Installation and First Look at LinuxHub Prime

Today I'm going to be taking a look at a Linux distribution that I've never looked at before. It's the first time I've actually heard of this particular distribution. This distribution is called Linux Hub Prime. And judging by what is on the distro watch page here, this is an Arch-based Linux distribution that uses the Openbox window manager, although it does have the option to install other desktops and window managers including Awesome, BSPWM, Budgie, Cinnamon, Deepin, GNOME, HyperLan, KDE, yada yada yada. So it's got a lot of stuff. I'm probably going to go with their default Openbox desktop because I'm assuming that's what they want most people to focus on. That's probably what they spend most of their time on looking at their website. It's very simple, the website. I imagine this is a rather new distribution, again, because I've never heard of it. I do like the fact that they published to both YouTube and Odyssey. That's kind of cool. But I'm going to go ahead and grab the ISO for Linux Hub, and I'm going to run through a quick installation and first look inside a virtual machine. So I've grabbed the ISO. Let's go ahead and boot into the live environment here. All right. And it took a minute or two for the live environment to load. Of course, the live environment looks like it is the Openbox window manager. And then we have the installer. We have Calamares installer, Prime installer, Explore. Yeah, I'm not sure. Explore, changing some settings. I will say this. Most Linux distributions do not play well as far as virtual machines. And this one, even though I'm in a virtual machine, it did correctly draw the screen resolution as a 1920 by 1080 screen resolution. So I love that that is done by default. And then we have the Prime installer and the Calamares installer. I do the Calamares installer because it's the first one in the list. Choose a desktop. I'm going to go with Openbox. Auto login is optional, but it's turned on by default. That probably, just for security, for privacy reasons, really, auto login probably should default to no if a user wants to turn it on. They should have to forcibly turn it on, right? It shouldn't be the default. And then vanilla stock or Prime modified. So the Prime edition, I'm assuming, is the fancy edition. So I'm going to go with that and then click OK. And it launches the Calamares installer. All right. So yeah, we'll just go with the Calamares installer. Be interesting to see what the other installer looked like. I'm assuming it's their own custom, probably, command line install. But let's go with the graphical installation program, because I imagine that's what most people would be comfortable with. So the welcome screen here. Choose the language for the Calamares installer. So it's fine for me, American English. It has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me, probably based on geolocation. So nothing to do there. English US is my keyboard. Nothing to do there. So just click Next. Partition scheme. I'm going to erase the disk and give the whole disk over to Linux Hub. Select Storage. It's already done that. I don't know if it'll create a swap or not. So if I OK, I click on it. And then I can choose File System and Swap. So File System, Extend 4 looks like is the first choice. We could choose ButterFS or XFS here as well. I'm going to go with the Extend 4 file system, since it was the first in the list. And then we'll swap to file. And you can see the partition scheme down here. 18 gigs for the main partition. The Extend 4 partition is going to create a 2 gig FAT32 partition as well. Let me go ahead and click Next on that. And then let's create my user. I'm going to call my user DT. We need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then repeat the strong and complicated password. And then the host name of the computer is going to choose Linux Hub Prime as the name. That's fine. I'm not going to change the host name. Do I want to require strong passwords? No. My password was plenty strong enough. And then use the same password for the administrator account. So DT's password, is that also the sudo password? Yes. So it's ticked on by default. And that's what I want. And then click Next. We get a summary. If everything looks good, all I need to do is click Install. Install now. And away we go. This portion of the installation typically takes between 5 and 10 minutes on my system here. So I'm going to step away, grab a cup of coffee, and I'll be back once the installation has completed. But the installer crashed, I think. I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going to go grab that cup of coffee. I'm pretty sure the Calamaris installer just crashed. I'm going to click this button down here, Prime Installer. With that, OK, that gets me this screen