 So, this is going to be a little bit of a different kind of Linux distribution. Today, I want to talk about Paraphesus, because I just discovered this in the last couple of days. I was scouring DistroWatch for something, and I noticed this distribution, Paraphesus, and I'd never heard about it. But it ranks rather high in the DistroWatch rankings. It is actually in their top 100. And it's odd seeing a distribution in their top 100 page hit rankings that I've never heard about. So, what is Paraphesus? Well, it's a small-scale, minimalist, command-line-based Linux operating system. It's an incomplete system, but it's constantly being improved. So, what this is, it's a live USB is essentially what it's going to be. You download an ISO, you burn it to a live USB, and you've got a very stripped-down Linux operating system on a USB. And when I say stripped-down, the entire ISO is 193 megabytes. So, there is no graphical programs on this at all. It is entirely the command line. So, you're not getting X or Wayland. There's not a package manager built into this thing either. All you get is what is actually on this 193 megabyte image, which is essentially the Bashel, the GNU Core Utils, and a few other extra niceties to help you live in this USB stick if you need to. For example, this is going to have the Lynx web browser, which is a terminal-based web browser. I think it's got a terminal-based email client built into it as well, and some other things. If I click on the user manual here, I will say their documentation here, their user manual, is actually really nice. It covers everything from burning the image to a USB, which I shouldn't need to cover, but they tell you how to do it with the DD command, if you want to do it through the command line with DD. But you can use a program like Etcher on Linux or Rufus on Windows to burn the ISO to a USB stick. But most of the user guide is just how to do stuff at the command line. For example, how to set a root password if you need to, because by default, the root user is not going to have a password set. You can do anything as the root user and pair of pieces. But for the most part, it's just your basic command line commands. It covers a lot of basic shell commands, the kind of commands that I spent a lot of time talking about on my YouTube channel. We've covered a lot of the standard GNU Core Utils, and their user manual is essentially how to use a lot of that stuff. So it's kind of neat. It's a really educational kind of Linux distribution, because to get around in this thing, you're really going to have to learn how to use some of the basic shell utilities. So let me switch over to this virtual machine that's just booting off the ISO directly. There's no hard drive, no storage attached. This is essentially the exact same thing as running a live USB. And when you first load up pair of pieces, it boots up automatically into this TTY login. And there's only one user on the system. It is root, and root doesn't have a password set by default. So it automatically logs you in. So some of the first things you'd probably want to do, especially if you were doing this on a USB stick, that you could write stuff to, first of all, let's verify that we're actually using Bash. So it looks like the root user's default shell is slash bin slash sh, which is just a sim link to whatever the default system shell is. But I'm assuming if I did a where is Bash. Of course, slash bin slash Bash does exist on the system. If you wanted to do any kind of customization with the Bash shell, let's see if they include any kind of Bash RC. So is there a Bash configuration file for the root user? Because we're logged in as root, right now we're in the slash root directory because that is the root user's home directory. And you can see there's no dot Bash RC for the root user. We could create one, but I'm not going to do that. And here in my virtual machine, I don't have storage attached. So it wouldn't be saved permanently anyway. I did a uname dash R. What is the kernel we're on? 6.0.2. That's not a terribly old kernel. So that's good. If I do a uname dash A, let's see all of the information. So Linux, of course, is the kernel. Parapheases, it's the name of the distribution. Obviously, GNU slash Linux is the name of the operating system in the kernel 6.0.2. If you wanted to read some documentation, you could use the links browser. So if I do links and then a URL such as parapheases.org, we'll take us to that website. And I just use the arrow keys to go down. And I find a link that I want to read, for example, new chapter, the screen manager. So this is about GNU screen, which is kind of like a terminal multiplexer. I don't know how to use it. But apparently they have it installed. And they have some documentation about that. If I wanted to read about it, I'm going to hit Q on the keyboard to quit. Do you really want to exit links? Yes. And I'm back here at the command line. Let me clear the screen to get that cursor back at the top of the screen. And really just reading some of the documentation, this is really, again, it's kind of an educational kind of project. You can see I'm actually going through their user documentation, for example, editing command line. So it tells you that by default, the Bashio uses Emacs style key bindings to navigate. If you wanted to set it to using VI style key bindings, it gives you the command to switch over to the VI bindings. Although interesting, VI is not installed, which is really