 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at a Linux distribution that I've never actually taken a look at on camera before. It is called Legacy OS. The reason I've never taken a look at Legacy OS before on camera is because my YouTube channel has been around for a little over five years, and Legacy OS has actually been on a six-year hiatus. So the last release of Legacy OS was six years ago. So it was essentially a dead distribution that's kind of been brought back to life here with this new release of Legacy OS 2023. And one of the things that struck me with this distribution is the name Legacy OS. It wants to be a distribution for older hardware, underpowered machines, maybe machines that are, you know, you're in a part of the world where internet is kind of flaky or nonexistent. It wants to be one of those distributions you install. It has a full suite of software already on it, and you're ready to go. And if I switch over to my desktop here, I'm going to take a look at this inside a virtual machine. I'm going to run through a quick installation and take a first look inside a VM. You will notice the boot screen here. You see the Antics logo. So Legacy OS is part of the Puppy Linux family, or at least it was. And now they're basing off of Antics and Debian Bullseye, and it is a 64-bit Linux distribution. And I mentioned that because being part of the Puppy Linux family, Puppy Linux actually has 32-bit ISOs and 64-bit ISOs, but Legacy OS does not have a 32-bit ISO. And for those of you that are not familiar with Puppy Linux, and Puppy Linux has been around for a long, long time, many years. I remember playing around with Puppy Linux, you know, 12 years ago, 15 years ago. It's been around for a long time. And Puppy Linux is an interesting distribution because they have so many different additions, like a Legacy OS here, I guess, was part of the Puppy family. Originally, when Puppy Linux was started, it was based off a distribution called Vector Linux, and then eventually Puppy Linux became an independent distribution with its own package manager and things like that. But Puppy over the years, they would put out different additions that had binary compatibility with other Linux distributions, because some of the versions of Puppy that I tried back in the day, they were binary compatible with Ubuntu, like you could install Ubuntu packages on Puppy. Some of the Puppy additions were binary compatible with Slackware, so you can install Slack packages. So you know, this was really interesting. Now, Legacy OS, they're going in a little bit of a different direction. They're obviously basing off of Antix, which is based off of Debian. So I love Debian as a base. I think Debian stable, especially is a fantastic distribution. And I think Antix is a fantastic distribution. The window manager or desktop environment that you typically is the default in Antix, although they offer a variety of window managers is ICWM, and ICWM will be the window manager that is installed by default on Legacy OS. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to run through a quick installation. So let me log in here and we come to the log in manager. You're going to be prompted for a username and a password. Your username is demo in the live environment and just hit enter. And the password is also demo. And it logs us into ICWM with a really nice looking wallpaper, a nice cocky. If I move my head, you can see Legacy OS powered by Antix. The cocky is covering up some of the desktop icons here, but that's fine. We'll get that screen resolution straight after we run through a quick installation. So I'm going to go down here into the menu system and I'm going to search for the installer. Here is the Legacy OS installer. Let's go ahead and click on that. It says checking installation media, press escape to skip. We'll just let it run the check. Next up is terms of use. It's just giving us some information that Legacy OS is an independent distribution based on Debian stable yada, yada, yada, but I click next. And then select the type of installation, regular install using the entire disk. That is what I'm going to choose. If you wanted to, I'm sure you could partition the drives yourself and do a manual partition for me and this VM. There's only going to be one operating system installed, Legacy OS, so it can have the entire virtual drive in this virtual machine. So I'm just going to click next. It says OK to format and use entire disk. So it's asking a question because it's going to format the drive right to the disk. So anything that would have been on that disk will be wiped out if you know you already had something installed on that disk. In this case, in this virtual machine, it's an empty disk. I'm going to click yes. It says copying new system. So I'll wait a minute. It says computer name. I'm assuming this is going to be the host name of the computer. It's going to default to Legacy OS one computer domain. It's going to default to example dot DOM. That's fine. I just leave the default values there. And the next button, it looks like I could go ahead and click it. Yeah, and I can run through the localization default. So the locale United States American English is correct for me for the time zone America is correct. But I need the central time zone. I'm going to look for something in the central time zone here in the list. It looks like Chicago is available for me. And that's in the central time zone. And then system clock uses local time. And then you have format. You want 24 hour format or, you know, 12 hour format. I'm just going to go with the defaults for that and I click next. And then let's create our username and password. My username is going to be DT. And let's go ahead and create a strong and complicated password for the DT user and then repeat the strong and complicated password. And then