 Today, I'm going to be doing a quick installation and first look at the recently released Antix 23. Antix has always been one of my favorite Debian-based distributions because it's rather unique. First of all, Antix is system D free. No system D. So for those of you that don't want to use a system D distribution, you have something against system D, well, Antix might be the right choice for you. Also, Antix is one of the very, very few Linux distributions these days that still offers both a 64-bit version and a 32-bit version. So today, what I'm going to do is I'm going to install Antix 23, their full edition, which includes four window managers, as well as a full desktop suite of software. I'm going to install this inside of Virtual Machine and take a quick first look around. So I've downloaded the Antix full ISO, so this is a 1.7 gigabyte ISO that includes four window managers. It includes IcedWM, JWM, FluxBox, and HerbstLiftWM, and it includes a full desktop suite of applications, including the LibreOffice suite. Now if you want something a little smaller, they do offer the Antix base ISO, which includes the same four window managers, but not as much desktop software, no LibreOffice or anything like that. And that ISO comes in around one gig in size. And if you want something really, really minimal, they do offer the Antix Core ISO, which has no XORG, it's just command line only at the end, right? It's just got enough stuff installed on the ISO to get networking up and running, and from there you install what you want. There's also the Antix Net Installer, which is a 220 megabyte ISO that, again, no XORG or anything, and you have to hopefully get connected to the internet, and from there you install everything via the Net Installer. So I'm going to go ahead and boot into Antix, let's do the normal boot option. Then it boots us directly into the live environment. The live environment is going to use ICWM, even though there's four different window managers available. By default, it defaults to ICWM. So what I'm going to do, I'm not going to play with the live environment, I'm going to go ahead and get through an installation first. So I'm going to click the icon here that says Installer, I double clicked it and double clicking it is probably not the right thing to do, because I got some error messages. I'm actually going to close it, would a single click have worked, yes. So no need to double click, so that's a Windows thing, the double click, they're using single click on this, because double clicking it had tried to launch a second installer application and it wouldn't launch the second one, it gave me that little error dialog box. Terms of use, I'm not going to read that, let's go ahead and click next, and then select the type of installation. So I created a 20 gigabyte virtual drive in this virtual machine, so we're just going to use that one virtual drive in this machine. Do I want to encrypt the drive? I could click encrypt and then give it a strong and complicated password for the encryption, and then click next, okay to format and use the entire disk, so it's just wanting confirmation, hey, are you good with us formatting that drive? Yes, and installation in progress. Let's go ahead and create our computer name, so that's the host name of this computer, I'll call it vert dash antics, computer domain, I'll just leave it as the example.dom, it's not really necessary. Then click next, localization, it defaults to US, American English, that's correct for me, US Eastern time zone, that's not correct for me, I'm in the central time zone of the US, system clock uses local time, yeah that's correct, let me go ahead and click next, and then let's create our username, I'm going to call my user DT, let's create a strong and complicated password for the DT user, repeat the strong and complicated password, and then the root user, do we want a root user? If we check that on, we will have a root user and you need to create a root user password, if we leave that ticked off, what will happen is instead of a root user, we will have sudo, and the DT user will have sudo privileges, so I'm going to leave that ticked off and click next, and then we get some tips, and other than that we're just waiting for it finishing the installation, this may take another minute or two, I'll pause the video until the installation has completed, and the installation has completed, after I pause the video it probably took about two minutes for the installation to complete after that, so probably less than five minutes total time for the installation, that installed very fast, even for what is the antics full addition, so I'm sure some of the smaller ISOs would have installed probably in like two minutes, so we need to go ahead and reboot the system to complete the installation, you can see it's already ticked on by default, automatically reboot the system when the installer is closed, so I'm going to leave that ticked on and click finish, and it reboots just fine, we get a grub menu, and it says please unlock the disk with the lux encryption, so that's going to be our encrypted drive, remember it had the option to encrypt our hard drive, and I chose to do that, so let me enter my super secure encryption password, and now it will continue to boot the system, and when we come to our login manager, I'm not sure what login manager they're using, it doesn't look anything familiar, maybe one of the older login managers like Slim or LXDM or something like that, I'm going to