 One of my favorite Gen2-based Linux distributions is Redcore Linux. Now, Redcore Linux, I've taken a look at it many times in the history of the channel here. And Redcore Linux has always fascinated me. It's a really nice, easy way to get into Gen2. It has a graphical installer. It ships with the KDE Plasma desktop environment. It has some of its own custom tools. Now, they just had a new release just a few days ago. So this is Redcore Linux 2201. This is their latest stable release. So I'm going to go ahead and download the ISO and I'm going to run through a quick installation and first look inside a virtual machine. All right. And when I go ahead and try to boot into a live environment before we get to a live environment, we have a login prompt. So this has always been the case with Redcore. And it's always a case that I struggle sometimes with these distributions that require a username and a password to get into their live environments. But typically, I would say the login would probably be the name of the distribution. So I'm going to use Redcore for the login name. And of course, that actually does log us in. But now how do I get to the Plasma desktop environment would simply start X work? It does not look like start X is going to work for us. I wonder if it's a video driver problem. So let me get out a full screen here, Invert Manager. And I'm probably in TTY1, so Control Alt F1. Yeah, that's where we're at now. The actual desktop environment probably should have been launched in TTY7. So let's do Control Alt F7 here, Invert Manager. And you say I don't have a login prompt. So it tried to actually probably launch the login manager, SDDM, which would get us into Plasma. But for whatever reason, Plasma, I guess failed to launch. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to shut down the virtual machine. So let's force off. And I'm going to try a different video driver. The video driver is QXL. Now that's actually not the video driver I typically use in these virtual machines. Usually I use Vert IO. So that's weird that QXL was chosen for me because I have it set or at least I thought I had it set to always default to using the Vert IO driver. Let's see if that makes a difference. So let me restart the virtual machine. Let's go ahead and get back full screen. Start Redcore. All right. And we get a graphical environment finally. All right. So we launch into our live environment with, of course, KDE Plasma. So those of you trying out Redcore in a virtual machine, Invert Manager or VirtualBox or some other hypervisor, make sure that you have the correct video drivers. And by correct, I mean, technically any of them should work, but I've played around with this stuff in virtual machines enough. I know that sometimes when things are not working right, try a different video driver. I found that Invert Manager, at least the Vert IO driver is typically the one that gives me the best results. So now let's go ahead and install the system. So I'm going to click on this icon here. And of course, we get the Calamaris installer, the standard Calamaris installer that so many Linux distributions use. I'm going to go ahead and choose my language. American English is correct for me. So I'll just click next. The time zone, it has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me. So I'm just going to click next. English US for my keyboard layout is the default. And that's correct for me. So I'm going to click next. And then our partitioning. Do we want to erase disk meaning give Redcore Linux the entire virtual hard drive of this virtual machine? Or do we want to do manual partitioning where I manually partition the drive myself? This could be useful if you've got some weird custom partition scheme you want to use or if you're dual booting alongside other operating systems, I'm going to choose a race disk. I'm going to let Redcore have the entire drive. Now, do we want to create a swap in a virtual machine? I really don't need a swap. But on physical hardware, you probably do want to create a swap. I'm going to do this like it is on physical hardware. So I'm going to choose swap to file. So it's going to create a swap file for us. Then I'm going to click next. Now let's go ahead and create our username and password. My username is going to be DT the name of the computer. This will be the host name of the computer. I'm going to call this Redcore Dashvert. And then we need to create a strong and complicated password for our DT user and then repeat the strong and complicated password. And now do we want to log in automatically without being asked for that password? No, the reason you create a strong and complicated password is for privacy reasons. So you have to enter a password to get into your machine. It just makes sense for privacy reasons. So I'm going to leave that ticked off. Now do we want to use the same password for the administrator account? Sure. That way the sudo password and DT's password are the same. That way I don't have to remember two different passwords. So I'm going to click next. And now we get our summary here. Location looks good. Keyboard layout looks good. Partition scheme looks good. So I'm going to click install. And now it's going to warn us that it's about to format the drive and right to the disk. I'm going to click install now and away it goes. This portion of the installation typically takes about five to ten minutes on my equipment. So I'm going to pause the video. I'll be back once the installation of Redcore has completed. So the installation has completed. That took a little longer than most Linux installations where typically these kinds of graphical installers take me about five to ten minutes to complete. This time it took about 15 to 20 minutes. Once it reached the stage where it's got to unpack everything, where it's unsquashing everything that hung for a little bit, but it only took about I'd say 15 to 20 minutes. So not a terribly lengthy installation time. Now to complete the installation in the Calamorris installer we need to tick on restart now and then click done. And then it should automatically reboot the machine for. So that's what I'm going to do right now. And I've rebooted my freshly installed Redcore