 So I was browsing distro watch earlier today and I noticed that one of my favorite Debian based Linux distributions Antics had a release as they just released Antics 19.3 and Antics is really interesting because it's based on Debian stable. I love Debian stable It is window manager only and it comes with like four or five window managers Pre-installed at least it did and versions that I've checked out on the past Those versions included Iced WM flux box and JWM I think and they even included one tiling window manager as well I think they included herbs to lift so Antics is really a great distribution It also still offers 32-bit ISOs Antics is one of those distributions that if you have ancient hardware if you're one of those people that still have you know machines that are like 15 years old and You're really having a hard time finding a Linux distribution that will work on that device because it's that old Chances are Antics will still work on that device Antics does not use System D as it's a knit system. They're still using the old sys via knit Although I believe with this latest version 19.3 They are also offering run it as an a knit option if you prefer run it So you have two different choices of ISOs as far as the a knit system You can choose the one with sys V or you can choose one with run it today. I'm gonna go with the standard flagship edition I'm gonna do 64-bit antics 19.3 using sys via knit and since I haven't taken a look at antics in a while I am going to run through the installation here on camera So I'm going to go ahead and let's go ahead and just launch into the live environment here And I'm assuming from the live environment we can run through an installation process Last time I looked at antics on the channel was probably At least a year and a half ago I would imagine it's been a long time since I've taken a look at antics and immediately we launch into Some kind of desktop it well a window manager here is this ice WM. I'm not exactly sure Rocks dash ice WM at least here in the cocky. That's what it says. So this is the ice window manager I'm gonna go ahead and click on the install icon. So I double click Maybe I only needed to single click because I got an error It says the installer won't launch because it appears to already be running So I guess it only needed a single click double clicking it tried to launch it a second time and it complained about it Alright here on the first screen. It's just a little bit about the terms of use with antics There are keyboard settings. It's gonna go ahead and choose US layout by default if I needed to change it I could change it right here, but of course I do use a US keyboard. So I am good I'm gonna click next Then we have our partitions. We have modified partitions and how I could click run partition tool I'm assuming that would probably open up a g-parted and that is exactly what it opens up We could go ahead and set up our partitions ourselves or if you wanted to you could just do automatic partitioning You can use auto install using the entire disk I created a 20 gigabyte virtual hard drive inside this virtual machine and yeah I'm just gonna let it use that entire virtual hard drive So I'm gonna click next is it okay to format and use the entire disk VDA in my case for antics Linux Yes, so it's gonna format the drive and of course any Information any data on that drive would be wiped out if it wasn't already empty drive So you want to make sure that you do select the correct drive if you have multiple drives in your system before just clicking Okay on that. All right, then we need to install our bootloader So it's gonna install the grub bootloader location to install do we want to install it on? MBR or PBR master boot record the MBR is typically the one you want to go with so I'm just gonna click next that was already selected anyway a Computer name antics one. It looks like is what it's gonna go with I'm just gonna go with what they fill out automatically here. Of course, you could change it if you would like Locale for me United States American English is correct time zone It shows America, New York, which is the eastern time zone. I'm actually in the central time zone So let me find a city in the central time zone Chicago works for me the system clock uses local time I could click that on if I wanted to or not I guess it really doesn't matter the format Do I want to do 24 hour time or 12 hour time? I actually prefer 24 hour time So I will change that and a click next then I need to choose Username so I'm gonna call my user DT Then we need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user and Then we need to confirm that strong and complicated password All right, and then we need to create a root password. So Let's create another strong and complicated password. All right. Do we want to auto log in meaning when we log in we don't have to Enter a password. It just automatically logs this in. I don't like that for privacy reasons I like having to enter a password to get into my computer. So I'm not going to tick on auto login So I'm just going to go ahead and click next here And it's still running through the installation here. This may take a few more minutes It really just took about 30 more seconds now It says automatically reboot the system when the installer is closed So if I click finish it should reboot the machine and everything should be good to go And that's what I'm going to do right now And it has rebooted and we get a grub screen. So it looks like the installation went. Okay. Let me go ahead and hit enter Let's see how long it takes to boot. Remember We're using the old sys via knit a knit system that it really didn't take very long to boot up at all Let me go ahead and enter my name Then let me