUI implementation was very intuitive. It only took me a second to figure out how to use that thing. All in all, I think it's probably a good distribution for people that don't use a lot of, you know, off the beaten path with kinds of window managers and command line programs. Like if you're strictly a traditional desktop environment user like KDE Plasma, Mate, XFC, which they have additions for all those, then NewTex is probably worth checking out. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this show. I need to thank Devin, Fran, Gabe, Corbinian, Mitchell, Lakami, R5530, Chris, Chuck, David, the other David, Donnie, Dylan, Gregory, Lewis, Paul, PickVM, Scott, and Willie. They are the producers of this episode. Without these guys, this installation and first look at NewTex would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because the DistroTube channel is sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, consider doing so. You'll find DistroTube over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace. How are you not going to have ex-monad in the repos?