Linux
Unable to control his fetish for tinkering with new distros, at long last Mayank Sharma finds himself a newcomer that isn’t half bad…
The Windows 7 EOL was too good a hook to miss out on and now there are several new distros that promise to offer a suitable replacement for the popular-but-defunct proprietary OS. The awkwardly-named DXT2 is another addition to this growing list and came about because its developer wasn’t satisfied by any of the existing desktop distros. The main pull of the Debian 10-based distro is its rendition of the Xfce v4.12 desktop environment that’s been heavily customised to give users a lighter and user-friendly experience.
Two of the more noticeable differences in DXT2’s Xfce4 desktop are the Tint2 panel and the Pmenu applications menu, which are used by default in place of the official Xfce components. The lightweight elements have been tweaked to blend with the other components of the desktop, which have also been modified to match the distro’s minimalistic approach. For instance, the menu is one of the noticeable elements that’s been taken from the Thunar file manager.
Talking of the file manager, the developer has also appended some useful custom actions in the right-click context menu. You can, for example, open the current folder inside a root terminal in addition to a normal terminal. Similarly, you can also edit any file as the root user as well. If you work with images, there’s an option to convert any image file to JPG at the click of a button.
DXT2 has separate Live and installation mediums. The installation medium defaults to the graphical Debian installer and the developers haven’t bothered to delete references to Debian 10, which is a good thing since they’ve prioritised execution of their ideas to the desktop experience over cosmetic changes to the installer. If you can earmark the entire disk to the distro, you can use the installation script on the Live medium to anchor the distro to your disk as well.
Down to the bone
DXT2 is designed to be used as a light base to act as a foundation to build your installation. The distro ships with barely any programs and while it uses the standard Debian Buster repositories, DXT2 doesn’t even ship with a package manager.
To flesh out the distro, you can use the custom installation scripts that reside inside the / usr/share/dxt2 directory. The current release has scripts to install Google Chrome, LibreOffice, Sublime Text, TeamViewer, VirtualBox as well as Samba and CUPS. These will work best for new Linux users. Experienced campaigners can use apt from the CLI or install the Synaptic package manager if they prefer using a graphical interface.
In addition to the installation scripts, the distribution has some scripts for some system administration tasks as well. If you’re using the distro on a computer with lots of RAM, there’s a script that will activate the tmpfs filesystem for speedier file accesses. If you’ve installed DXT2 on a SSD, there’s a script that will set up a weekly TRIM cron job and also set the scheduler to deadline to improve performance.
When you’ve finished setting up your desktop as per your requirements, you can use the exportiso script to dump all the customisations into a Live ISO image. The image mirrors your installation in that it contains all the applications that you’ve added to your DXT2 installation as well as all the files you’ve created. This makes it one of easiest distros to transform your installation into a portable environment.
For a project in its infancy that still lacks documentation and doesn’t have a real support infrastructure, DXT2 has taken impressive first steps towards becoming a very capable light distro.
Ignore its young age and the peculiarities that come with it, and you have yourself a capable, light Debian-based distro.
“The current release has scripts to install Google Chrome, LibreOffice, Sublime Text, TeamViewer, VirtualBox as well as Samba and CUPS. These will work best for new Linux users”