Linux and of course I got to the login manager. The login manager of course is SDDM, the standard login manager for KDE Plasma. Let's go ahead and login. Get a nice little welcome sound. I greatly appreciate that. Obviously Redcore being based on Gen2. Before we do anything we probably should update the system. So if I go into the menu system and I search for software, we have the Discover Software Center, but that's KDE Plasma Software Center, but I don't know if that's really going to do anything for us because Redcore has always had their own package manager essentially called Sisyphus, which is S-I-S-Y P-H-U-S. So look for Sisyphus and they have Sisyphus GUI. There is a command line interface to Sisyphus. You can open a terminal and do some Sisyphus package management commands, but they do have a graphical tool as well. And you can see I am syncing myself. I hope to finish soon. So probably going to take a minute or so for it to sync. Well, that actually synced rather quickly. And we have the options down here of upgrading the system. And of course that's what I'm going to choose. So let me hit that and I get a message here at the bottom of the screen. I am upgrading the system. Please be patient. And because this was released, I want to say it was released about two weeks ago and being rolling release. There's probably a lot of packages that probably need to update. So this may take a minute. And one neat little feature of this graphical interface Sisyphus is you do get like the terminal output here in the GUI window. So you can follow along with exactly what's going on. Otherwise, all you would have is just a hanging window saying I'm upgrading the system. Please be patient. But you wouldn't really know what it's doing. But here you can kind of tell exactly what's going on. Now this update has been running for about 10 minutes. And you can see it's emerging binary 40 of 355. So 355 packages need to be updated and we're just on number 40, right? So this is going to take a while being Gen2 based, source based, right? The update times can be lengthy. So I'll pause the video, I'll be back once this update has finally completed. And I've been letting this update run for about 20 minutes or so now. And it's still not even halfway done. And I really don't want to have to wait for this very lengthy update. And the reason I was going to wait is because especially when you're building packages from source, any package management stuff is kind of CPU intensive. And being I'm doing this in a virtual machine, I don't want all of the virtual machine CPU to be sucked up by this package management update that's going on. And then be trying to show you other stuff in the VM. And maybe things act a little slow or buggy. And I know that will probably be the case, but I am going to go ahead and minimize this window. And let's take a look around Redcore. Just know that if things act kind of sluggish or slow, that's because I'm running that update. And again, that's sucking up all of the CPU of this virtual machine right now. So let's go through the menu system and see what is installed out of the box here in Redcore Linux. So let's go category by category. So in the development category, we have the Qt5 designer. So this is for Qt developers. Very few people are going to need to touch that. So we won't even bother. Now we have an education category and we have mathematics for subcategory and library office math is in that category. We also have a science category that also has library office math. Under games, we have Lutris and Steam. I'm assuming these are the installers for Lutris and Steam. So if I clicked on Steam, it's going to run the updating Steam runtime environment. Probably shouldn't run this also while also doing that update of the system as well. Yeah, updating Steam. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and cancel that. I'm really, I'm not going to launch Steam inside the VM anyway, but that is just a quick way to get Steam and Lutris installed if you need it. We have a graphics category. We have font forge. We have GNU image manipulation program. Of course, that's going to be the GIMP. Let's go ahead and see what version of GIMP we're on. Let me go to help and let's go to about. This is GIMP 2.10.32. So the latest version of the GIMP. Also under graphics, we have Gwynvue, which is the image viewer for KDE Plasma. We have Ocular. Ocular, I believe, is the PDF viewer, the document viewer. And let's see what version of Ocular we are on here. If I go to about Ocular version 22.08.1. Under internet, we are using Chromium for our web browser. Let's go ahead and launch that. Let's see what version of Chromium we're on. You don't find a lot of Linux distributions that ship Chromium out of the box. So this is version 106.0 for Chromium. Most Linux distributions typically they ship Firefox. It's their default web browser, the free and open source browser of choice for most Linux distributions. But Chromium is fully open source. So that's not a bad choice either. Also under internet, we have Conversation with a K, which is KDE Plasma's IRC client. If I open Conversation, would it default to the Redcore Linux IRC channel? It will. So it will automatically connect us to the Redcore channel over on Liberichet. That is a nice touch. I love when Linux distributions have their IRC clients automatically connect to their support channels that just saves us still. Because that's probably what most people would open that program for anyway. We have Q-BitTorrent for a BitTorrent client and we have the Steam installer also in the Internet category. Under Multimedia, we have GUVCView. This is a webcam application. It's actually a really nice webcam application. I use it on all of my machines. We also have Phonon audio and video. I don't know what that is. Let's open it. It looks like it's some kind of audio settings program because it's asking about the pulse audio sound server and things like that. I'm not really sure what that is, but it's definitely not a audio or video player. But we do have under Multimedia an audio player, QMMP, and a video player, VLC. So QMMP is kind of like a win-out clone, right? It looks very old school. Like the old school win-out