enter my Password and let's go ahead and log in. Of course, this is the ice Wm window manager here. Let me see if I can get a proper screen resolution I'm wondering if control alt T would bring up a terminal. Let's see if they Actually use that key binding. They don't so let me search for the terminal here in the menu. All right And I'm going to run a X render here And just to see what are the available Screen resolutions here. The one I want is 1920 by 1080. That's what my monitor is set for All right, and now that we have a proper screen resolution. We should be good to go Although the cocky is a bit out of place. I wonder if I could kill that and relaunch it Let me open the terminal again. I'm gonna do a kill all cocky Just to get rid of that cocky in the center of the screen. Now the first thing I want to say is You know ice Wm for a window manager. It really does look good the panel the menu system I mean, this is a really nice little window manager. Let me open up our file manager here I'm not sure what they're using here is this The rocks filer. Yeah, it's the rocks filer. So it's kind of a minimal kind of file manager here But it's not a not a bad little file manager, but ice Wm. Yeah, I really like it They do offer some other window managers if I go to desktop and other desktops We do have rocks flux box. So that's flux box using the rocks file manager We have space flux box, which is flux box using space fm in the space file manager Flux box minimal flux box. Yeah, you get the idea. You get a variety of flux boxes a variety of ice window manager and Jwm is also available and that looks like that's it flux box ice Wm Jwm And I know they used to offer herbs lift was pre-installed in previous versions I guess they no longer offer herbs to look which I guess makes sense probably most people Probably wouldn't want a tiling window manager So they're already sticking to floating window managers flux box Jwm and ice Wm are all very similar So it kind of makes sense. They all function kind of the same. So Herbs look probably was just the odd man out. Let's see what kind of programs are pre-installed So this was the 64-bit full install It was 1.2 gigs in size was the ISO. So it was not a terribly large ISO So I'm not expecting it to have just a ton of programs pre-installed, but let's see what is here So we have an antics category and here we have an Android device USB connect. Well, that's kind of nice I appreciate that they actually include something like that for people that have Android phones That is actually pretty cool. We have the antics updater I'm gonna click on that because I'm this was just released I can't imagine there's gonna be any updates But I would like to see what the updater tool looks like of course, it's got to sync the repositories. So it's got to Refresh the Debian repositories I'm assuming and it looks like I only have one thing that I could upgrade since it's just one thing and it probably Will just take a second. I'll go ahead and run the upgrade. All right, and that was it So yeah, really neat little updater tool if I get back into the applications menu the antics subcategory We have the antics user manager I guess if you had multiple users on the system, you could manage those users antics Wi-Fi switch Backlight brightness, of course, that would be useful especially for laptops. Now we have charoot rescue scan Wow, that's really interesting. I'm gonna click on that We're not gonna be able to do anything with this what this would be useful for is if you used antics as a rescue USB stick, you know, you could charoot back into your system, you know, if you needed to for some reason So yeah, that is very very useful utility to have especially on a live USB stick We have the apt package manager, of course, that's the command line apt package manager I'm assuming if I clicked on it, it would just open a terminal and it would give us Yeah, some apt commands that we could run also have date and time format USB ISO snapshot the personal menu editor and yad color. What is that a color picker? It is under applications We have an accessories category where where we have our archive manager That's for zip unzip and tar gz and that sort of thing. We have CalCurse That's interesting because that is like a calendar scheduler to do kind of app, but it's a terminal based Application, yeah, so I'm not sure, you know that many people would find that useful I actually like CalCurse. I did a video about CalCurse Very very early on in my channel's history like in the first month. I started my YouTube channel I briefly talked about CalCurse on a video and I was cherry tree. I'm not sure what that is Let me do the about information. This is a hierarchical note-taking application Okay, so that's probably a better note-taking app since it's actually a gooey note-taking app At least for most people most people probably wouldn't be comfortable with CalCurse clip But of course is our clipboard fire Jill is a way to sandbox applications You know where you could for example Firefox you could have Firefox Gilled, you know, it's it's it's locked in this fire Jill and it basically prevents Nasty things from happening within Firefox and affecting your machine, you know That's kind of the point of something like fire Jill. We have calculator, which is a nice little calculator We have leaf pad for our plain text editor the midnight commander editor So this is emcee edit so a terminal based text editor about rocks term So this rocks term is the terminal emulator also under accessories. We have RX VT Unicode So we have you RX VT So we have a couple of different terminal emulators installed on the system also under accessories We have search monkey space fm again space fm is another kind of file