 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at the recent release of 4M Linux. Now, I've taken a look at 4M Linux before, but it's been several years and it's an interesting kind of project. It's an independent distribution and it's really minimal. You can run it as a live USB or you can install it if you prefer, but it's kind of minimal. It's, you know, it's for those that like distributions such as Puppy Linux, for example, or Antig. You know, the more minimal kind of distributions and I sometimes do like playing with these types of distributions. So, if I go to their website, you will see 4MLinux.com. There's not much information on this website, unfortunately. Here the main page is just an announcement that version 44 stable was just released, but really it really doesn't tell you much about the distribution. You have an about page, but there's not much on the about page about 4M Linux other than it explains the name 4M. It's because 4M Linux stands for the 4Ms. The Ms are maintenance, meaning it's a system rescue CD or USB stick if you prefer. So maintenance. The other one is multimedia and multimedia, of course, is for audio and video playback and then mini server. And when they say mini server, they're really talking about networking and they're talking about FTP, HTTP, Telnet, and SSH, iNet basically is what they're talking about with the mini server. And then the fourth M is mystery because they have a small collection of Linux games available on the distribution as well. So I'm going to go ahead and click download. I'm going to go ahead and grab that latest ISO and I'm going to run through a quick first look of 4M Linux version 44 inside a virtual machine. So I spun up a VM here and this is 4M Linux version 44.0 and it appears that they are using the ultra lightweight window manager known as JWM by left click on the desktop. I get a left click panel. So this is unusual, usually it's a right click, but they have it set up as a left click, right click, left click, right click menu. It's a left click menu. You also have the menu here on the icon here in the panel because JWM it's very similar to open box, but the good thing about JWM, if you're building a Linux distribution around one of these kinds of minimal window managers, JWM has a panel where obviously open box does not have a panel by default. I'm not crazy about the kind of like Windows 11 wallpaper that they're using, although it's been all the saturation has been taken out. So it's more of a grayish black and white kind of picture. Not my favorite wallpaper. You have a little bit of a conky here going on here. Conky is a program that's basically your system monitor. And just looking at it, I wonder if I can actually tell how much CPU and memory we're actually using. It really doesn't tell me much here, but I'll probably pull up a terminal here in a minute and maybe run H top if it's installed. Now H top may not be installed because again, this is such a minimal distribution. It's really designed to be again, it's designed to be able to be run as a live DVD or live USB. So there's going to be, well, I was trying to actually zoom in here in the terminal, but it looks like they have some of the key bindings are a little different here in LX term, but let's see if H top is actually installed. It is. And JWM is one of the lightest window managers. If not the lightest window manager, typically, this is very typical of JWM is 200 megs of memory is being used right now. 200 megs of the six gigs of RAM that I gave this virtual machine. That is actually pretty incredible. I'm not sure what kernel they're using. If I do a U name dash R, we've got kernel 6.1.60 here on the system. So that's a pretty recent kernel. Now let me see exactly what is installed out of the box here on 4M Linux. Because if I go through the menu system, they have bash. So I'm assuming that would just open a terminal. OK, well, that terminal is different than this terminal, right? Because the prompt is different. So this is root and this is the live user. Well, it says root. So both of them are the root user, but the prompt is different. Hmm, that is interesting. So by doing LS or are they the same? Maybe it's a different shell. Maybe this is bash and this is a different shell. Let's do it. LS BLK LS BLK is not found. So and you can see Ash is telling us that. And so that is a different shell. This is not bash. This is a lighter weight, more minimal shell called Ash. And you can also see that because they're trying to save space and be more minimal, not all of the new core utility also on the system. LS BLK is not available. So that is interesting. If I do a LS BLK here, it also will not be found. But you can see now the shell that is telling us that LS BLK is not found is bash. So got two different, at least two different shells installed. If I go back into the menu system, we have an internet category and oh, we're not going to have a big bloated browser like Firefox or Chrome. We're going to have net surf. Net surf is not great, but it is usable. And if you need something minimal, I mean, it's there. But again, for a live USB stick, it would be fine. And if this was something you were actually going to install on physical hardware and try to live in, you're going to want a better browser than net surf, which we might check out how to install some programs other than the defaults here in a minute. We have HexChat for our IRC client. So probably if you need to connect to like the 4M IRC channel, if they have one, you know, you can get support through that. Sylphied is our desktop email client. If I click on that, we can go ahead and set up our email account. Of course, I'm not going to do that. So let's go ahead and cancel the setup. Sylphied is not my favorite desktop email client either. I would probably install something like Thunderbird or Geary or Evolution. And yes, something better than Sylphied. Transmission is the BitTorrent client for the GNOME suite of software. It's actually a rather fantastic BitTorrent client. Let's close out transmission. One thing I'm kind of surprised being a minimal distribution. There's a lot of stuff actually installed out of the box here. The thing is everything they installed is, you know, smaller programs. There's nothing really big or heavy here. So also under internet, I mean, we have download managers like