that you would see in Windows 95 or Windows 98 from way back in the day, right? So that's a real blast from the past there. And then, of course, VLC is your standard free and open source video player on Linux. That's a cross-platform. I use VLC on Windows, Mac, and Linux, right? So VLC, this is version 3.0.17.4. And of course, I say VLC as a video player. You could also play audio through VLC if you prefer. Under the Office category, we have the full LibreOffice Suite. So we have Base, Calc, Draw, Impress, Math, and Rider. If I open LibreOffice Rider, which is the word processing program, let's see what version of LibreOffice we are on. Let's go to Help and let's go to About LibreOffice. This is LibreOffice7.3.6.2. Let's close that out. Under Settings, we have System Settings, which is your standard, like, control panel application, right? Where you can go and change things like appearance, workspace behavior, window management, and notifications and regional settings, things like that. Let's go ahead and go into the appearance. And let's see. So we're using the Breeze theme. I actually would prefer a dark theme. So let's change to Breeze Dark just to have a dark theme. Of course, if we're going to change to a dark theme, I probably would want a light wallpaper. So let's close out of that. If I right-click on the desktop, let's configure desktop and wallpaper. And let's find a light-colored wallpaper. So we have all the standard KDE Plasma wallpapers that you've seen before, plus the one red-core branded wallpaper, which is the default wallpaper. But since I want a light wallpaper to contrast my dark theme, one of my favorite KDE wallpapers has always been this one here, Autumn 5.5. I'm going to click Apply, and then, yeah, I quite like that. That actually is a really nice contrast with a very light wallpaper against the dark theme. Now, I wonder if Control-Alt-T brings up a terminal. So Control-Alt-T does not bring up a terminal. So let me search for console with a K. That is KDE's console. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in. Let's go ahead and check what kernel version we're on. So uname-r. And the kernel version may change because I'm running that update. I bet there's a new kernel. But the one that shipped out of the box when this shipped was 5.15.71. And of course, that is an LTS kernel. Now, typically, when I open these terminals, I'll also run H-top to show you system resource usage. I know this is not going to be an accurate representation at all, because I've already mentioned I'm running that update of the system. We're upgrading all of our software through the Package Manager. And the Package Manager, again, sucks up a ton of CPU. So the CPU usage is through the roof. But that's because we're updating the system right now, as far as the RAM, we're using 1.3 gigs of RAM of the 6 gigs of RAM I gave this VM. That's probably twice as much as what it will use on a cold boot. But right now, we're using 1.3 gigs, again, because I'm running that update of the system. Let me go ahead and close the terminal here. And I'm going to go back into the menu system here. And let's go into system. And under the system category, we have the Vahi browser. We have Belina Etcher. Now Belina Etcher is a really nice application. So this is an application to burn USB sticks. And it's a really fantastic piece of free and open source software cross platform. It is an Electron app, which is partly why it's cross platform. But I think it's probably the best USB stick burner available, at least on Linux. Also under system, we have the Discover Software Center, which again, you probably are not going to use because they're going to have their own Sisyphus GUI package manager that you should be using. Dolphin, of course, is the file manager for KDE Plasma. This is just the standard Dolphin file manager here. Not much to see there. Also under system, we have the Info Center. Let's go ahead and click on that because that'll give us a little bit of the system information as far as what version of KDE Plasma we're currently on. We're on 5.25.5. We're on KDE Frameworks 5.99.0. Cute version 5.15.5. And of course, we're using X11. We're using Xorg, not Wayland here. And finally, also under system, we have Timeshift. Timeshift, of course, is a way to take snapshots of your system. What this will do is if something bad happens with an update. And because Redcore is a rolling release distribution, bad things can happen on updates. Sometimes an update will break things. And it's nice to have these snapshots where you can go and roll back to a previous working state of Redcore before the bad update happens. So that is essentially what Timeshift is. I personally, I don't use Timeshift, but I know many, many Linux users do use Timeshift as kind of, again, like a safety mechanism. For me, typically, even though I run rolling release distributions, typically updates this minor breakages, packages break or whatever. And typically, I try to solve those problems myself without just rolling back or downgrading packages or anything. But sometimes you just can't help yourself. Sometimes you run into a situation where an update breaks something, but because you depend on stuff for work, you need a working system right now. Sometimes it's nice to have those snapshots. And that's essentially everything that is installed out of the box on Redcore, the Sisyphus GUI package manager here. Let's see. Yeah, I'm still not even probably two thirds of the way with that update. So I'm just going to let that continue running. And I'm just going to put that in the background. So that was just a quick installation and first look at the latest release of Redcore Linux, Redcore Linux. I've always been a fan of it. It's a fascinating distribution, being that it's based off of Gen2, because there's really not very many Linux distributions that base off of Gen2. There's just a handful of them out there. And honestly, I think as far as Gen2 based distributions go, Redcore really stands out among the crowd. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I need to thank Gabe James, Matt Maxim, Mimic Mitchell, Paul West. Why you all know me? 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