 Today, I'm going to be taking a quick first look at the recently released Slackle 7.3 their open box edition. Now Slackle is a very interesting Linux distribution, Slackle is based on Slackware and Salix. Salix was a Slackware based distribution, it's no longer active, it's been dormant for a number of years. I think Salix last saw a release like four or five years ago. So Slackle kind of is the spiritual successor to Salix OS. So Slackware based and they have a number of different editions. I want to say they do three main editions. They do KDE, Mate, and of course, Openbox. And you guys know I love the Openbox window manager. So Slackware based, Openbox window manager. It's going to be a fantastic distro, right? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to run through a first look inside of the actually, I probably won't run through the install because this release here, the Slackle 7.3 Openbox is really designed to be run as a live USB, although I guess you could install it to a hard drive. Slackle's country of origin is Greece. They do have 32 bit and 64 bit ISOs available. The ISO size for Slackle 7.3 Openbox is 1.8 gigabytes in size. The release announcement is basically a forum post and they go through the installation process as far as how you get Slackle 7.3 Openbox installed on a USB stick or an external hard drive or an external USB SSD drive and whatever it is you want to install it to. So they have this link here, Slackle startup guide and you could click on that. And it's just another forum post and how do you want to read the startup guide? There's a PDF, an EPUB or HTML site. I'm going to read the PDF and you can see it's a very nice little PDF file that they put together explaining to you all about Slackle, how to burn the ISO, how to install it, how to install it using UEFI, if that's what you want to do, etc. For me, I'm just going to fire this up in Vert Manager today. And we're just going to go through the live environment. So let me switch over to the VM I created here. And when you first boot into the ISO here, of course, you have a language option screen. That's the very first thing that's greeted. So for me, English US is what I want. And then we get our boot menu really is Slackle live, Slackle live persistence, Slackle live ACPI equals off, Slackle live snow swap, Slackle live text mode. I'm just going to choose the first option, which should be our standard graphical desktop environment with the Openbox Window Manager. And this may take a minute or two to boot up since we're booting directly off an ISO. So this isn't, you know, an installed Linux distribution. One thing to note, if you are going to try out Slackle, as far as a live environment, the password for the live environment is live. And if you need a user and a password for the live environment, the user is one O-N-E and the password is one O-N-E. So this is the live environment. Let me see if I can go ahead and get a proper screen resolution. So if I run an X-Rander, I wanted to make sure that 1920 by 1080 was available, because that's my monitor resolution. So let me hit enter on that. And now we have a much better resolution. Let me move this cocky window out of the way. That is interesting that their cocky window is an actual floating window. It's not actually pinned to the desktop. And let me see if I can zoom in here in this terminal. This is the LX terminal. I'm going to run a uname space dash R. Let's get the kernel for this particular release. This is kernel version 5.4.50. By the way, Slackle 7.3 is based on Slackware's development branch. So the packages are a little fresher. Where, you know, the standard Slackware stable branch, of course the packages are ancient, old and crusty. It's very stable, though. You can see in the command prompt here, we have our username here in the live environment. As I mentioned from the documentation, the user is one. And if we had to use a password, like a root password for anything, that also would be one for this user. Let me go ahead and see if htop is installed on the system out of the box. It is being open box. You would expect it to not use a whole lot of system resources. It's using practically no CPU at the moment, which you would expect we're not really doing anything. It's using 382 megs of the 4 gigs of RAM that I gave this VM. Let me go ahead and close that out. The khaki on the desktop, while it is useful information, I'm going to go ahead and close that out too. I really don't need to see that at the moment. If I wanted to, we could run through the installation. I will bypass the installation for now. And I'm just going to take a look at the live environment on this video. So we do have a menu system. It looks like the panel they're using is a traditional kind of panel with a menu system and your PIN tabs and your desktop switcher and everything. I think this is probably the LX panel, the standard panel that comes with the LXDE desktop environment. I'm assuming that's what that is. If we right click on the desktop, of course we have our traditional open box menu here, the traditional open box right click menu. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go through the menu system here in the bottom panel. And let's see what is installed here on Slackle 7.3 open box. Now this is, again, designed to be run as a live distribution. As such, there's probably a lot more programs here by default than what you might expect on most Linux distributions. So under audio and video, we have the Asunder CD Ripper. Probably not a program most people would install on a Linux distribution, but again, because it's designed to be a live USB, it's going to have some extra cruft on it just in case you need it. We have the Brasero Disc Burner. We have Excel, which I believe is a music player. I've never actually used Excel myself. Yeah, it's just your standard music player. I do notice that I've got some weird graphical glitches going on here in the VM. It's probably a video driver problem here in the VM. I may need to correct that if it keeps