 From time to time I find myself browsing through distro watch just being interested in the number of distributions that are out there and From time to time I discover a distro that just makes me pause and say what the fuck is that distro? I've never heard of that distro before when that happens I make one of these videos and you and I together we install that distro and we discover exactly what the that distro is and That's what we're going to do today. So today. We're going to be taking a look at a distro called Scepter Linux S E P T O R now. This is a very special Linux distribution from what I can tell there's not a ton of stuff out there on it They do have a website, which is better than some of the distros that I looked at on this series They also have a wiki, but mostly that is just release notes. So there's not a ton of stuff here literally The amount of documentation that describes exactly what scepter is is a paragraph long, which I'm going to read you right now So this is their website and as we can see they are based on Debian They run KD plasma and they have tour technologies now We'll talk more about the tour and the security stuff here in a second, but if we hit read more It's going to scroll us down to this this is Exactly and only what they have told us what they are But like this is all you get as far as I can tell now there have been times where I've been wrong many times as I Continually tell you on this channel. I get things wrong, and I miss things if there's more to your description than this I haven't found it. I'll show you there wiki in a minute, and maybe we'll discover together something that's a little bit different, but This is what we know scepter Linux is an operating system that provides users with a perfect computing environment For surfing the internet anonymously scepter provides users with a stable and reliable distribution That is based on Debian GNU slash Linux and works on a wide range of computers Distribution featuring a customized KD plasma desktop and tour technologies And then it has a list of the things that we can expect on the ISO now From what I've been able to Suss out if you will This is a live environment. It's meant to be it's meant to be used in a live environment And is not meant to be installed on hardware something similar to like tails or cubes So that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna look at this We're not gonna actually install it because there's no installer from what I could tell But we're gonna take a look at the live environment and see what it's all about But first let's go ahead and take a look at the little wiki agent because we we know wikis are always very informative So as far as I can tell again, all this does is link to the description of the apps that is that it has included So this stuff like for example KD plasma 5 This is just a copy and pasted description of plasma 5 as far as I can tell and then we have this the release notes So we'll scroll to the most recent release which was October or August 10th of this year And these are the release notes. That's Yeah, that's it. There is it. There's a video here, but that I have not watched but it gives us the versions of all the new software and It says it's been upgraded to Debbie and bullseye as of October 10th, which I might be wrong But I think that was before bullseye was actually official, but I might be wrong on that I think that bullseye came out in September, but Again could be wrong on that time just flies when you're having fun. So I'm not sure. Anyway, so literally That's all the documentation we have. That's all we know about Scepter Linux. Now it may have Come across that I'm judging them, but that's mostly just the tone that I use for these videos But they don't at least so far have done a very I don't think that they have done a very good job of telling us what their distribution is about I actually got most of my information On scepter from this page here, which is on distro watch was just I mean, it's a sad thing to say Scepter is a linux distribution Which provides users with a preconfigured computing environment for surfing the internet anonymously It is based on debian's testing branch and it uses privixy For privacy enhanced proxy together with the the tor and an enmity network to modify web page data and ht Http headers before the page is rendered by the browser the distribution uses kd plasma as the preferred desktop environment And it also includes the tor browser and onion share for anonymous file sharing. So That's All we know enough bitching about the lack of documentation. Let's go ahead and see what the thing is all about So I have A virtual machine here all set up to go now. I've been using this one here for a little I have looked at this a little bit because I wanted to make sure That this was a distribution that would fit in with the series, but needless to say we're making the video So let's go ahead and jump in so I first I need to go through and actually change The graphics display driver because from the little bit I used it the default display driver for virtual box did not work Like it loaded up, but I was having problems with it getting full screen It was a mess. So oh, hey, you want to hear something I didn't see it said there's an install option here We're installing. I didn't even see that earlier. We're going to see if we can install it Here we go. So this is looks like uh, something similar to the the devian installer just a little bit kind of also Void linux, I think has something like this is this is an end cursors installer So we're going to choose english the united states is fine american english is fine So here we go here. So we're Doing some stuff This is going to be completely unplanned because