Antix Linux - The Lightweight Distro That Packs a Punch!

hello and welcome to the OTB channel are you looking for a lightweight distro that you can install director USB and use it as a portable toolkit or perhaps you've got an old computer maybe even a Pentium 2 that you're looking at bringing back to life well if so maybe this video is for you after the intro we're going to look at Antiques Linux hello and welcome back first and foremost can I just apologize to everyone for not putting out my normal Saturday video I've been feeling a little bit under the weather not the thing that's sweeping the globe just your normal bug but anyway today I want to look at a lightweight distro that really does pack a punch years ago there used to be quite a few of these around DSL which I don't think is being actively developed anymore and tiny core which is still around and we may look out in the future but there's one distro that keeps getting mentioned in comments from my viewers and that's antics and I haven't loved antics ever I've never bothered looking at it and yet perhaps I should have done I often think that with many of the the big-name distros around some of the smaller districts that have been around for many years get overlooked and I can tell you right now that after looking at this distro in detail and playing with it for a day or so I'm left wondering why this isn't more popular than it is as you know I've recently done the switch over to a window manager I've tried to open box I've tried BS PWM but particularly with open box the way I manage to configure it I started to ask myself the question do I need a full desktop environment well that was very much in my mind there was as I was looking at antics because it uses lightweight a lightweight window manager of your choice you're not restricted to one you get the choice of using several I've used ice WM with the rocks browser and I think you'll be as impressed as I am so let's go to the split screen to start off with and have a look at what it's all about so this is the antics Linux page and you can see a picture of it there and it's a it's a nice-looking desktop a big focus of antics is about putting a distro on a USB Drive and there are many ways to do this with antics you can install it on a live USB you can install it in such a way that it has persistence so that you can save files onto it and you can also do a frugal install so you can install it on an existing hard drive within an existing system it's incredibly flexible as far as their how it does this it's also designed for older computers and older computers going all the way back to the old Pentium tools in fact if I go onto the antics FAQ page here what it actually says is here we are antics should run on most computers ranging from a hundred and ninety two megabytes old Pentium two systems and it comes pre-configured with 128 mega Swampert for version of antics there are also a range of different configurations you don't have to download the full version you can just down the download the core version or the net version and they will run with a hundred and twenty-eight Meg of RAM but the full version what's actually recommended for it is 256 Meg of RAM for the full distro and let's face it the full distro at 256 Meg of RAM in this day and age it's pretty lightweight you can also install it on a hard drive so you don't need to just use it on a USB key you can install it as your base system and that's what I've done if I go to the Wikipedia page for antics here it has an interest in history according to Wikipedia the first version was released all the way back in 2007 so it's not new to the market it's been around for a long time and we're currently on version 19 which is what I'm using preferred 256 Meg of RAM fine that's really not a problem for most people these days and I notice here that he also says states that it was originally based on the Metis Linux distribution Metis was one of my favorites when I first started I used to love all of its configuration tools and of course we have antics that separated away from map is still still kept a close relationship but it was very much based on a USB live installation or an installation for older computers and we also have MX Linux now which is another of the popular distros that have come out of the original methis so yeah you can definitely tell as you look through antics that it has its roots in the old mepid map is system but enough talk let's just get into in stalling it and see what we think so let's fire up an six you can see that I've created an entry here in VirtualBox I've already installed it in fact but this one is just hooked up to the ISO or it will be in a second there you go and let's start it and you can see you get this nice little boot splash or grub screen I'm not entirely sure what it is what I do like about this is right from the word go you have some options on the bottom so I can pick f2 right from the word go so let me pick UK I can set my timezone with a three so let's see if I can actually find that London there we go and f4 gives me a whole range of options to use with grub I don't need to use any of them hopefully f5 gives me the choice of whether I want to boot this live iso in persistent mode or not and f6 this is the thing that I really like gives me the opportunity to run the window manager of my choice now by default it runs the ROC's file manager a nice WM but as you can see there you can run fluxbox as well and JWM and even herbs loft WM Wow so quite a few options let's stick with the defaults and see what happens it's a nicely put together ISO the whole feel of it is very lightweight but it's quite polished as well which I suppose is what you'd expect from something that's been around for this long and as you can see we've booted very quickly let me see if I perhaps get a better resolution here ah system session screen resolution a R & R okay let's have a look and see what we can get there isn't a 1920 by 1080 option here but let's just go for 1650 by 1080 there you go and you can see what I'm running here and let me just pull that into the background so here's the basic desktop I'm not going to run through the everything care included here for the time being let me just see if I can make that bigger hmm it's not great to be honest like this but let's go straight to the install and we can look at the system once I've got it installed and I have the guest additions installed as well so let me just hit the install icon the installer won't launch because it appears to be running already in the background hmm well I don't know about that but let's just follow along I see it's already picked up the GB keyboard which I set with the option on the boot menu so let me hit next modify partitions or auto install using