go ahead and enter my username, and then hit enter and enter my password, let's go ahead and log in to ICWM once again, so we'll take a look at ICWM first, let's go ahead and change the screen resolution, so if I go into the menu system, and I go into applications, I bet it's under preferences, they're probably using something like A-R-N-R, A-Rander, yeah A-Rander is here, so what this is, this is a graphical front end to X-Rander, which you guys see me on almost every video use the X-Rander command at the terminal, A-Rander is just a graphical way of doing this, so if I right click on the monitor here and go to resolution and go to 1920 by 1080, then hit the checkbox, it changes that resolution for us, although the wallpaper and the conky, they need to be redrawn, so what I need to do is actually restart the whole desktop, so if I right click, go into desktop, other desktops, I'm going to choose the default option, ZZZ-ICWM, and it should hopefully restart the desktop for us, it does, it redraws the wallpaper at the correct resolution and puts the conky in the right place, by the way, this is a program called conky, the system monitoring application that gives you some information about disk usage and CPU usage, ethernet speed up and down, et cetera, so you guys have seen conky many times on my videos, when I show my actual desktop, if I switch over to not the virtual machine, this is my actual desktop, this is conky, right, people often ask me on my videos, what is that? That is conky and that's what they're using here inside Antics as well to display that monitoring information. Now one thing about the desktops, if I right click and go back to desktop, other desktops, you see we have three different, four different ICWMs to choose from and four different flux boxes to choose from, four different JWMs to choose from, it's because each one of these uses a different file manager, I believe, so ZZZ is the ZZZ FM file manager, ROX is ROX FM file manager, I'm not sure what just regular ICWM or minimal ICWM is what the difference in those are, but we could check those out. But first, let's actually take a look at the file manager. So let me click on the quick launcher here for the file manager and go to help and frequently ask questions. The ZZZ FM users manual, so I don't really know this file manager, I have actually never used this before. I don't think, I don't even know if this was in some of the previous versions of antics that I've looked at. I haven't looked at antics lately. So this is a different file manager for me. I'm not sure how to use it, but that is the ZZZ ICWM desktop. If I go to ROX ICWM, this is going to use the very old school retro looking ROX filer. ROX filer, for those of you that were around Linux, you know, 20, 25 years ago, probably remember a lot of the ROX applications, including the ROX filer file manager here, looks really old and ancient. And it was never one of my favorite file managers, but a lot of people really love ROX. So it's nice that it is an option. If I go back to other desktops and just use ICWM with no other description, let's see what it's going to use for a file manager. And it looks like it's just going to go back to using ZZZFM. I didn't mean to make that maximized. And then if I go back and choose the minimal ICWM, let's see what the file manager is going to be. Once again, ZZZFM. Okay. So the only one that has a different file manager is going to be the ROX file manager. And then, of course, the khaki is not here for the minimal one. So I guess that is the difference. Also, the desktop pipelines are not here for the minimal. So I guess that is the slight differences between the three. I'm going to go back to the default ZZZ, ICWM. We get our desktop applications back and we get our khaki back as well. So ICWM has a panel at the bottom, a standard kind of panel. You click on the icon here, you get a menu system. Also, if you right click anywhere on the desktop, you get the exact same menu. So this menu, the right click menu, the quick launcher here just launches that right click menu in this spot, right? So it's the same kind of menu. And if I go through it, let's see app select. Is this some kind of app store? Yeah, it looks like we can go ahead and choose to install some things such as ad block. That's interesting. I have also Mixer. So obviously, they're using also, they're also using, I believe, pulse audio and pipe wire. I wonder if Control Alt T would bring up a terminal. It does. It brings up the ROX term. So ROX terminal, again, one of the ROX applications. You zoom in. I do a where is pipe wire. Just to verify that they are using pipe wire. They are. Let me zoom out a little bit. I made that a little bit too big. So where is pipe wire? You can see there's the location to the pipe wire binary. And just to verify, system D is not here. Where is system D? It's nowhere to be found. Let's see what kernel version they're on. Let's do a uname space dash R. They're on 6.1.42. So a pretty recent kernel. If I do a apt list space dash dash installed, let's get a list of all the packages that are installed via the apt package manager. I'm going to up arrow, and I'm going to pipe that into WC, the word count program, space dash L. So instead of word count, I want a line count. That's what the dash L flag does. Let's get a line count of the apt list dash dash installed command. There are 1,676 lines of output in that. So that means there's 1,676 packages installed out of the box via the apt package