UGet, GWGet, which I'm assuming is just a graphical front end to WGet. I've never actually, yeah, it's a download manager. So I got a couple of different download managers installed under the internet category under the office category. The library office is not here, but the GNOME office programs are here. So Abbey Word and Numeric are GNOME office applications. Abbey Word is the word processor. Numeric is the spreadsheet program. Let me open up Abbey Word and let me make it full screen. If I go to help and about Abbey Word, this is Abbey Word 3.0.5. Also go to help and about GNOME Office. You can you can get help information about what GNOME office is, but it's trying to open Pill Moon as the browser. So we did have a different browser other than NetSurf. I guess we had Pill Moon as well. I go to about about Pill Moon. This is version 32.5.0. I was actually under the impression that Pill Moon really didn't see much development anymore. So I'm kind of surprised that Pill Moon is available. Was Pill Moon here in the internet category? It wasn't. That's weird that NetSurf is here, but Pill Moon is not listed in the menu system. But, you know, let me go ahead and continue through the menu system here. We have various notepads as a subcategory. We have Leafpad, Editor and Beaver. I've never heard of Beaver. Let me open up the Beaver editor. This is Beaver 0.4.1. It looks like a very simple, very plain text editor. We have a maintenance category. Now this will be where all of the system rescue CD stuff is. And this will be like the biggest category of stuff here. So you've got data, you got backups, manual, automatic imaging. You got recovery stuff such as GNU's DD Rescue. You got wiping files. You got various file managers in and in. You got Midnight Commander, which is a terminal-based file manager. Midnight Commander, pretty neat little terminal-based file manager. It's actually quite good. Also, under the file managers, you have PCMAN FEM as the graphical file manager, which PCMAN FEM is one of my favorite GUI file managers. We also have M-Grandpa, which is an archiving tool. We have Xarchiver, which is also an archiving tool. And we have Fowler, which is another archiving tool. So Fowler is GNOME's archiving tool. Xarchiver is XFCE's archiving tool. I don't know why you need all of that, but they're all here if you need them. Under CD, DVD, we have ISO Master, Fi Burn. So you have the ability to rip and burn CDs and DVDs if you need to. Under Partitioning, you have GNU Parted because you do need to partition a drive. If you're going to actually install 4M Linux on physical hardware, it is a command line installation and you will need something like a parted or CFDisk or FDisk to go ahead and manually partition your drives. FDisk is already installed. So is CFDisk, GDisk and CGDisk are also here. So you've got about six different partition managers to choose from. Under the monitoring category, we have various network monitoring tools such as NCD, Unitwatch, IFtop. And of course, we had Htop for our system monitor. Under QEMU, we have AQEMU and BIOS and UFI under the four menu category here. Of course, QEMU is for virtualization for virtual machines. Under miscellaneous tools, we have GTK Hash, UnitBooten, which UnitBooten is a program that writes to USB drive so you can burn an ISO to a USB stick. UnitBooten is kind of flaky kind of software. I've used it in the past, but it's really, I think it's mainly for burning like Debian-based and Ubuntu-based ISOs to drives. I don't think it does real well with things like arch-based distributions. For example, you probably want a more modern ISO program like Etcher. You know, Belina Etcher to actually burn ISOs to USB drives, if that's something you're really wanting to do. We have the multimedia category, of course, for one of the four M's. We have several video players here. So we've got M-Player, Celluloid, we've got Minitube. If you want to watch some YouTube, we've got several audio players, including XMMS, let me go ahead and click on XMMS because it's really neat because it kind of looks like the old WinApp program on Windows, right? So neat little small minimal audio player under Let's Rip. We have more CD rippers under Let's Mix. We have various mixing tools like Awesome Mixer. Havu Control is also here under Let's View. We have our image viewers under Let's Paint, few simple paint tools such as MT Paint, GNU Paint, Next Paint. Under Let's Edit, you've got Image Magic for that editing images. We've got Audacity, obviously, for an audio editor. We have a MIDI category and we also have a devices category. The devices category, it looks like it is for your webcams because we have things like WXCAM, GUVC View, which is a program I often install on my systems. And GTKCAM, so there is a ton of stuff in this menu, right? So there's a lot of things on this ISO. We have the 4M category. One thing I did want to do is in the 4M category, we have things like the Updater and the Installer. If you want to run through the installation, yeah, it's just a command line installation, right? It opens a terminal. You will already have to have your drive partitioned if you actually want to run through the installation, but I'm not going to do that. We're just going to take a look at this in a live environment. But one thing I do want is to read the help. So let me go ahead and click on the help because this is pretty good documentation because the website didn't have much, but this little help document is actually pretty good and they do have a section here on 4M Linux packages. So how do you get extra packages? It's an independent distribution, so they're not really basing off of something like Debian or Arch or Ubuntu or anything like that. So where do you get extra packages? Well, you're kind of limited. They are there, and it actually has a pretty good selection, but note they call their packages add-ons, meaning add-ons because these are not already installed on the system. These are extra add-ons you can add to your 4M Linux installation, and you can see the add-ons are located in slash var slash 4M Linux. So let me go ahead and open a terminal and let me zoom in a little bit. I'm going to cd over to slash var slash 4M Linux. By doing ls, there are all the add-ons, and you can see they all start with add-on underscore name of program. For example, if