4Mlinux 30.0
With more computers in the attic than on his workstation, Mayank Sharma keeps his eyes peeled for minimal distros.
With more computers in his attic than headsized spiders, Mayank Sharma keeps his eyes peeled for minimal distros and spiders.
There are quite a few distros designed for older hardware. However, what sets 4Mlinux apart is that you can mould it to your requirements. Each of the 4Ms in its name point a particular set of bundled apps. The distro has several system administration, monitoring and system rescue apps under the maintenance menu.
Similarly, it has a whole lot of multimedia apps to record, play, rip, edit, mix all kinds of audio, video and image files. The Mystery menu houses over a dozen popular, classic open source games including firstperson shooters like DOOM, Duke
Nukem 3D and Quake. Finally there are miniservers, which is one of the reasons 4Mlinux is unique among its peers.
4Mlinux employs Joe’s Window Manager (JWM) and includes a panel, an applications menu, quick launchers, desktop icons, the wbar dock and Conky applet. JWM isn’t the prettiest desktop but it’s one of the lightest options for resource-strapped machines, and the 4Mlinux developers have tweaked it enough to make it look pleasing.
While you can get plenty of mileage from the distro straight out of the box, 4Mlinux’s package management makes it unique. Actually, 4Mlinux doesn’t include a package manager in the traditional sense of the word. Instead it rolls packages as add-ons that you can grab from within the Extensions menu. The collection is diverse and includes a large number of mainstream open source apps, including Libreoffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, Opera, VLC, Virtualbox, Wine and more.
You can download any of these apps with a single click, which is a lot more convenient than a traditional package manager. On the downside, you can’t add any more apps besides the ones listed in the Extensions menu. This would have been a showstopper omission had 4Mlinux been a desktop distro.
However, 4Mlinux is primarily designed to resurrect old machines, and the ease with which you can flesh out the default install counts as a bonus. Once installed, the package is started from the same Extensions menu entry used for installation. If your computer lacks the resources to power an extension, you can uninstall it by simply removing its folder from the /opt directory.
The one feature that impressed us most about 4Mlinux is its miniserver function. The distro includes a host of servers including a full LAMP server with Apache and Mariadb, as well as FTP, NFS, Proxy, and several others. While their inclusion alone makes the distro stand above its lightweight peers, 4Mlinux also makes managing these servers pretty simple. You can start all the servers from the graphical menu, or only the ones you wish to use from the CLI. The distro also includes a web interface to help you tweak the configuration of these servers, along with tools such as Webmin and Adminer to manage the servers. Do note, however, that while 4Mlinux is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit machines, the servers are included only in the 64-bit edition.
There are several notable improvements in this release, with the developer continuing to chip away the rough edges. For instance, the distro now includes Opengl support for games right out of the box, and can automatically disable Pulseaudio to avoid issues with some classic games.
You can use all of the functions of 4Mlinux, including the servers, from within the Live environment. Installation is handled by a custom CLI script and is slightly complicated. You’ll first have to manually craft a partition for the distro using the Gparted partitioning tool from within the Live environment. Then fire up the installer and point it to this partition, which will then be formatted before installation.