hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3776.txt

Episode: 3776
Title: HPR3776: A linux distro review
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3776/hpr3776.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 05:14:18

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,776 from Monday the 23rd of January 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Alinux Distro Review.
It is hosted by Bookworm and is about 10 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Alinux Distro Review.
Hello, Hacker Public Radio Bookworm again, checking in this time with a Linux review.
This one is Zero Linux, XERO Linux.
Don't remember where I stumbled across it or where I found it, but it is available from
their web page.
I'll include a link in the show notes.
I first installed it on an older Macintosh that I have.
It's an Intel Mac, mostly due to two factors.
One, I had the hardware that wasn't doing anything.
And two, one of the reviews I saw about it touted the Mac-like interface from a modified
KDE Plasma base.
As a Plasma user, how could I resist?
Previously installed for door 36 on the Mac, and was using random hardware issues at boot
time.
I wanted to see if the issue persisted on the Archbase, and since I'd never used Arch before,
this is a perfect test case.
The install, powered on the Mac, and if you have a Mac keyboard, you can press and hold
the option key to get a list of boot options.
I received boot into Fedora, or to the EFI partition on my USB drive with the zero Linux
installer.
Selected the EFI USB device, and was presented with four menu options, zero Linux installer,
our EFI boot options, Mac OS, and reboot.
Booting into the installer, the GUI, was providing me with first with, in the GUI
installer, I was first given the option to install several fixes for virtual environments,
including QEMU and VMware.
Next I was greeted, literally with a welcome screen proclaiming, welcome fellow Linux nerds,
unquote, I'm at home.
After selecting language, time zone, keyboard layouts, the disc partitioning options are
presented, and in much less confusing, verbiage than Fedora I might add.
You are given a choice of what swap, swap partition type to use, swap no hibernate, swap
with hibernate, and swap to file.
And a choice of file systems to use, including XFS, ButterFS, and the XT4.
I chose the XFS default, since this was just a toy, not a high availability or high capacity
server, no need for a ButterFS, and if I am happy with the state of the system, I may
well use it as a media server or aplex server, and in that case, I'll need a larger file
capacity of XFS.
Also available are the file system encryption checkbox and manual partition options.
Under user account setup, it detected an offer to set the machine name as MacPro 5.1,
which is fine.
It'll help me idea the device on my network, versus a unique name I would then have to
come up with, and would inevitably contain MAC in the name.
So why not just go with the default this time.
The page also included checkboxes to validate password strength, forcing strong passwords,
an auto login option, and an option to, quote, reuse user password as root password.
Obviously, for pseudo purposes, this would not be recommended, but in my situation, I did
choose it and choose also to use the strong password validation.
Next screen verifies all the selections, and when it is, when next is clicked, a pop-up
wants you to confirm, again, that you want to make the changes that you've selected.
Insert jeopardy music for the install time.
A couple of months back now at this point, I don't remember how long it took.
It wasn't an extraordinary long time.
There's a decent, but not extensive list of pre-installed apps that it has to install.
During the install, there is a button to observe what actually is going on in the background,
partitioning, file copies, compiles, etc.
I think I'll watch that for a few minutes, and then get tired of trying to keep up with
the scroll.
After the installation, it was complete at first boot and log in.
I can see a message on the boot screens, referring to the same hardware issue I saw on Fedora
8, something about CPU 0 bank 8.
There might be a hardware issue.
It is, after all, 8-10-year-old, no, an older Intel Mac.
Step one is, as always, update the system.
And let's see, 121 packages were ready for update at the date of install, including the
newest kernel at that time of 5.19.
Next stop, install proprietary drivers, open-source drivers, and non-pre-installed apps.
All this went very smoothly, as though the distra-maintainers had put lots of thought and work
into it, and to say I'm impressed is an understatement so far.
There's also a handy-dandy, quote, post-all system config button, and all my goodness
does it display all kinds of information, useful information about the hardware software,
pre-installed applications.
You name it, it comes up in that list.
Includes such goodies as YakWake, Avanti browser, KDE Connect, they're also pre-installed.
The only thing I really needed was a decent office suite.
I chose lever office, of course.
The Xero Linux Hello app, now, when you first log in, pop-up screen is quite a set up,
offering all the tools you need to do up and running, with an app browser very similar
to discovered, that's used by Fedora.
Finding lever office was very easy, take a checkbox, confirm a few dependencies, need to be
installed, click install, and move done.
I was able to seamlessly browse the internet, was able to watch a full-length Jackie Chan
movie on Netflix with no issues or buffering lever office calc open, opened in about five
seconds or so, only marginally slower than my regular i7 desktop PC running Fedora 35.
All in all, I got to say, it was a pretty stable, pretty solid, pretty clean process.
I've had no issues with it for over three months now.
I'm not using it as a daily driver, but it does stay on when I'm home.
I will use it for streaming videos from educational sites or things that I'm trying to do,
training on, trying to do additional learning. I've had no issues at all, I'm using a 32-inch
insignia TV as the monitor, and had no problems configuring sound to use the TV's internal speakers.
So sound is not an issue.
The actual hardware itself, it's a 2010 Mac Pro 5.1 with the dual Intel Xeon 12.4 processors
running at 2.5 GHz and 32 GHz of RAM with an ATI Radeon 5770 video card.
I picked it up at a local college surplus auction with no hard drive, and it does have four
pre-determined slots for hard drives that click directly into the motherboard, no additional cabling
needed. I installed a 500GB spinning rust hard drive for the operating system,
and an additional 500GB for additional storage. As far as older hardware is concerned,
it's still fairly quiet and crash-free. I think the longest uptime I've gotten so far is about
seven to ten days, somewhere in that neighborhood, and the only reason that shut down is because I
had to do it manually, because I was leaving, didn't want to leave the PC on unattended.
That's all I've got for today. If you like the Mac aesthetic, but you want to use open-source
software, I think this is a great choice. The operating system itself is your Linux, as I've
stated before, looks like the guy's behind it, or just guy or gal, or whoever it is behind it is
doing a fantastic job of really thinking out the details. Everything from the old gnome throwback
menu across the top. That's where you have your start buttons and your app menu and time and
things of that nature, with the Mac-like menu bar at the bottom with the bouncing icons for your
running apps and things of that nature. I'll put a screenshot with a link to the Xero Linux website
and some pictures, screenshots that I've taken on the device. If you notice, yes, that is the
MST3K guys in the bottom right corner of my screen where they belong. If you have any questions,
please comment in the show notes and hope you enjoy. Thank you. Have a good day.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does work. Today's show
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