giving me problems. But right now performance seems to be pretty good. It's just that window wanted to slide a little further across the screen than what I moved it. I don't know. That may be a compositor problem too here in the VM. We have ISO Master, also under audio and video. So this would be, I'm assuming, for burning images to drives and USB sticks. We have Install Multimedia Codecs, of course. That's so you can play all your multimedia formats, your audio and video formats from this live USB stick. We have M Player, which is, of course, the standard movie player. M Player is kind of an old school video player. Let me move my head out of the way. You see, you've got the window and you've got the little control section down here, which is kind of neat. It has that retro look, right? It looks like something from 20 to 25 years ago, right? That's not a modern kind of video player. Also under audio and video, we have the pulse audio stuff, such as Pavu control. We have some cute V4L2 stuff as well. V4L2 is video for Linux. And we have SM Player. SM Player is a lightweight, minimal video player for Linux. Very popular application. Also under audio and video, we have the MPV media player. Under development, we have Genie. Genie is a text editor, a plain text editor. It's really more like an IDE though. It's got some plugins and it's got some really interesting stuff. You can add syntax highlighting and line numbers. All the stuff you want to do if you do any kind of scripting or programming. Genie is a fantastic little IDE. I've used Genie a lot in the past. Also under development, we have some acute stuff for the acute toolkit. Under graphics, we have GIMP, which is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. That is our free and open source alternative to something like Adobe Photoshop. So this would be for editing raster images. And let's see what version of GIMP they are on. If I go to about, we get GIMP 2.10.20. So that is a recent release of GIMP. Also under graphics, we have Simple Scan for our scanners. We have View Noir, which is a image viewer. Lightweight, minimal image viewer. You see it often in distributions that ship window manager only, you know, open box, flux box, things like that. We also have MT Paint also under the graphics category. We have a network category where we have the Avahi server. We have FileZilla. FileZilla is an FTP client. I really love FileZilla. I've been a FileZilla user actually for probably 15 years or more. I was actually using FileZilla, which is an open source program. Back when I was still running Windows years and years ago, you know, back in the XP days, FileZilla has been around that long. It is a fantastic FTP client. So really nice little program. I love FileZilla. We also have Firefox as the standard browser here on the system. And Firefox is taking a little time to load. And this website is taking a little time to load. It's loading automatically the Slackle website. So this is the About page or Slackle. Let's see what version of Firefox we are on. If I go to Help and about Firefox, we are on Firefox 78.0.1. Let's close out Firefox, close all the tabs. Also under Network, we have Pigeon, which is an instant messaging client. That's kind of a odd choice. You don't see that on very many Linux distributions these days. But again, because this is designed to be a live distribution, there's a little extra stuff here, you know, just to prevent you from having to go out and get something in case you need it. We have something called Socus 3G. I'm not exactly sure what that is. Look like it had something to do with like a cell phone tower or something from the icon. I'm not exactly sure what this is. Is there any kind of about information for this particular app? No, there isn't. Let me close that out. Also under Network, we have Thunderbird for our email client. We have Transmission for our BitTorrent client, and we have the Wicked Network Manager. Of course, that's for getting our Wi-Fi working. Under Office, we have the full LibreOffice suite, and we also have our PDF viewer, which is the actual document viewer. LibreOffice 6.4 is installed, and it includes Base, which is the database program calc, which is the spreadsheet program draw, Impress, Math, and Writer. And we have a Settings category. We have the Adobe Flash Player. Will Adobe Flash ever die? I doubt it will. People are still having to ship Adobe. We have Customize, Look, and Feel, which should be the LX Appearance tool, and it is. And this is where you could change the GTK theme, such as, for me, I like dark themes. I would change it maybe to the Abway to Dark theme. It's not a horrible choice, and some of the other choices here are not great. A lot of the standard OpenBox themes and LXDE themes, but really, the Abway to Dark theme is probably the best option here. We also have icon sets here. By default, they are using the Mate Fienza, but since we chose a dark theme, let's choose the Fienza dark just to make sure, because I am probably going to change the OpenBox theme as well. As a matter of fact, I should go back into the System Settings here and see if I can find the OpenBox Configuration Manager. There it is. And since I did the Abway to Dark, there are Abway to OpenBox theme. There isn't, but there's some other dark themes here for OpenBox, like that one there. If I choose that, at least now, I have a black OpenBox right-click menu to go with the GTK theme that should be dark now, but the GTK theme, I guess I didn't save it, because it's still a light theme. I must have messed that up. Yeah, I didn't hit Apply. So let me go to Abway to Dark, Apply. There we go. And now we've got a dark panel, dark theme, and now a dark OpenBox theme to go along with it. Although the bar for OpenBox is a light theme if it doesn't have focus, but I don't mind that. Alrighty, that looks a little better. I wonder if I can change the wallpaper by right-click on the desktop. Where is the wallpaper? It's probably under the Preferences category. Is there any kind of wallpaper utility