I did not see that install option Before I just loaded it in the live environment I was under the impression that it was just for live environments But apparently I was wrong. So we're going to install this thing and see how it goes We're doing a lot of different stuff here. Let's see how it goes. Um Okay, so you need to set a password for root A good password the root user should not be an empty password If you leave this empty the root account will be disabled and the system initial user account will be given the problem That's what I want it to do. Okay I want the regular user to have Pseudo privileges So please enter the same root password again. So we're just going to hit continue Okay, a user account will be created. It's weird that they do the user account first thing first, but okay So full name for the new user Matt continue username for your account continue Choose a password for the new user now. We're going to choose a very hard password to guess And then we'll continue and then it's going to ask us to do it again. Probably. Yep Continue And we're going getting the time for the network time server. Okay, so it did select eastern which is good It's exactly where we need to be Okay, so now we're going to do the partitioning So anyways, uh, let's see the installer can guide you through the partitioning Through partitioning a disk using different standard schemes or if you prefer you can do it manually With with guided partitioning You will still have a chance later to review and customize results If you choose guided partitioning for an entire disk, you will next be asked which disk should be used So we're going to use guided use the entire disk and that's the right disk. That's the only one in the virtual box partitioning scheme So all files in one partition recommended for new users or separate home partition or separate home bar and temp partition So we're just going to put them all in one. That's not usually the way I usually do it, but this is fine. Okay, so Let's go ahead and finish partitioning and write changes to disk. So that's a nice little partition thing sometimes with these these Encourages installers you have to kind of do your own thing Sometimes you even have to enter like fdisk or cfdisk in order to do the partitioning So it's nice that this actually does it for you. So that's nice, uh, write the changes to disk. Yes Here we go Unlike the other videos where I was very persistent in trying to get this installed if this doesn't install I will just scrap it and we'll go look at the live environment, which is what I was planning on doing Anyway, so I'm going to cut this away and I will come back when it gets to the next step Okay, we've gotten to the next step This it says it seems that this new installation is the only operating system on this computer If so, it should be safe to install the grub bootloader To your primary drive if your computer has other operating system that the installer failed to detect this will Make the operating system temporarily unbootable. So we just go ahead and hit yes And then we'll use the same disk and then we'll see how this goes Okay, it says installation is complete. So it is time to boot into your new system Make sure you to remove the installation media so that you can boot into the new system rather than restarting the installation So we're going to go ahead and hit continue And it should reboot here. Okay. Here we are. We have loaded into the system. I am Actually quite shocked that that worked usually I have the hardest of times with the end curses installers They don't like me for whatever reason every time I try one of those things. They just break And I don't blame them. I blame me. That's obviously I do something wrong, but this time it worked So we're going to enter our password here And hit enter and we have the traditional kde splash screen coming up And here we are we are in scepter linux now first impressions, which aren't really first impressions because I used it earlier, but Uh, my impressions of the desktop and the layout is that it is okay I'm going to show you a few things that I like a few things that I don't like And uh, the wallpaper is, um Interesting it is custom made so kudos for that. They didn't just use a stock wallpaper I would change it though because I don't like that color. Anyways, uh Going into the menu here. We're going to go ahead and first we're going to open up a terminal So first we'll do uh control t And that does open up a terminal here. We'll just do first we'll go to do neofetch And we have um, we've got to resize this we can actually see the damn thing And we'll do that again. All right, so we're this was running kernel 5.10.0. This is It says 2 000 packages pre-installed now Don't be alarmed by that. This is a devian based distro. Devian distros always have way more packaging It has something to do with the way they count packages So whereas you install arch you're going to have something like 700 out of the box Is really they're kind of the same. It just has to do with how they count the dependencies and stuff So this is using bash 5.1 This is plasma 5.20 Which is as far as i'm aware pretty old at this point I'm not sure We'll look here in a minute, but i'm pretty sure that plasma 5.20 is pretty old at this point It might be the last lts. Uh, this is that is using the oxygen theme and the scepter 2 plasma theme Along with the alufo alufold Uh icons, which i've never heard of before so we've done that. Let's go ahead and see If htop is installed, which is not so sudo apt update and and sudo apt upgrade Always an update your computer before you try to install something I I have learned that the hard way before so We'll go ahead and do this and see how long it takes to update That's