weird, because VI is kind of the text editor on Unix-like operating systems. It's almost always there. And it's unusual to find a Unix-like operating system that doesn't have VI installed. And if you're asking about Vim, Vim is definitely not installed. So what is our text editor? Well, reading their manual, Ed, is the text editor. There's actually two. But Ed is one of their text editors. I did a video about the basics of how to edit a file in Ed. It's complicated. It's not something you probably really want to look into. Colon Q, I believe, quits out of it, similar to Vim. Or actually, I guess, just Q. Yeah. So no colon is needed. The only other editor here is Nano. And honestly, I think pair of pieces. I love the whole idea of a very minimal command line-only kind of operating system. But you've got to have better text editors, because you're going to do so much with scripting. You're going to have to create some scripts to make life work in this operating system. And most Linux users are not. Nobody's going to use Ed. Let's just be real. Nobody is going to use Ed as a text editor. And most of the kinds of people that would use this kind of operating system are probably not going to be happy with Nano either. VI at least needs to be installed, if not Vim. Vim would be a better option. But if they're trying to keep the operating system super small, at least give us VI. And if you want to uninstall Nano or Ed, that would be all right, too. But I would say keep Nano, I guess, for the Nano users. But you've got to have VI. And looking at some of their documentation, again, we were on a page a minute ago about screen. It looks like screen dash capital S. And then I could give it some name, would create another screen, another monitor, with a different prompt. And if I do Control-D to detach, I'm back to essentially the screen that I was on before. Either way, if I do that LS again, LSLA here, .melrc, you're probably wondering what that is. So there is a program that they have installed called Snill, I guess. Some kind of mill client. I don't have any idea how to use it. There is documentation. But if you wanted to, I mean, I guess I could take a look at the configuration. Well, for one thing, I would never set this up on camera anyway, because obviously I would have to enter some personal information as far as emails and accounts and things like that. So I'm not going to get that working on this video. But for those of you that need access to email from a essentially a TTY-only operating system, that is possible. And of course, you have the links web browser as well. So really, you could use this thing for a lot of things. There's really not much you couldn't do in this kind of operating system. The only thing you couldn't do is obviously things that have to be graphical. So you couldn't watch a video, right? But you couldn't edit a video. You couldn't create, I guess, images like you would in Gimp or Inkscape. But beyond that, pretty much everything else that you want to do on a computer can be done at the TTY. Going back to the documentation, that really just covering a lot of the standard GNU core utils, what is apropos, manDB, which is the database of the man pages. Of course, that's one of the most important things. Every Linux user really needs to know about are the man pages. It even covers the basic directory structure on Linux. So what is slash bin? What is slash boot, et cetera? It covers some of the more powerful commands, such as the find command. I've done videos on all of these command line programs, LSBLK, the list block command, and mount, and unmount, and charu, and yeah. So this is really interesting. There's some networking stuff here, if config, and then WPA sublucent, it looks like is installed and available to us as well. So that's a little bit of what you can do with pair pieces. Again, it's not much to it. Because, again, this image, 193 megabytes. And that is kind of cool. Honestly, I wouldn't mind keeping a USB stick around with something like pair of pieces on it. I find it a rather interesting project. And I'm going to keep up with it in the future. Right now, according to their website, again, they mentioned that it is an incomplete system. So I'm assuming that in the coming months, if not the coming years, it's going to see a lot more improvement. And it's going to become more than it currently is. It looks like it has been around. It has had several releases dating back to at least 2022. If I go to more news, I wonder what the oldest release is. Early 2021, February 2021. So this project has been around for a little more than two years. And again, ranks kind of high on Distro Watch. But for whatever reason, it has flown under my radar. I'm just now hearing about it. But yeah, pretty cool stuff. So check that out. Now, before I go, I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Gabe James Maxim, Mahomi Stubbald, Matt Miment Mitchell, Paul Royal West, Armored Dragon, Bash Potato, Chuck Commander, Ingrid George, Lee Marshdown, Methodist Nate, Erion Paul, Peace, Warshroom, Dora, Polytech, Realities for the Last Red Prophet, Roland Tools, Devlin, Willie, and Zenibit. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick look at pair of pieces would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these lovely, ladies and gentlemen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. Without these guys, I wouldn't be able to do what I do. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.