back. And instead of Calamaris Installer, I mentioned I wanted to see what the other installer did anyway. So let's choose Prime Installer. And then once again, open box. Let's see what this is. OK, we get a graphical screen here. Username, DT is strong and complicated password. Repeat the strong and complicated password. Actually, I don't need to repeat it. I only have to create a root password now. That's interesting. You probably want people to confirm both the user password and the root password. They really should have four fields here because people could mistype, and they wouldn't know that they've mistyped. So make them confirm a password. That's something the Linux Hub Prime team, they need to add that. Auto login. Again, it's turned on by default. You really should turn that off. And then Prime, sure. Click OK. And let's see what happens here. Hopefully this goes a little better than the Calamaris installer. And we get a terminal, which I kind of figured it would be some kind of command line script. Installation failed. Close. I imagine the installation failed. It's because I already partitioned those drives with the Calamaris installer. And that's probably not what the Prime installer was thinking. What I'm going to do is I'm going to recreate the VM from scratch and then do the Prime installer. That way we start with a non-partitioned drive. So let me just go ahead and shut down. I'm going to force off this machine. I'm going to go ahead and delete this virtual machine and create a new one. All right, guys. I'm back. I created a new VM. Since the Calamaris installer crashed the first time, I don't know if that was just a one-time event or if it's going to happen every time, but I'm going to skip the Calamaris installer and go straight to the Prime installer. Choose Openbox. I'll go ahead and create my user, give him a password, create a root password, turn off auto login. Or actually, you know what? Let's just leave auto login on since it's the default, just in case me changing some settings is a problem. I'll just leave all the defaults here. I'm going to click OK. It launches the terminal. And let's see if the installation program proceeds here because the first time we did this, now it works. I think the problem was the Calamaris installer, when that failed, I'd already partitioned the drive. And you can see the first thing that the Prime installer tries to do is partition a drive, but I'd already partitioned the drive. It was confused about all of that. I'm going to make the terminal full screen. And I'm going to zoom in a little bit if I can. I'm going to choose disk configuration, use best effort option. So let me hit enter. Let me hit partitioning and let me partition the drive. I can manual partition the drive or I can use best effort default partition layout. Let's let Linux Hub do the automatic partitioning. OK, it's going to create one big partition and it's going to create that on slash dev slash VDA, my virtual hard drive here. I'm just going to tag that on. And then file system, ButterFS, Xtend4, XFS, F2FS, Calamaris. I believe the default file system was Xtend4. So I'll go with that. It looks like ButterFS is the first file system in this installer. I'm cool with either one. Of course, XFS is here as well. Let's just stick with Xtend4. This is the partition scheme it's going to come up with. And for me, that is fine. Do I want to turn on LVM? Not really. Do I want to turn on disk encryption? On physical hardware, I would. In this virtual machine, I won't. So let me go back and click install. Now that we've done the partition, giving me a configuration file there. Would you like to continue? Sure. And starting device modifications in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And away it goes. And there we go. And it's installing packages. So I think this will work. But I will pause the video. And I will be back in a few minutes to see if the installation actually completes. All right. And the installation completed. That took about 10 minutes or so. You can see the installation has completed. We get the ASCII art here in the terminal. And here in the dialog box, we also have installation complete. And then let's reboot and see what happens. And we get a grub menu. So it looks like it installed correctly. And because we chose to auto log in, we get sent directly to the desktop here. Interesting wallpaper here. I like the Tent 2 panel down here. The Tent 2 is typically the panel that Openbox uses. You have, of course, a right-click menu here in Openbox. Although the font is really small, it's also kind of jacked up. The spacing is to the point where the top of some of the capitalized letters is really messed up here. So the first thing I'm going to do is try to fix that. Because that's going to be very annoying. So how about Openbox