quite a lot of updates, but not surprising go ahead and because this iso was released. I believe in august I might be wrong about that, but it has been quite a while. I believe so we're just going to update this Okay, that has been updated. Let me go ahead and do a sudo apt install htop here and then we can Run htop so we can see here it's using about 723 megabytes of memory, which is about normal for plasma. It has 80 tests 219 threads and It looks like xorg and console and stuff for the ones that are using the most in terms of cpu percentage right now, which is again 100% normal because htop seems to take a little bit of memory. So As you can see the theme here is very breeze ask, but breeze circa plasma 4 If you well, maybe plasma 3. I'm not sure at one point kd kde Not kde plasma kde had these round buttons, which were just Fugly it's all get out in my opinion. So It's weird that they chose to basically just use plasma, which is or excuse me. They just chose to use breeze But they changed the window decorations not my cup of tea, but not anything you can't change. Anyways, we can go and close that And now we can go through and see some of the applications that are installed Now i'm not going to go through all of them because there are a ton of applications installed Again, that's what led me to believe other than Distro watch being you know distro watch that this was for live environments only because a lot of times the live environment Distros include a lot of software out of the box Because then you don't have to go through and install them. So in terms of graphics. We have gimp. We have The holy bria office suite is here ocular spectacle for doing screenshots k color chooser I'm pretty sure the entire plasma stack is here as well because we have a whole bunch of k Apps ones, you know the things that are that have k at the beginning of their name So let's go ahead and go back to all applications here the internet We have a hex chat kd connect onion share, which is I believe that that's the file the The network file sharing app for tor the tor network Qtox, which is another tor client and we have the tor browser as the default browser We can go ahead and open up this now It's said in that on the distro watch that they do special things to filter out particular parts of the internet in order to Facilitate anonymity how that works. I'm not exactly sure, but I'm going to go ahead and hit connect here I've Have a very interesting profession right now. I've never once in my life used tor like never So I'm not going to be able to really tell you much about this. I've never had a Desire to actually learn about it I will say that that responsiveness isn't all that great, but This is basically firefox as far as I know but with like uber privacy You know enabled and then you use it for privacy reasons It has an ad blocker installed by default, which is nice. So yeah, that's tor. I wonder what if we Go down here and see this is version We're getting an update. Whoa. Okay. So this is version 10.5.4 based on firefox 78 I'm pretty sure tor is almost always based on the esr Version, but I might be wrong about that But anyways, that's tor how that affects like let's just say we wanted to go to Great website I will that waiting for it to load Our systems detected unusual traffic on your computer Apparently, I won't go to youtube possibly because this is tor. I'm not sure. What if we just go to regular google um I'm assuming this is a tor feature because google's you know, you're gonna track you a lot So but you know, this is more for me learning what tor is about then probably what you guys are interested in because Everybody out there probably knows what tor is and how to use tor. I don't know anything about it other than exists So i'm just going to leave that because just assume that I don't know what all i'm doing So there's nothing wrong there. I would probably just install firefox But then again, if you're using this if you're using this you're using it because you want those anonymity features You're not going to be using it because you want to visit youtube and google and stuff like that But I don't know it's all going to depend on what your use case is because if you're downloading this you want To use that tor stuff and you're using it for a reason Granted they haven't done a very good job Of explaining the features and the reason why you'd want to use their distro because they literally have one paragraph of descriptions on their website Which I seem to be coming back to again. All right, so let's go ahead and multimedia here We have elsa eliza for the music player. We have vlc Office we have all the library office suite here. We also have several of the Contact k organizer and contact information for the kdp suite the plasma suite Is what I was looking for that word that I was looking for The words are hard. The words are just not flowing today. I don't know what's going on I should have taken the day off like I was planning on doing and then I wouldn't have to stumble over my words so much Anyway, settings are just going to be the standard kd setting stuff. We also have some napkin package manager here for installing Pack, uh, you know applications and such Utilities, let's see here. We have a whole bunch of k stuff like For the kd plasma suite the stuff we expected, uh, and then that's it pretty much So let's go ahead and take a look at the settings here And we'll see in terms of like Themes we just have regular breeze and the scepter theme But you can go through and obviously add it whatever things you want This is using the the breeze dark Plasma style and the application style, which is also breeze. But the window decorations is, uh, Oxygen that's the yeah, I'm pretty sure oxygen