manager That's the settings for it though. And then also under accessories. We had XF burn, which is XFCE's Disc burner not too many people have the need for a disc burner anymore But again because antics is kind of Designed to be used on older machines many of those older machines will still have optical drives You know CD and DVD drives so XF burn kind of makes sense on a distribution like antics where a lot of the more modern Distributions it really is kind of out of place now to have a disburning utility taking up space on the ISO And just briefly there is a games category where we have the dustbox emulator We have jeweled and a mahjong and the under graphics We have GT cam. We have LibreOffice draw Mirage MT paint screenshot and Simple scan, so we don't have any of the big heavy graphics programs things like gimp Inkscape blender, you know nothing like that again because this is usually a Distribution probably going to be put on older equipment Probably those kinds of programs are not common and use you know Blender is such a heavy program for example It really requires a powerful workstation to use it and would is antics the distribution you're typically going to install on a machine Like that I would have no problem installing antics on my workstations But that's probably not what most people would be doing under the internet category. We have Cine I'm not sure what Cine is this command needs root privileges. Well, I just really wanted to know what Cine was Well, I'm just gonna close it. I'm not gonna enter a root password and find out what that is That sounds like a bad idea to give a root password to something I don't know what it's going to do claws mill. I do know that's a minimal email client It's not a very good email client Honestly, I would install Mozilla Thunderbird if you want a proper email client or Geary Geary is a nice minimal kind of Email client that's available on Linux claws mill. I've never liked it It just looks ugly. It's just kind of clunky and it's just not my favorite also under internet We have connect shares. We have Dillow. We have disconnect shares Droopy not sure what droopy is See HTTP server starting. Why are we starting a HTTP server? I'm just gonna close this We have a few things under internet that I am not sure exactly what these programs do We have some FTP clients. We also have Firefox ESR as our browser Firefox ESR Yeah, ESR stands for extended support release. It's kind of like, you know, certain distributions have long-term support releases Firefox has extended support releases and by default it goes to the antics forum comm page I guess if you need support for antics, so that's kind of nice that they included that As the home page out of the box. We also have hex chat for our IRC client if I click on it Will it actually connect to? Like the antics server or anything like that. No, it's gonna go to OFTC I guess as the network Anyway, let me quit that. Yeah, I'm not sure if the antics guys have an IRC channel But if they did it would be great if they actually made the hex chat automatically connect To the antics support form because sometimes especially people that don't use the IRC because it's such an old technology now You know, so you'll get directed to somebody's support form. Yeah, they're IRC chat channel And but you don't even know how to use something like hex chat So it would be great if you know if you just connect by default And that that's the channel it goes to I wish more distributions did that also under internet We had the links to browser. That's just a terminal-based browser We have transmission for our bit Torrent client, which is a fine program under multimedia We have also mixer, of course a Sunder CD Ripper again Many of the machines that are gonna run antics are still gonna have CD drives So it kind of makes sense to have the CD Ripper there Celluloid I believe is the video player. I don't know too much about celluloid. I've never used it myself We have GUVC view which is another webcam program. We have MPS dash YouTube for YouTube MPV of course is our other video player another minimal video player. We have poor man's radio That's interesting SM tube. That's a nice program too. And we have sound card user speaker test stream light XMMS this is a Minimal audio player and it kind of resembles the old win-amp program XMMS is Really kind of a fascinating program. We actually have a few of those old win-amp kind of clones floating around on Linux We have XMMS, of course We have audacious There's a few of them that have skins that kind of resemble the old Windows win-amp audio player under office We have the entire LibreOffice suite and let me go ahead and launch it. This is Debian stable So I probably should check the version numbers on this So this is LibreOffice version 7.0.2.2 And this is based on Debian 10 Buster the stable branch We have a preference category with a lot of the usual suspects that you would expect to have here AR and R for setting our stream resolutions That's just a graphical front end to XR and R which I did in the terminal earlier This is just a GUI for that. I also have customized look and feel I'm assuming that's LX appearance It is and this is where we could play with the themes the GTK themes the icon sets You also have a firewall configuration. Let's see are they using UFW the uncomplicated firewall That appears to be what they are using. Yes, so this is GUFW This is the graphical front end to UFW the uncomplicated firewall It's kind of a standard firewall program That's usually installed on a lot of Debian based distros a lot of Ubuntu based distros and it's the firewall program I typically install on like my arch installs if I'm gonna install a firewall I almost always use UFW and we have