root administrator account. Looks like by default we won't have a root account. If you don't create a root account, I'm assuming sudo would be available for you. But if you wanted to, you could tick that on and have access to a root user account. But I'll leave that ticked off. Do we want to auto log in? I typically don't like auto log in. On every computer of mine, I want to have to enter a password to get in. Because otherwise, that's a serious privacy concern because just anybody can get into your computer. So I never tick on auto log in. Save live desktop changes. I'm not sure what that is. It's ticked off by default. I'll leave it ticked off. I'm going to click next. Getting help. So some information about where to go. Get help if you need it. And now I don't have a next button to continue. So I'm assuming I have to wait for the installation to complete in just a few more seconds here and I think it will be done. And the installation has completed. Now it says automatically reboot the system when the installer is closed. And that is ticked on by default. So if I click finish, it should automatically reboot the machine for us. And we're back to our login manager. So now my username was DT. Let's enter DT's strong and complicated password. So the first thing I want to do is fix the screen resolution. Now this is a virtual machine issue on physical hardware. You shouldn't have to do this. But I'm going to go into applications. And it's probably in preferences. And I bet they have AR and R for a graphical way. Yep. So AR and R is essentially a graphical front end to XR and RX render. And then I could right click on that resolution. And this should be 1920 by 1080 at the check box. And yeah. Now it's a little wonky, the wallpaper and everything. But we can fix that as well. Because I can go to the control center. And I can just redraw the wallpaper by going to some settings for wallpaper. Choose wallpaper right here. I hit apply just to redo the wallpaper. Now everything looks good except the icons are still hidden behind the cocky there. I probably need to kill the cocky and restart it. Because I think the cocky is basically drawn in the wrong place here. Oh, I fixed the cocky there. But for those of you wondering how I made that magic happen here in the VM, I just did a kill all cocky to kill the first cocky. And then I ran cocky and then ampersign, which is run cocky as a background process. And it restarts it. And now it's in the proper place. So this is legacy OS. And I've got to say it does have a nice look and feel to it. It's already got that kind of retro old school look and feel. This is the way most Linux desktops kind of looked. 10, 15 years ago, a lot of them use these cocky, essentially system monitoring displays where you had time and date information. Sometimes you've had information about CPU usage, RAM usage. Sometimes you had information as far as things off the internet, like stock quotes and weather. And you could do all kinds of neat stuff with this little cocky application. I do love the ICWM theme here, this blue theme. Because so many themes are kind of old and still. So many themes, especially if you're doing a light theme, are just your standard silver, light gray kind of theme. If you're doing a dark theme, they're typically very dark, almost black. Having something that's a little different. It's got a little color to it, this blue color. And it looks almost like a polarized kind of blue to it. That is really cool. Now some of the quick launchers down here, let's very quickly open the software installer. Let's go ahead and enter my DT users password. I'm assuming he is a member of the sudoers file. So let's see. Yeah, so we do have sudo installed on the system. And you are a member of the sudo group. So that is great. So we have a graphical way to install software. And it's broken down by categories, such as audio. So if I wanted the dead beef music player, which is my favorite graphical music player, I could tick that on. If I wanted a different browser, like the Brave browser, I could tick that on. And just hit the install button and away you go. Some other things that pop out to me is for software categories, non-free. So let me go to non-free, non-free video codecs. It's grayed out for some reason. I don't know if that means it's already installed. But I don't think so, because I can check it. So I think maybe they just have it grayed out because it is proprietary. And they're just warning people, hey, this is proprietary software. But you probably want to tick that on and install that for a proper desktop computing experience. You really need multimedia codecs. Because if you don't have those things, then there could be issues playing certain audio and video formats. And you're playing DVDs and Blu-rays and things like that. You really need to install those non-free codecs. Now I'm not going to install anything extra. But that is nice that they have that graphical package manager there. They also have Synaptic Package Manager, which is my favorite Debian graphical GUI package manager. This is essentially a GUI front end to the apt package manager. And you have this gigantic list of all the packages available in the repos. Remember, this is based off of Antics and Debian. So you got all the Debian packages available. So you should be able to find any piece of software practically that you want on this thing. Let me close out Synaptic. Some of the other quick launchers we have, we have our file manager, which is the Rocks Filer. So this is interesting. This is one of those file managers you never see these days on Linux because Rocks Filer, I don't believe has been under development for a long time. I don't think it's seen any kind of real activity for more than a decade. But Rocks Filer was very popular back when I first started in Linux. A lot of people still