manager. If I get back into the menu system here, we've already taken a look at the terminal, the file manager, the web browser, I believe is Firefox. Yeah. Let's see what version of Firefox we are on if I go to help and about Firefox. This is Firefox, the extended support release ESR. 102.14.0. And back to the menu system. We do have an editor here. Now they have a couple of different editors installed. This is Genie. Genie, one of my favorite plain text editors. It's a really fantastic lightweight text editor slash IDE. You can see this is Genie 1.38. I believe they also have a mouse pad or leaf pad, one of those two. If I go into the applications, go to accessories. Leaf pad is also another plain text editor. That's very plain though. I don't know why you would choose to use leaf pad when Genie is already installed. I'd probably just uninstall leaf pad to be honest. Also in the menu under applications, we go into accessories. You can see you've got your basic applications that you would expect for any full desktop environment. So you've got your archive manager for zip, unzip, things like that. You've got your calculator, a calendar. You've got your clipboard. You have the fire jail configuration wizard. That's interesting for those of you that want to fire jail your applications. You also have, is that URXVT for a terminal? So other than the rocks term, we also have URXVT installed as a terminal. That's interesting. I wonder why we have dual terminals here. We also have XF burn, which is a disk burning utility. It's part of the XFCE suite of applications. Pretty simple little disk burning utility. Also under applications, there's actually an antics section here. And a lot of this is customization for your antics desktops. For example, add menu item. I'm assuming that would edit our ICWM menu. So yeah, you can go ahead and create a app name. You get an icon. Tell it what command to run, et cetera. And when you're through, it should appear in your menu system. Under applications, there is a games category. Not much here, really. DOSBox and Mahjong are the only two applications. Under graphics, we have our document scanner. If you still have a scanner, other than that, we have a couple of basic paint applications, Mirage and Screenshot. So we do have the Screenshot utility, which I'm assuming probably the XFCE Screenshot tool. It's kind of what that looks like. Also under applications, we have a multimedia category. We have Awesome Mixer. So that is basically something like Pavu Control, where you can adjust sound settings for also. But you also have Pavu Control, post audio volume control. You also have a CD Ripper application. You have Celluloid for video player. MPV is also here for a video player. SMTube is here as well to play videos. XMMS is here as well. So this is your audio player. It's kind of like an old school Winamp clone. Actually, a lot of really neat applications are installed out of the box. Even though the ISO was only 1.7 gigabytes, the reason they're able to put so much on that ISO is most of these applications are really, really tiny applications. They have Cine, which I believe is like a wireless networking application. I'm not using wireless. We have ClausMill for email client, not my favorite email client. HexChat is installed as well. So and it looks like it's going to by default connect to OFTC for a network. I'm not sure what that is. I was hoping maybe it would automatically connect us to like the Antics support IRC or something like that. Maybe it does, but I'm not going to go to the trouble of trying to enter a chat room. Let's go to the office category. So we do have the entire LibreOffice suite, calc, draw, impress, math, start, center, and writer. Let me launch LibreOfficeRider, which is the word processor. Let's go ahead and see what version of LibreOffice we are on. So this is LibreOffice 7.5.5.2. And let's close that out. So ISOWM is a pretty simple little window manager. It's really kind of a full desktop environment because you've got your panel and your menu system, the panel, very full featured. You've got your quick launchers. You've got your desktop switcher, where you can switch between desktop one, desktop two. You've got a sys tray. You've got a clock and everything else. Let's take a quick look just for a couple of seconds at the other desktop. So if I go to desktops, other desktops, let's switch over to ZZZ Fluxbox and see how their Fluxbox is themed. So Fluxbox, we still get desktop icons. We get the conchie and everything. And we have a menu that we can go through here in Fluxbox. Of course, Fluxbox has its traditional right click menu as well. Again, the menu icon is just a way to actually launch the right click menu without having to right click because sometimes you'll have applications full screen on a desktop and you don't have a place on the desktop to actually right click. So it's nice that you have that launcher in the panel as well. And of course, you have your workspace switcher. Fluxbox, very open box like. If you've ever used open box, you'd be right at home in Fluxbox. And if I go to desktop, other desktops and switch to ZZZ JWM, JWM is even more like open box because it really is. It reminds me of open box in a lot of ways. It has the dynamic menus. Like if you want to create some scripts to dynamically generate output in this menu system, you can actually make that magic happen. But JWM, unlike open box, does come with a proper panel. It's got some quick launchers and you do