I wanted to install transmission, which is already installed, but add-on underscore transmission. So that's the transmission BitTorrent client. If I scroll up, you can see there's quite a bit of stuff available here as an add-on. I also noticed I've got directories here, core, help, samples. Let's do a ls of this core directory. We've got busybox, glib, c. Okay, so there's quite a bit of stuff here that you could play with here. So how would you install one of these add-ons if we go back to the documentation? You use the zk script. So zk, so all of these add-ons are tar xz files, and the zk script, what it does, it probably just extracts that archive and places the files in the correct places on the file system. So it'll put the binaries and slash user bin or wherever they're putting their binaries. It'll put the man page and slash lib. They'll put the proper files in the proper places for you. So let's see if this actually works. Let me find something that I actually want to install and play with. So I notice xterm is here. So let me go ahead and see if I can do a zk add-on underscore and xterm, and then we'll just do a tab complete here in the bash yield. And let's see if that actually installs xterm. Now, something popped up and went away real quick. That seemed like a really quick installation if that was an installation. Let me see if I can launch xterm. So xterm is here. But I don't know xterm might have been here out of the box anyway. If I go back to the documentation, yeah, zk and the name of add-on does install the add-on. So that is the correct way to do this. zk update updates the system to the latest version of 4M. So if I do zk update, hit Y for yes. And do you wish to continue? The latest version is 44.064 bit. Now we're actually on the latest version. So I will decline that. I just wanted to verify that zk update does work. Let me go ahead and close out of the documentation here. So I'm going to close that, save changes. No, I shouldn't have made any changes to that document. I'll close the terminal here. Now we do have the dock at the bottom. I'm not sure what dock this is. Is this a plank or some other dock? I'm trying to click on it to see if it would give me any information. I'm really not sure what this is. I could open a terminal. And what I could do is xprop installed. If I hit enter xprop, it's not installed. That's the x properties command. What this does is you enter xprop in a terminal and your cursor turns to an x. And then you click on a window, such as this dock at the bottom. It will actually tell me the properties, such as the window title and things like that. But I'm assuming that's some really minimal lightweight dock. It is actually rather responsive. Like the zoom effect is buttery smooth. So I'm actually, I would like to know what that dock is. I could actually cd back to slash var slash 4m Linux, where all the add-ons are. And what I could do is run an LS. I'll do a LS dash LA for the long format. I'm going to grip for, I think it might be plank. Let's see if plank is there. Nope. Well, how about dock? Just trying to guess that maybe the dock is part of the name. I'm not sure what other dock this could be. Is it one of the old school docks from years past, like a Avant or almost one of the other popular Cairo dock is a popular dock from years past. Cairo's here, but not the Cairo dock. I think they renamed Cairo dock to GLX dock. None of that is here. Yeah, I'm not really sure what that dock is. So because we only have one user on the system right now, the root user, what if you wanted to modify or edit the config for JWM, for example, where are those configs located on the system? So let me open a file manager. We default to the slash root directory because slash root is the home directory for the root user. But I don't see any JWM configs here and slash root. They're probably going to be in slash user slash share. I'm just taking a wild guess. So slash user slash share. And let's see if there is a JWM directory somewhere in here. Again, this is just a guess. And it was a good guess because slash user slash share slash JWM does exist. And you can see you have an auto start file. So this is what is launching things like the dock and the conky, right? You have X Render. This is what is setting the screen resolution by default. It's set to 1028 by 720. I manually forced it to be 1920 by 1080 here for purposes of this video. And then this here, system.jwmrc. That's the actual JWM config. So you should edit these files here if you actually want to change the system level, the root level, JWM configs. Overall, I got to say 4M Linux is a really strange distribution, right? It's clearly designed primarily as a live USB, a live rescue CD USB, because it has all of these really small, like partition managers and network managers and things like that built into it. But it's also weird because on top of that, you include like three or four different video players, three or four different audio players, you know, lightweight audio and video players. And then they also talked about gaming, which I actually didn't see a gaming category. There's the mystery category and it does have some really basic games like chess and Sudoku and, you know, old school things like Asteroids. So you've got some games here as well. So that's kind of a strange mix. But it seems to be, it seems to have some kind of following because again, this distribution has been around for about 13, 14 years now. And I do think, you know, a lot of people want to talk about pointless distributions. I don't think this is a pointless distribution because I do think it's unique enough that it kind of stands out. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about the following people. Gabe, James, Matt, Paul, Steve, Wes, Arkotic, Armor, Dragon, Commander, Angry, George Lee, Matthew, Methos, Nate, Erion, Paul, Peace, Archive of the Door, Realities for Less, Red Prophet, Rolling Soul, Last Street Tools, Devler, Warchant 2 and Ubuntu and Willy. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at 4M Linux would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen. Each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen help support my work because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by the community. If you like my work, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.