lesslinux.org Development Blog

If you notice that for more than two months there are no fresh builds you might send me a short email. There are phases of commercial builds which usually spawn a few free builds for a smaller circle of testers. If you are interested and just ask me via email, I’ll give you access to such a build.

My latest image might have broken USB boot support due to a new version of the NASM assembler. This is fixed in the latest unstable build. Besides this the TeamViewer BLOB is fixed now (there is no directory teamviewer9 anymore in the tarball). Hivex correctly builds the ruby bindings and I based my “reset shell” tool on the new hivex library instead on chntpw. Firefox got updated to 34.0, Thunderbird to 31.3.

Have fun! lesslinux-search-and-rescue-uluru-20141203-124327.iso

You probably noticed that LessLinux uses Gtk2 only. Even applications like Abiword, Gnumeric and some of the Gnome tools are older versions – some three years old, partially taken from Gnome 2.32. The background of this decision was to provide a persistent look and feel as well as to keep the size smaller.

This is not suitable anymore.

I had to decide between moving to the Mate libs or to Gtk 3. Mate is a fork of the last stable Gnome. This move would probably have given me some updated utilities and libraries but it would not have an provided newer applications like Brasero, Abiword or Gnumeric. So I decided to move to Gtk3. I already moved the easier to move applications like Zenity, Brasero, Abiword, Gnumeric and Evince. Wireshark and the likes will follow soon. Then I will provide images for testing. Afterwards, I will move Ruby-Gnome and the WX based apps like FileZilla and TrueCrypt to Gtk3. However, some Gtk2 programs will stay for a while: Firefox will keep Gtk2 as default for a while and XFCE will not move to Gtk3 in the upcoming version 4.12. At least a version of LessLinux Search and Rescue will be possible that uses Nautilus, Openbox and Midori that will be Gtk3 only.

We are working on our first images that work on UEFI secure boot as well as on normal BIOSes. This is quite a challenge, since until now images were prepared with genisoimage and later patched with isohybrid to contain a partition table. This resulted in images that could either written to CD or to USB stick. When written to a USB thumb drive some magic in the initramfs moved ISO filesystem and bootloader and created a new MBR partition table with one empty FAT32 partition at the start of the USB stick. This way the majority of space of a thumb drive could still be used – especially users with drives of 8GB or larger appreciated this feature. (more…)

This article targets mainly readers from Germany and Austria, thus it is in German. The topics “user support” and “financial contributions” will soon arise for other users as well, then a similar article in English will follow.

LessLinux ist ein offenes System. Mir liegt viel daran, dass eine breite Masse von Nutzern aller “Erfahrungslevel” mit den LessLinux-Systemen arbeitet, Kritik übt und Verbesserungsvorschläge beisteuert. Mir geht es dabei besonders um Feedback “normaler Nutzer”, denn dieses ist unheimlich wichtig, wenn es darum geht, ein wirklich benutzerfreundliches System auf die Beine zu stellen. (more…)

What? LessLinux is a distribution that is aimed to be light, embeddable, simple, stupid. It is not based on any existing distribution and is currently solely intended to be used as a live distribution, started from CD, USB or via PXE.

Why? I use LessLinux as a test field for concepts and ideas that I want to incorporate in future projects. LessLinux is intended to evolve to a simple platform for different kinds of toolboxes and “single purpose distributions”.

Where? You might download a current development build of LessLinux from http://cdprojekte.mattiasschlenker.de/Public/LessLinux/

How can I help? Please prepare an USB stick with an empty folder “hwinfo” and send the archives in this folder after booting LessLinux to ms@mattiasschlenker.de. It will help me to work on the hardware support which is the biggest topic for now.

Why a blog? The chronologically ordered structure allows for easy updating. Blogs are usually well-indexed by search engines and using tags like “FAQ”, “Cheatcodes”, “Troubleshooting” will bring in some structure. As soon as LessLinux is settled a bit, a Wiki will follow.

Wo gibt es Infos auf Deutsch? Als Einstieg sei auf zwei Postings im Rootserverexperiment hingewiesen:

• Linux-Distribution oder Auto — der Aufwand, es zusammenzubauen ist etwa der gleiche
• LessLinux: Erste Alpha zum Download

If you find some bugs either in LessLinux or in this blog, please let me know. I try to release as early and as often as possible. This also included this blog, so most of the styles should work, but some might not be displayed ideal. The template currently uses a crude mixture of German and English, this will also be fixed in the next days.