NUTYX 10.5
Since he’s made deception a habit this month, Mayank Sharma now claims that he’s built his distribution from scratch.
Since he’s made deception a habit this month, Mayank Sharma now claims that he’s built his distribution from scratch. Does his assertion hold water?
We’re big fans of NUTYX here at LXF Towers. The last version of the minimalist distro we reviewed (LXF225) scored highly for its bloat-free design and its Cards package management system, which made light work of transforming the vanilla installation into a full-blown desktop. What impressed us most is that unlike other build-your-own distros, NUTYX was far more approachable.
In the couple of releases since that time, Nutyx has added a bunch of features to further lower the entry threshold. Two major changes in this regard are the availability of a Live mode on the ISOS and the graphical front-end to the cards package manager.
Nutyx 10.5 now has several ISOS for both 32- and 64-bit machines ranging from 315MB to 1.29GB. The smaller ISO will help anchor a barebones CLI install that you can flesh out on your own, while the chunkier ISOS gets you a full-fledged Mate or Openbox sporting desktop. The NUTYX ISO images subscribe to one of the two program branches. The Fixed branch is the stable version that will only receive security updates for the included packages. If you prefer fresher versions of tools, make sure you grab the ISO for the Rolling branch.
It’s alive, it’s alive!
Unlike earlier releases, the boot menu in recent NUTYX images enable you to boot into a Live environment. You can use this option to explore the distro and how well it plays with your hardware. Once you’re satisfied you can install NUTYX to your disk using its rudimentary ncursesbased installer. The CLI installer is fairly straightforward and the only inconvenience is the lack of a graphical partition manager.
NUTYX goes old school and asks you to use either cfdisk or fdisk to prepare partitions for installation. The rest of the installation process is fairly routine. Once it’s done, you can boot into your new NUTYX installation, which will either drop you to a shell or a graphical desktop depending on the ISO you’ve used for installation.
While the project suggests new users should stick to its Mate or Openbox sporting images, even converting a barebones install into a graphical one doesn’t take much effort. The process is well documented and it only takes a couple of commands to get to a graphical desktop.
NUTYX supports a large number of desktop environments, from lightweight ones like Mate and LXQT to heavyweights like KDE and Gnome. NUTYX simplifies the process of installing complex piece of software like a graphical desktop thanks to its dependency resolving package management system. Inside the desktop you can use the Flcards tool to add and remove programs.
The distro does have a few peculiarities though, particularly with its package manager. The CLI cards tool doesn’t list the dependencies or the total download size when asked to install a package. Instead, it starts downloading the packages straightaway, which can be unnerving if you’re installing a desktop environment. Flcards has some limitations as well. For one, you can’t select and install a whole group of packages at once. You’ll have to manually earmark each individual package you wish to remove. So for example, while you can easily install the Gnome desktop using the Collections tab in Flcards, removing it is done much faster using the CLI.
Barebones build-your-own distros are fast, but NUTYX is fast not only in operation but also in terms of deployment. Getting from a Cli-only environment to a ready-to-use desktop doesn’t take more than a handful of commands. Alternatively, you can start out with a Matebased desktop installation, which will still be an order of magnitude faster than any of the mainstream distros.