used Rocks Filer as a file manager. In particular, it was very popular for those of us that were using standalone floating window managers like ISWM, like OpenBox, FluxBox, and things like that. So this is definitely a blast from the past. It's a different kind of look and feel for a file manager, right? Where are all your bookmarks? Well, you have the bookmarks here, right? You can turn that on and off and basically toggle it. But, you know, you've got these big buttons here. You don't really have like a text field for your path or anything, right? It's kind of a strange kind of beast, right? You can change the size. That's kind of neat, that button there. You can only size up or go back to the original. You've got two buttons for size. I kind of wish that was all one button where you could just toggle it, but that's not a legacy OS thing. That's just a Rocks Filer thing. And again, like I said, this thing hasn't really seen much development, at least in the last decade or so. And if you guys do install this, and for whatever reason, the Rocks Filer is not a good enough file manager for you, I would suggest on a more minimal system that has a standalone window manager. Maybe check out PCManFM, or if you want, check out Thunar, which is the file manager for XFCE. Both of those are fantastic, fully featured file managers that should work for you. Let's go ahead and click the browser icon, and let's see what browser we're using. I'm assuming it's going to be Firefox, it is. So let me make this full screen. I'm gonna go to help about Firefox, and let's see what version. This is the ESR version. So this is Firefox ESR 102.6.0. So that's ESR, that's the extended support release of Firefox. Some of the other icons we have down here, we have the only office launcher, which I'm assuming is just a quick way to install only office if we want to. Now did I not click on that? I thought I did. But it doesn't look like it's gonna do anything, so I don't know if that's a bug or not. So let me click the next icon, which is the terminal. The terminal is the ROX term. Kind of like the ROX filer. We have the ROX terminal. You can see ROX term 2.9.5 GTK2 VTE9 build. And you can see the copyright 2005 to 2014. So probably not something that's seen any activity in a long time either, which you can tell being a GTK2 app, right? Let me zoom in a little bit. Let's do a uname dash R. Let's get the kernel version. We are on kernel 5.10.57.antix. And let me do a apt list. Let's make sure the apt package manager is installed. It is. Let me cancel that. I actually didn't want to run apt list because it's gonna list every package in the repository. I wanted to run apt list space dash dash installed. So this will list everything that's installed currently on legacy OS through the apt package manager. Let me up arrow and I'm gonna pipe that into the WC program, the word count program, space dash L. The L flag is a line count rather than a word count. This will tell me how many lines were in that output for apt list dash installed. There were 1,900 and six lines in that output. That means there's 1,906 packages installed out of the box on legacy OS. Now being based on antix, antix is not a system D distro, but it's also based on Debian. Debian is a system D distro. So I'm wondering where is system D? System D is installed. So if I did a system, a CTL status for example, would that actually do anything? So we may not be using system D, but it may be installed for other purposes. I don't think system D is the init system that's actually in use though. So I bet if I did a where is sysvinit, which is the init system that antix actually does use. Yeah, you can see there is the path to the binary for sysvinit. And I can tell you because of the nature of this project, it's designed to be run on older machines potentially and it's designed to be a fully featured desktop. So if you don't have access to internet or you have intermittent access to internet, you've got a full featured suite of applications already installed. I don't think they're gonna have things like flat pack snaps app images already available for you because I just don't think that would make sense for this kind of project, but just to verify, I will where is flat pack, it's not here. Let's do a where is snap D, it's not here. And finally, where is app image, it also is not here. Now that's not to say you couldn't use flat pack snaps in app images because they're available in the Debian repository. So if you wanna enable any or all of those formats, you're certainly welcome to. Now let's check if htop is installed out of the box here and it looks like htop is, let me zoom back out and let's see what kind of memory usage we're using. So CPU, we're not using really any CPU but that's to be expected. We're not doing anything on this computer at the moment, right? So CPU should be practically zero and that's what it is. RAM, we're only using 250 megabytes of the six gigs of RAM, I gave this virtual machine. That is extremely lightweight and that's kind of the point of a window manager, a standalone window manager like ICWM is it can run on really low RAM. And again, because it's meant to be run on older machines, legacy OS, and some of those old machines, if it's a 10 year old laptop, for example, it may only have four gigs of RAM available for it. So you don't want a really bloated desktop environment like GNOME for example, which can on a cold boot take well over a gig of RAM just to be running your desktop environment. So ICWM only taking up 253 megs of RAM that leaves a lot more RAM for other applications to use such as the web browser, which unfortunately web browsers suck up a ton of RAM these days, that's just the nature of the modern internet. Very quickly, I'm just gonna go back through the menu system just to see any other applications that stand out. We