NuTyX 9.0.
Shashank Sharma is neither trim nor flexible, but that’s the kind of distro he likes. With its homegrown software management tool, NuTyX looks promising.
Shashank Sharma is neither trim nor flexible, but that’s exactly the kind of distro he likes and this Linux from Scratch seems to be ticking all of his inflexible boxes.
The release of Knoppix, a live CD distribution, was a watershed moment for Linux. It spawned an era of derivative distros, but despite the overwhelming number of them, most of which are now largely Ubuntu based, we occasionally come across distributions such as NuTyX, an independently developed project with a homegrown and feature-rich software management tool.
Available as a sub-300MB image, the ISO provides a bare-bones system that users flesh out depending on their requirements. In a stark departure from other distributions, NuTyX insists that it be installed on a single partition; users are advised against creating separate partitions, such as for / and /home. The Curses-powered installer, which asks a limited set of questions, such as keyboard layout, partitioning information and so on, is developed in-house, too, and gives users a choice of fdisk or cfdisk for partitioning.
Bare-bones indeed
The installed system lacks many useful and everyday tools. For instance, it doesn’t provide a graphical user interface (GUI), let alone any GUI tools. It doesn’t even provide Lynx, the textbased web-browser. There’s no mail client, word processor, music app and so on, but this is what makes NuTyX special, as users are free to populate the distro only with software they want.
You must use the Cards software management tool to install additional software. The command sudo cards install xorg lxde firefox libreoffice fetches and installs all the specified software and their dependencies. You can query a list of installed packages or search for packages in the repository with cards search package-name-ordescription . Unfortunately, unlike aptget,Cards doesn’t give a list of dependencies or total download size. Instead, it starts downloading the packages straightaway. The distro also provides a number of collections comprising essential software, such as cli,cli-extra,gui-extra, and more. These simplify package installation, as you don’t have to type in the name of each package. However, as each collection is host to hundreds of packages, blindly installing a collection leaves you with a system full of packages you don’t require. For a list of packages offered in each, run cards search gui-extra .
The distro also provides a number of aliases defined in the ~/.bashrc file to ease software management. For instance, instead of sudo cards install package-name , you can run get package-name .
Should you make a mess of the NuTyX installation, playing around with Cards or compiling packages not in the repositories, you can revert to the base installation with cards base -r . The website provides guides on a wide range of topics, and the forums are a good resource, but require registration for searching and posting. If you prefer video tutorials, the developer posts these to a dedicated YouTube channel ( http://bit.ly/nutyx).
In NuTyX, we have not just an incredibly stable and robust system that can function as a server as readily as a media-streaming station, but a distro that can be a great learning tool for new Linux users looking to expand their skill set beyond the likes of justworks distros such as Ubuntu.