once again have a menu button that you can click to launch the right click menu rather than having to right click. Just in case, again, you don't have space on the desktop to right click. They also mentioned HerbsLuftWM being on the ISO, but I didn't see HerbsLuft as an option for switching here. I wonder if I could choose HerbsLuft from the login menu. So if I log out and go back to the login manager, so let's log out and session type. Let's see, can I click that? It says press F1 to change session type. So let me do F1. Why did that not work? Okay, F1 and it cycles through. And there is a HerbsLuft entry. So let's just take a quick look at HerbsLuft. It may not be themed or anything. That may be why they don't want people to log into it. You know, if you've never played with HerbsLuft like a default HerbsLuft without it being configured, it could be a little weird. So let me go ahead and cancel switching to the other desktops. Now, I'm not going to know the key binding, so I may actually have to read this. So SuperShift C to close, that makes sense. That's the default close key binding for DWM and for X-MotenAD. So HerbsLuft uses that as well. I'm assuming SuperEnter gets us a terminal. SuperShift C to close. SuperShift R reloads. So if I make some changes or something, SuperShift R would reload and SuperShift Q would quit. So let me get back into the ICWM desktop here and A-Rander. I guess I didn't save the A-Rander command I ran earlier. So I'm just going to run X-Rander-S1920 by 1080. For those of you that actually want A-Rander to remember what you did, what you would have to do is you would go back to, what was it? Under preferences, go to A-Rander. You would choose your output or your resolution. And then instead of just clicking the check, you still need to click the check to make those changes happen. But then you also want to save. And what you want to do is save a file somewhere in your file system. And remember that whatever name you give it and have that file part of your auto start hook and all of your window managers. So every time it tells A-Rander to run the script and automatically change the resolution. So that's how you accomplish that magic. If you need for that to happen. So the only real reason to need to do that is really in a VM. So let me go ahead and fix the screen resolution here by choosing other desktops. And let me right click. Oh, we get a much bigger menu now. So there's some kind of glitch there. But what I was wanting to do was go into preferences. Just to see, I was really wanting themes. Well, we have a ton of themes. So antics, green, large. Okay, so that just changes your ICWM theme. So the title bars and the panel is ICWM. That's not the GTK theme. The GTK theme is actually the center of your window, right? The ICWM theme is just your title bars and buttons. But that is a pretty cool theme they were using. So back to preferences. I'm not sure what the default is. And this is blue huge. So for those of you wanting big themes. Yeah, we've got a lot of big names. How about New Day Small? Yeah, that's much more my style there. If I right click, I want to see the wallpapers. So I'm not sure what kind of wallpaper application they're using. I would assume they're probably using nitrogen to set the wallpaper. But I could be wrong about that. I'm going under preferences. Customize look and feel. So they're using LX appearance for the GTK theme. So I could use something like arc dark, arc darker. Yeah, yeah. And the icon themes. I could change that here as well. Let me once again, right click, go to applications, go to preferences, backgrounds, maybe, or wallpaper. There it is. Wallpaper. So let's go ahead and select a picture. And it defaults to user share wallpaper for the directory. And try that one out. Hit apply. It is a wallpaper that was titled beta. It's got the Greek later letter beta there. So that's interesting. Let's see what else we have flat. Well, that's kind of colorful. Let's see how we like that one. Yeah, I could live with that. We've got found lost marbles. Don't really like that. There's a leaf. There is a flower, pylons, space, and a sunflower. Let's try the leaf one. Looks kind of minimal. Would be probably really good against a dark theme. You know, set the ICWM theme to dark, set your GTK theme to dark. That would probably work out just fine. So that was just a very quick and cursory look at the recently released antics version 23. Again, four different window managers, ICWM, JWM. You had Herb's Luff WM and you also had Flux Box all on the ISO antics. Again, very light, very fast, very minimal. No system D available, both 64-bit ISOs and 32-bit ISOs. For those of you that have really ancient hardware, so I'm talking about machines 15 years old or possibly older, and you need a 32-bit distribution, I strongly urge you, give antics a try. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Daniel Gabe James, Matt Paul, Royal West, Armored Dragon, Commander Angry, George Lee, Methos, Nate Irion, Paul, Peace, Arch, and Vador, Realities4less, Red Prophet, Roland, Souls, Astri, Tools, Devler, Ward, Jintu, and Ubuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. What about these guys? This quick look at Antics23 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 right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community, if you like my work, and want more videos on Linux and free and open source software like Antics. Subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.