was a previous version for kde. I'm almost positive I remember that I remember those because I Highly dislike them because they're really I don't know. There's skewer morphic and I've never cared for that kind of thing Anyways stupid thing to critique. I mean literally They're matt you've changed it stop bitching about it Seriously anyways, this is just uh, let's go down here to uh Let's see if we actually I think katie plasma or katie Um Removed the system information out of the the settings panel. So this is version 20 5.20 5 for plasma. This is using the apps version to the use to tell you what apps katie plasma apps you are using Apparently that's not the case anymore. Uh, let's go ahead and open Go back to tour here for a second and see what the latest. Oh, we got to connect again always connect automatically Latest katie plasma release Because I don't actually remember what version katie plasma. I haven't used plasma in ages I used to like You know follow that religiously like ooh new shiny new things I will say That if you're gonna use tour expect us to be really Really slow. I'm but I'm positive that that's a tour thing Not a problem with scepter, but again if you're using this you're using it because you want to use tour and it's just This this would this would be pretty much borderline unusable for me. I mean I've not been sitting here for 30 minutes. It's not 30 minutes I have been waiting for 30 minutes for this load. No 30 seconds But still that's that was quite a and we still got to go to the page 5.24. I'm I think maybe a few moments later Okay, so it took a while for me to actually find that information apparently they bury it a little bit katie plasma 5.23 appears to be the latest so this is A little old, but again, this is debbie and so it's not that surprising But according to distro watch it uses the testing version according to their website. They're using bullseye So which one's true? I'm not actually sure because they can't both be true so From this I would say that they're using the stable branch It's not the testing branch because if they were using the Testing branch, I think that they would be at least up a couple more versions I don't think they'd be that the latest But I think that they'd beat up a little bit more than five that 20 which is several releases now old So you don't use a debbie and base distro for the the latest and greatest So it's not that big of a deal But you should just keep that in mind if you decide to use this now overall I think this is probably better as a live like environment because as a Like an installable distro. I mean, it's not bad. It's not, you know, horrible or anything, but I think that the merit of this distro Is is in that you would be able to take it with you and always be anonymous I think if that would is the way that it's probably intended to be used and there's nothing wrong with it It's fairly it's really surfaceable. It uses kd plasma, which which I really like it has reasonable applications installed It doesn't have a ton of duplicates which which I've seen a ton of distributions that are for live environments do like they have just A ton of duplicates because they don't want you to have to download stuff every time you You know boot into live environments. So it this doesn't do that It's well does fairly well designed. It has you know, I we don't look at the wall papers But I mean I suppose we could do that Here are the wall papers that they have installed Some debbie and wall papers And that's I mean Yeah, so I mean there we will look at the wall papers. There's not really all that much more We could take from from this As I said, I'm positive that this would make more sense as a live environment. I don't know If it would allow you to install stuff on the live environment and then have it be persistent I'm not sure if that has happened because like I said, I'm not sure how this is supposed to be used Because they don't have to do a very good job of explaining What it is other than it's supposed to be something that facilitates anonymity with the tour thing So if you are looking for a distribution that is Kind of built around tour I'm because I'm sure there's a lot of like under the ground things that they've built in to facilitate tour being part of the operating system Uh, because it seems to be their thing Uh that I just don't know about because like I said, I don't know anything about tour Like zero things about tour the way, you know I know they talk about onions a lot, but I couldn't tell you what that is It's something that I'm gonna have to learn. I should learn it. I just have never taken an opportunity to do so Uh, that's for me to do and for me to improve myself on anyways That is it for this video. Uh, I don't have much more to say about it is it's yet another debbie and based Distribution, but it seems to be more They have their niche which seems to be focusing on people who desire anonymity How this compares to tails. I couldn't tell you I've never used tails So maybe that's the next one I take a look at so that is it for this video If you would like to get in contact with me or you have thoughts on On this particular distro you can leave those in the comment section below I love our conversations and love to get into it with people who disagree with me It's always fun. If you want to get in contact with me on twitter You can do so at the linux cast you can support me on patreon at patreon.com Slash linux cast before I go or let's take one thing my current patrons devon chris east coast web gen 2 is fun too patrick hill primus marcus megalin jackson every tool steve a sit a Mitchell art center amityas merit camp jester lee j-dog in the bsd rock. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time