desktop preferences? Let's click on that. And Appearance wallpaper, here it is. Looks like it's using the same tool that desktop environments like LXDE use. So can I change the wallpaper? It looks like by default, they only have two options. That default slackle, which has got the field here, or this one here, slackle-gen die. I'm not sure what that's supposed to be. It looks like it is a Penguin Jedi. That is an interesting wallpaper, but surely they've got something better on the system than that. So that was in User Share Wallpapers. Let me go up to User Share Backgrounds and see if there happens to be anything in that particular directory. User Share Backgrounds is actually not even here. So all we have is these two wallpapers. I hate to say it, but the Penguin Jedi is the better of the two wallpapers, in my opinion. I think that's the one I would go with. Now we should talk a little bit about package management with slackle. I have actually checked out slackle before on the channel. It's been a couple of years since I've taken a look at slackle, but I do know that they have their own package manager. They have two package managers on the system. They have, of course, the terminal-based one, and they have a graphical one somewhere on the system. And the terminal command line way of doing your package management is using a slapped git. So if I do a sudo slapped-git, so it's similar to apt-git, and you know, Ubuntu-based distributions and Debian-based distributions, sudo slapped-git space and then dash u, I believe updates the system. And then we have to enter our sudo password and remember our user is one, and the password also is one. And that should update the system. This was just released, you know, three or four days ago, so there really shouldn't be anything to update, but I will let this run for a second, the terminal over here. I'm very similar to how I did the update. Matter of fact, let me go ahead and cancel this. I was going to let that run, but it's very similar to how I just did the update, the sudo slapped-git space dash u. If you did sudo slapped-git and then dash i for install, then you could install a package. I don't know what you need to install. Maybe you need to install glibc or something here, whatever package it is that you needed to install. That's how you would do that. Let's see if we can find the graphical package manager on the system. The graphical package manager is called g-slapped, so graphical slapped, and it's probably under the system category. There it is, g-slapped. I don't remember what this one looks like. We do need the sudo password, but I think it is, yeah, it is. It looks like it is basically a synaptic package manager for slapped-git instead of for apt-git. So if you've ever used the synaptic package manager in Debian or any Debian-based Linux distribution, it looks like it's the exact same format. So that is your graphical package manager. Let's also go back to the system category here, because a lot of these system tools are useful on a live USB, especially if you're going to use Slackl 7.3 for a system rescue USB stick. So you do have some interesting tools here. So you do have g-parted, the partition editor. That's very nice to have on a live USB stick in case you're doing any kind of rescue work. Also, LX terminal was the terminal that we saw earlier. That is the default terminal on the system for those that were wondering. Also under system, we have some printer settings, repository mirrors, in case we need to play with our mirrors a little bit while we're installing software. We also have some language stuff we could play with and user and groups as well. There is a utility category as well, and that's just your standard accessories that come with most Linux distributions, such as your character map, your archive manager for zip and unzip and all that, your calculator, your plain text editor, which in this case is leaf pad. And we also have OB menu here as well. OB menu allows you to add or delete things from the right click, open box menu. So it's a nice, easy way to edit your open box menu, because if you didn't have that particular tool installed, what you would have to do is edit a XML file that is installed on the system. It's usually in dot config slash open box slash menu dot XML. That particular document will be on the system somewhere, and you actually have to edit that particular document to edit this menu. OB menu makes that process quite a bit easier. But anyway, that was just a very quick first look at the recently released Slackle 7.3, their open box edition. It's a really interesting Linux distribution because there's just not that many Slackware-based distributions anymore, and Slackle is a very small distribution. You probably would never hear about it if people like me didn't actually cover it on YouTube. As a matter of fact, Slackware itself is waning in popularity these days. You don't see that many people running Slackware. It's a small Linux distribution these days. So Slackware-based distributions are just that much smaller, and I find that disturbing. I want to give some of these distributions more love on the channel, because there's way too many Debian-based distributions out there and way too many Arch-based distributions out there. So when I see a Slackware-based distribution, I want to give it a little airtime because I think these distributions do deserve the coverage. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Pablo, Nate, Corbinian, Mitchell, Entropy UK, Arch5530, Chris, Chuck, DJ, Donnie, Dillon, George, Lewis, Omri, Paul, Sean, Tobias, and Willie. They are my highest-tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Slackle 7.3 open box wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All of these fine ladies and gentlemen help support my work over on Patreon, because there are no corporate sponsors here at DistroTube. This channel is sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, consider doing so. You'll find DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.