Configuration Manager? OBconf. No such file or directory. OBconf is Openbox Configuration. It's a program that should help you configure Openbox. Here's another link for OBconf. That actually launches. So we can actually change some stuff. Yeah. So the Sans font here. Let's change that to something more appropriate. I don't know what fonts are in the list. Let's just go to the top. Adwaita Sans. Let's see how we like that. Let's turn that up to a bigger font. I'm just going to go through and do this for all of them. We'll just make all of them Adwaita Sans 10. All right. I've adjusted all of those font sizes. And now when I right-click, yeah, that's much more readable. I could actually make that a little bigger. But I'm not going to. I will make the headers bigger so they stand out. Let's make them 11. Adwaita Sans 11. And bold. How about bold? There we go. See how that looks. Yeah. I like the look of that. So I'm going to go with that as far as themes. We do have some Openbox themes right now. It's using Nord, which is fine. I've got a couple of other things here. Your standard Clear Looks theme, which is a default kind of Openbox theme that always gets shipped with it. Onyx, which I believe is a black theme. Which if you're a dark theme kind of person, which I am, the Onyx theme is one I often go with. Matter of fact, I like it enough. I'm just going to go ahead and stick with the Onyx theme for now. So when we first log in, we get our Welcome Center. So our Welcome application is set to autostart. We can actually remove it from the autostart file, so we never have to see this again. But for right now, I do want to check this out. It looks like this is probably a YAD window, but I'm not positive. I also thought some of the installer stuff was YAD. So let me go ahead and do... Well, this opened full screen, this terminal. And I'm not sure where the buttons are. How do I move this? How do I get it out of full screen? I'm going to have to learn some keybindings. I'm assuming they have some of this stuff keybinded. So the very first thing we need to do... Let me just launch the terminal. We need to figure out what the keybindings are. So I'm going to open this with vim. So vim.config slash openboxrcxml is the file that's going to contain some of the openbox keybindings and stuff. You also have a menu.xml. The menu is strictly for the menu entries. But let's see what closing a window would be. Because I am actually not sure. Looks like C to close. Would that actually do anything? Shift C. These have meanings here inside of vim. Super C. How about Alt C? I'm not really sure. Let's see if I can find anything else that... I mean, if I click on this, it minimizes it. If I right click, it kills the terminal, which is nice. But how do I actually float the terminal? It needs to have the ability to float. And yeah, I'm just going to kill that. I don't know what to do with that. Where are the title bars? Because this is a floating window manager. Openbox is not a tiling window manager. It floats. But how am I going to float it if I can't actually float it? I just don't... I mean, I can drag the whole VM, which is not what I want to do. OK, so Alt and the mouse key, I can drag things. OK, so now let me open the terminal and let me right click the Alt key. OK, now and then left click and the Alt key, I can drag it. OK, now what I was wanting to do is I was wanting to run the xprop command, which turns my cursor to an X. And then I click on this and it tells me the X properties, tells me what that window is. And it is, in fact, a YAD window, which is what I wanted to know. So it is programmed with YAD. YAD is a way to quickly script GTK applications. So now let's take a look at what is going on here. Install software. Let's see what software center it uses by default. If I click that. So something comes up here, but I'm not sure. Is this the GNOME software? PADMAC. OK, so this is interesting because PADMAC is a GUI package manager for Manjaro. Manjaro created PADMAC. So it can be used on any Arch-based distribution other than Manjaro. Most Arch-based distributions don't really fool with PADMAC because it's kind of a nightmare to ship. If you're a distro maintainer, I've played with it a little bit, you know, creating my own ISOs and stuff. It's a bit of a buggy mess most of the time, but that's there. We have the ability to install flatpaks. Now, PADMAC actually should have the ability to handle flatpaks and snaps depending on how they configured PADMAC. So, but it looks like for flatpaks, they're using a different software center. Wow. What software center is this? And again, there's no title bars, no menus or anything. So this is another one. I'm going to just use the Xproc commander to figure out what this is. And this is Discover. So I thought it might be Discover, but I