Calculate Linux 20.6
After that last review, Jonni Bidwell finds something much more suited to his highbrow tastes: a Russian distro based on the venerable Gentoo.
Jonni Bidwell has a slice of celebratory cake as he explores the latest version of the Gentoo distro that’s now 20 years old.
Back in Elizabethan times, “calculating” used to be a crime, punishable by being locked up in the Tower of London or some other ghastly fate. Fortunately, times have changed and we generally show deference to those who calculate, especially if it saves us from doing sums.
Calculate Linux, name notwithstanding, is not really about manipulating equations (or getting locked up in the Tower), but rather a well-put-together distribution that anyone with some Linux experience can use. It’s based on Gentoo Linux. Yes, that’s right, the compileeverything-from-source meta-distro that’s the butt of many a jibe and meme on social media (whatever that is).
So the tagline “easy Linux from the source” perhaps should have an asterisk somewhere. This isn’t a beginner’s distro, there’s no “app store”-type affair and the documentation isn’t clear in some places, especially if you’re unfamiliar with Gentoo terminology (although much of the time Gentoo’s excellent docs will have the answers). However, it does provide a lot of the advantages of Gentoo and spares a lot of the pain (lengthy compile times, trying to come up with a workable set of USE flags, unstable packages fighting with one another… that sort of thing).
There are KDE, Cinnamon, LXQT, MATE and Xfce desktop editions available, as well as a Server and a dedicated Directory Server edition. And if you want to build a more minimal desktop or server, barebones “Scratch” editions are available. Oh, and there’s a media centre edition, too. We think that’s all of them. We opted for the MATE edition, which didn’t include the modern Brisk menu, so looks dated compared to distros that do. In general the software selection was fairly sparse given the 8GB install footprint, though. It was nice to see an RC build of the Clementine music player, the project having recently emerged from a three-year hiatus.
A straightforward installation… mostly
If you’ve ever installed Gentoo (or tried to) you’ll know it’s rather painstaking. Not so Calculate. The installer does enable you to create rather elaborate partition schemes, such as having dedicated partitions for swap, data and system updates. It’s a little more involved than installing Ubuntu or suchlike, but it doesn’t take three days and is all fairly self-explanatory.
If you leave the defaults you get three partitions: root, data and home. Setting up the initial user is a bit of a pitfall, since you have to manually set up the groups to which they belong. You’ll be fine if you just modify the guest user account on the live environment, or copy the groups of which it’s a member. But if you don’t, you’ll find things like USB, accelerated video, printing, scanning and all manner of other things don’t work.
Calculate has its own binary repositories, so you don’t need to compile everything from source. But it’s also entirely compatible with Gentoo, or whatever overlays you might use with Gentoo. So yes, you can recompile everything with bespoke processor optimisations, strip out unnecessary functionality through USE variables and use the latest unstable sources. The eix tool is included to speed up queries to the Portage tree which stores package info.
Managing this kind of hybrid arrangement is made easy through Calculate’s cl-update tool which manages the official Gentoo tree, Calculate’s overlay (and any desktop-specific profiles), as well as any custom additions by the user. It’ll also clean up orphan packages and can do reverse-dependency rebuilds. Leaving you free to tinker the bejesus out of this fine distribution.