have editor, let's see what editor that happens to be. Ah, that's Genie, my favorite plain text editor. I love Genie, Genie, and it's a plain text editor, but you can, it's got a lot of plugins, it's got a lot of features you can add to it. It can be a fully featured IDE if you want it to be. So fantastic that they add that. We have app select, which I'm assuming is just a quick application search. Yeah, so you've got your search filter where you can search for a particular application. Also in the menu system, if I just go into the applications here, and I'm not gonna cover everything. You've got a lot of small utilities here, again, it's kind of designed to have everything out of the box, especially if you were using this like as a live USB stick, you know, it's nice to have so much stuff available. For example, you've got your USB maker, you get your live USB kernel updater, you've got the Chirrut rescue scan, right? That could be interesting as well. I'm not actually gonna run that, but that's kind of cool. Under applications and accessories, you have an archive manager for zip and unzip, things like that. You have your disk tools to manage partitions. You have a calculator, which is calculator. So that's a GTK based calculator. It's really nice program. Leafpad, which is another plain text editor. You have GNOME maps. Vim is installed out of the box. That's very nice, XF burn for burning disks, especially on older computers. You're still gonna have optical drives on most of those machines. So that's nice that you still have the ability to burn a CD or DVD on those machines if you need it. Under applications and games, you just have a couple of games here, really. Under graphics, you've got several graphics programs, including GIMP, that's for raster graphics. GIMP is, and then Inkscape is for vector graphics. So two of the most popular free and open source software programs on the planet. Actually, GIMP and Inkscape, fantastic programs. You also have a variety of other tools, including some paint tools. You have a PDF of viewers, the document viewer here is for PDFs. Under the internet category, we've already seen Firefox is installed. Thunderbird is also installed for our email client. We have transmission for BitTorrent client. We have HexChat for an IRC client. So that's nice if you need to connect to an IRC support channel for your particular Linux distribution. And we have NetSurf for a web browser. So other than Firefox, we have NetSurf. This is another blast from the past. I don't know if NetSurf really sees any development these days, either if I go to help about. NetSurf 3.10, so this is from May 24th of 2020. So that's not too long ago. It's a little under three years ago, I guess was the last release. But for web browsers, you really, for security reasons, I would want to be running a web browser that sees very active development because these things constantly need to be patched for the latest vulnerabilities. So I would strongly suggest just using Firefox which is installed out of the box under the office category. It looks like we do have the only office programs here. So only office document. Does that actually launch anything? No, I think the only office links are kind of just dead links. Maybe I should install only office through like the synaptic package manager. And then these links, of course, should work. But right now it's like a dead link. Like they're trying to run only office, but only office hasn't actually been installed yet. So actually, let me try that out. If I go back to the synaptic package manager, let me run a quick search here. I'm gonna search for only office. And it says it's installed. You see the green here? That means it's installed. I could remove it. So yeah, it's installed. That's interesting, but for whatever reason, it's not launching maybe on a reboot. It'll fix some things. Again, this is the very first time I've logged into it since the installation. Under the preference category, you have standard stuff for setting display resolutions, monitor settings, keyboard settings, things like that, language settings, wallpaper. You've got this very simple wallpaper tool here. So I want to select a picture. Let's see what else is in user share wallpaper. So looks like some standard GNOME wallpapers. This is from the GNOME wallpaper pack. Some of them are. And I've seen most of these. I think I'm just gonna go with the default wallpaper though. I think I like this. So that was just a very quick and cursory look at the latest release of Legacy OS. Legacy OS, again, based on Antics and Debian. And for those of you that have older computers, Legacy OS might be an option for you. The only thing is it can't be too old because Legacy OS is 64-bit. Now, 64-bit machines, they've been the standard for at least a decade, 12 years maybe. Now, if you've got a machine that's say 15 years old, it's possible that the CPU in that machine is 32-bit. And of course, you're gonna need a 32-bit operating system to run on a 32-bit processor. So Legacy OS won't work on really ancient hardware, but for most people, you probably got something that was made at least in the last 10 or 12 years. And Legacy OS should run like a champ on those things. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode, James Maxim, Matt, Mimic, Mitchell, Paul, Royale, Wes, Armor Dragon, Bash, Potato, Chuck, Commander Henry, George Lee, Methos, Nate, Erion, Paul, Peace, Arch, and Maduro, Polytech, Realitec, Realitec, Red Prophet, Roland, Tools, Devler, and Willie, these guys. They're my house tiered patrons. Over on Patreon, without these guys, this quick look at Legacy OS would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, wanna see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to Distro Tube over on Patreon. Peace. A tiling window manager like DWM would run great on Legacy OS.