wasn't sure. That is really strange. How do I kill the window? There's no close buttons. I'm sure there is a way to close the window, but without knowing what the command is, I'm just guessing. Alt-C, Alt-X, Alt-Q, Alt-Shift-C. I don't know. Right-click down here does kill it though. We have a button here for Manage Khaki, although there isn't a Khaki by default, but I guess it does probably ship with some Khakis if you wanted to add it. Backup system with time shift. Online AI modules. That is interesting. Curious what that is. So you have the AI app directory. This is HuggingFace.co is the website. I don't know why I would want to fool with these. I don't know anything about them. I need more information before I'd ever want to fool with any of that stuff. But that's the first Welcome tab here in the Welcome application. We have Pac-Man related stuff. So this is fixes for annoying key ring issues or removing the database lock files, updating the AUR repos, editing your pacman.conf. We have a security tab here. So this is for password manager, enabling the firewall, the uncomplicated firewall. Not going to do any of that here in the VM kernels. So if you wanted a different kernel, if you wanted the Zen kernel or the Cache kernel, which is very popular these days, they're available here. GPU. So if you've got NVIDIA driver issues or something, you deal with that here. Disk. I'm not sure most people need to be playing inside a partition manager, like a GNOME disk or a Gparted. That can be kind of dangerous. Htop is here and just a quick link to Htop. And let's actually check this out. See what kind of system resource usage we have. Not really using any CPU, which you'd expect. We're not doing anything. And then the memory is using 700 megs, which seems kind of high, but we do have some stuff running here. And then Builder. Build a custom Arch ISO. Builder on Omarkey, Cache, StormOS. Interesting how to make your own Arch ISO. That's cool for educational purposes. I like they include some educational material like that. Gaming related stuff. So Lutris, Steam, and all of that. Microcode. So the microcode stuff that needs to go into your kernel. And it has the microcode for AMD and Intel here. And then about information. So I'm going to go ahead and close that. Now I'm going to go through the menu system and see what is installed by default. So this menu. So this panel is the Tent 2 panel. And this menu is not like a built-in thing with the panel. I would assume this is a third-party program, like a X menu or, you know, there's various menu kind of applications that are standalone menu systems. So that when you left-click this icon, you know, you get a X menu. If I right-click on it, does it do anything? Well, let me right-click the icon. It gives us a RoPhy menu. So you've got two different menus. You've got your standard kind of menu system here. Or if you right-click on it, you get RoPhy. I'm assuming RoPhy has a key binding. I wouldn't know what it is, though. Is there Alt-Enter, Alt-P, Alt-R for RoPhy or Run? Again, we need more information about key bindings here. But going through the menu system, you have Gnome Calculator, Gnome Disk, Ngrampa, the Archive Manager. And that's from XFCE because FileRoller is the Archive Manager in Gnome. So you've got a mixture of GTK applications from Gnome and XFCE here. Mousepads, the XFCE plain text editor. Nitrogen is how you change wallpapers. So Nitrogen, fantastic little wallpaper program here. So there's a variety of wallpapers to choose from. Also, when we were in the right-click open box menu, you had Wallpaper Manager, which I'm assuming is Nitrogen. But you had a button just to change the wallpaper. If I click on that, yeah, we automatically change the wallpapers anyway. Still can't close this without right-clicking down here. But yeah, let me go ahead and get back in the right-click open box menu. Change wallpaper. Yeah, change wallpaper. That's a script that just changes to a random wallpaper, right? It just picks one at random. Some of these are very cool. I actually quite like that one. Yeah, very cool. Very cool. Let me go to the Wallpaper Manager. The one I liked the most out of this bunch, I think, was this one. Let me hit Apply. Yeah, I'm going to go with that. That is sexy as hell. Very quickly, back into the menu system. Just quickly, I mean, we have a Waypaper also is here for a wallpaper setter. They have both Nitrogen and Waypaper. Both of them are fantastic programs. It's weird they ship two Wallpaper Managers. That seems like a little bit extra bloat. Waypaper is much more modern and is actively developed. I'd probably just get rid of Nitrogen and keep Waypaper. U-Launcher is here, so another way to launch programs. U-Launcher. See Preferences here. Control-Space is the hotkey, so that is interesting. Control-Space, and