our wallpaper setter Let's see what program they're using for this. It looks like it's called antics wallpaper And let me see if I can make this window bigger because I can't even see all the buttons Can I choose select and we could play with the wallpapers? I always like checking out some of the wallpapers available. So if I hit apply Well, that's really bright but against a dark theme because we're kind of using a dark theme That wouldn't be bad actually see what else is available. That's kind of an interesting abstract art Okay, some of these actually this is nice too. It's a similar pattern to the one we had out of the box But a little lighter. Yeah, that's not bad either. Let's see. What else we have and that's the default one and That could be interesting as well That's some interesting wallpapers here. I don't I don't mind these actually these are actually pretty good I'm gonna choose something really minimal here though. Yeah, that's not bad. I'm gonna go with that Now one thing I should do is I should open up a terminal and let me do a uname Dash R. Let's see what kernel we're running because again based on Debian stable. It's gonna be a older kernel So it is running kernel 4.9 that of course is the kernel and Debian 10 the other thing I should check is H top is it installed it is what kind of ram are we using? So I gave this virtual machine Two cores of my CPU and I gave it four gigs of RAM more than enough RAM for antics But antics doesn't need four gigs of RAM because right now ice WM is using 211 megs of RAM and that is with a little bit of stuff going on, right? I've opened and closed a lot of programs We've got some stuff going on down here little widgets and you know the volume icon and the sys trait I mean we could slim that down we could get that under 200 megs rather easily so ice WM It's really lightweight now Let's check out some of the other window managers because that's kind of the thing with antics It's claimed to fame as it comes with all these other Window managers and you can quickly switch between them even inside the window managers themselves You go to the menu and instead of rocks ice WM Which is what I'm doing now if I wanted to use rocks flux box. I just click and just like that I am in flux box. Yeah It takes a second to load. Okay, and of course you got our flux box right-click menu Which flux boxes are right? I prefer Open box because open box has the ability to do dynamic menus and things like that But flux box I guess you know the neat thing about it it comes with its own panel So you don't have to worry about finding a third-party panel or dock like the way you do with open box So flux box is pretty neat if you want another box like window manager JWM is really nice So if I go to space dash JWM, let's use the space file manager with JWM You're a big time open box guy JWM is probably the one you want to use in antics. It's just like open box There's a right-click menu and this right-click menu does have the ability to do Dynamic menus meaning you can script something so that the menu is a dynamic menu meaning things change within the menu So you do a bash script or Python script and it will list out things like Top processes, you know or how much CPU you're using or the current date and time things like that So, you know, it's not static menu entries, which are your typical entries JWM also comes with its own panel if I do a H top right now. It's using 239 megs of memory, but to be fair When we did this in ice WM, we were not running cocky And cocky is going to suck up a little bit around not much But let's see if I kill all of that. That's still only 235 megs of RAM one thing I haven't checked out yet if I right-click here in JWM to get the menu and I go down to control center Of course, this is our system panel center the settings thingy This is where you can basically configure everything about your system So you have desktop and system and network shares session disk hardware drivers and maintenance So that is a program you'll probably go to often So I did at least want to open that here on camera And I think that's where I'm gonna leave it here for this very quick installation and first look at the newly released antics 19.3 a beautiful distribution for such a minimal distribution and antics is really minimal as far as You can get it installed on some really old equipment Like if you have something that you're really struggling like things like Lubuntu and peppermint and Linux light You know those won't even install on that machine Typically the two distributions you should try next are antics and puppy, right? If you can't get antics or puppy to work on that machine You might you might have to retire that machine at that point, but antics is really fantastic I love the fact that there's so many machines out there that would just be thrown away They'd be just thrown in a trash heap somewhere because they can no longer run a quote modern operating system No, no and antics is really helping save the environment in a lot of ways because it's keeping these machines running Far longer than they otherwise would now before I go. I do need to think a few special people I need to think the producers of the show Michael Gabe Corbinian Mitchell Devon Fran Arch 5530 a commie Chuck Claudio Donnie Dylan George Gregory Kellogg Devils Lewis Paul Scott and Willie. They are the producers of this episode They are my highest tiered patrons over on patreon because without these guys this installation and first look at antics Wouldn't 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 this show is Sponsored by you guys the community without you guys I couldn't do this if you'd like to support my work look for distro tube over on patreon. All right guys. Peace