now I could launch something like Firefox, for example, which is the default browser. I can see that down here in these quick launchers here. We've already seen a little bit of Firefox. Then we've got our File Manager as a quick launcher. This looks like Nautilus. Let's verify that, though. Go to About. No, this is Nemo. Nemo is a fork of an older version of Nautilus. I wish I could close the program. I guess I could go into File and choose Close, or I could right-click down here in the bar, and then we have our terminal. This is the LX terminal, I think. Really small font size. I need to change the fonts in this. Let's go ahead and do a uname-r. It's based on Arch, so everything should be the latest and greatest packages. As long as you've updated the system, you're on the latest of everything. Let me go ahead and exit out of the terminal. I wonder if they have any other terminals or if it's just the LX terminal, because if you're going to include multiple launchers and multiple wallpaper managers, you might include better terminals than the LX terminal. Something like an Alacrity, for example, that's very popular these days, or even something like the GNOME terminal, I think, is better than the LX terminal. I don't see any of that. We don't really have a lot here under Graphics. PDF Viewer, our Image Viewer, a couple of Image Viewers. We have the Mate Color Selection Tool. Under Internet, we have the Firefox browser, and that's really it. Under Office, we have Caligra. Kind of lightweight as far as the programs installed, which is fine. I don't mind that. I'll install the programs I want to install. If I get back into the Openbox right-click menu, one thing I did want to play with is some of the configuration, like with the Edit Panel. Let's click that. This is a Tint2 styling program that's been standard for years here in Tint2, where you got all these pre-built themes that you can switch to just by clicking on them. Right now, we are using... Which one are we using? Probably this one here. And then if I wanted to, I could click to this one, the Prime configuration. If I double-click, will it load? It says, please wait down here. Now, it just allows me to actually go into more theming options. I don't want that. I actually just wanted that to actually load. I really want to replace it. Yes. So you got to click the checkbox and then click OK. And now it changed it. Yeah, I actually kind of like that with the big Prime next to the icon here. You got a light theme if you want it. You got this transparent theme. You got the vertical themes here. These are kind of ugly. I wouldn't want to do that. I actually like the one I chose there. So I'm just going to go with that. I'm going to go into the menu system to quit because I don't know. There's no close button on the menus. But anyway, this was a very quick and cursory look at Linux Hub Prime. It looks like a rather new Linux distribution. And obviously, it's got some bugs. It's got some polishing that needs to happen, right? There's some cleanup. But for people, if you've never actually created a Linux distribution and an Arch Linux-based distribution, these things are not easy to put together and actually have everything work. The fact that that Calamari's installer didn't work properly for me, I'm just glad they had a backup installer, the Prime installer. And that thing actually worked very nicely. Overall, I do like the look and feel. I mean, I love Openbox. Openbox is one of my favorite floating window managers. I kind of hate the way they have it configured because if it's a floating window manager, I need the windows to float. I need them to have title bars that I can grab and drag. I need them to have a close button. I need all of that. But overall, I think it looks good. It just needs a little more work. But it's a very young project, I'm assuming. And I do want to congratulate the developers of Linux Hub Prime because there is still demand for these X11 desktops, these X11 window managers. Openbox is always going to have fans. And if Openbox is never ported over to Wayland, which it won't be. It's not really something that's under development anymore. You know, if I'm primarily an Openbox kind of guy, I'm going to stay on X11. So I'm glad there's these distributions that are out there to cater to those kinds of people. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Matt, Steve, George, Darlof, Lee, Mark, Methos, Erjan, PeaceArch and Vidor, Roland, Wargento and Ubuntu and Willy. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick look at Linux Hub Prime would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon. Because I don't have any corporate sponsors, I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like Linux Hub Prime, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.