entire disk okay okay to format yeah absolutely fine and it's installing away so not much to that it's obviously not asked for the username or the password yet so let's see what it takes or how long it takes to get to that stage right at this stage it's paused and it's asking for operator input which means me so I have the option here to install grub to the Master Boot Record or I've booted in bias mode so that's going to be the option I choose although I could also install grub to a partition the partition boot record PBR and they found booted in UEFI mode I would be choosing the option to boot to install grub to the ESB but let's just stick with that and hit next computer name antics Wan example.com okay whatever I'm gonna leave that as default and hit next I'm already on United Kingdom British English you're at London I'm gonna select my clock uses local time and hit next and then let's set up a username so ot be as normal and I'll set up a password and again and I'll set up a password for routes as well sudo is enabled by default in antics I don't want to show passwords I don't want to do auto log-in to I want to save live Desktop changes if I'd installed something to this system while it was live or made some configuration changes it would retain that when it was being installed to the hard drive but as I've done nothing at the moment I'm just gonna hit next and we'll see how much longer it takes right and that's the installation complete so that was pretty quick I'm not going to automatically reboot here I'm gonna switch this down I'm gonna boot into the system which I installed yesterday and I've already installed the guest additions on it so we should get full resin straight away so we'll be back in a couple of minutes right welcome back you can see that I've now got antics fully installed and it is running at 1920 by 1080 I did have to install the guest additions but that was fairly painless what I'm really quite impressed about here if you look at the conky over to the right is it's running on 209 Meg of RAM which for something running in a virtual machine is quite impressive let me just verify that with a CH top yeah 200 Meg's so it runs at 200 Meg's or less I've opened and closed a few programs so initially it was running at about 190 190 Meg's but ultimately this is very very lightweight it's running the ice WM window manager I've had a look at that in the past very briefly and it's often described as having a Windows 95 ish lock I have to say that the customization that's been done on the antics version of Ice WM removes that old windows 95 look it looks far more modern as a desktop to the point that it even has something that looks like quite a modern menu system there I don't know if that's the standard ice WM menu or not but hey ho so let's have a quick run-through and see what we've got we've got the terminal here which is the Roxx terminal everything installed on this system is to keep things like wait we have the rocks file browser or file manager and the editor what's this this is Gorgan right now I've not heard of it at all but it's clearly based on Jeannie what about web browser what's the default here let's wait for that to launch and it's looking like Firefox to me but let's just do a help about and and have a look see where are we about Firefox Firefox Kuantan it quantum is installed okay great what else have we got here well if we go to the first section antics we have a whole range of different applications set our date and time command line control center what we want to do here internet tools and apps system tools system information live system Center right so let's just have a look at the configuration file right oh the f stabbed the slim comm file the live remaster exclude list right there's a few things there what about system information list all blocked devices let's just hit OK and enter my password oh right and it runs the command for us okay that's quite neat nice little tool what else have we got here we have our live USB kernel up data and the live USB maker I have actually used the live USB maker and I've burnt a copy of antics to a USB Drive and the live USB maker allows you to create a USB boot disk with persistence and I've just been playing around with it on my think badan and it seems to work really well personal menu editor Y add color former USB COI apt based pakad my package manager I wonder if that sir what does he want there upgrade 27 packages now view a list of packages to be upgraded or ignore these for now okay so this would appear to be a command line app data so search for antics kernels search for all kernels view a list of 83 suggested command line packages great okay all helpful things that have not actually seen before right applications the chroot rescue scam back light brightest brightness the antics of data so i presume this is just a front-end to the software sources' i believe this runs just on debian 10 and yes he just runs apt you can obviously just use the command line if you prefer but if you prefer to click something in the menu well that options there for you what about accessories well okay archive mung manager cal curse cherry had no idea what cherry tree is what is cherry to tree does it tell us a hierarchical notetaking application okay some people might find that useful suppose but it's also got leaf pad their midnight commander our xvt the terminal search monkey the space FM file search and of course the updater let's go to the updater and see what that is aha and that gives me the little update manager in the system tray there it's not actually coming up oh right yes it is and telling me what i can upgrade now so this seems to be many ways of a accessing act here so education LibreOffice math games you've got a DOSBox emulator I can't even pronounce that job well ed and Marge young you've got digital camera browser gtk cam LibreOffice draw Mirage empty paint screenshot tool and simple scan Internet okay well I install chromium on this yesterday it didn't have a chromium installed but it installed very quickly and a simple way to set up your son Bashir's con man is the tool that's used to connect you wireless and i can confirm it worked fine droopy I have no idea what droopy is no mind I'm gonna shut that down I haven't one else G FTP Nome PPP I don't know how many people still use dial-up but the options there should you need it hex chat so an IRC clients links to the links browser there we go and we can no doubt display web pages within the links browser I haven't used that for years I'd have to have a look and see but nevertheless it's an option what else have you got transmission so you've got your BitTorrent Kline their client there and WPA gooey alsa mixer asunder CD Ripper G UVC view for your web cams SM cube a sound card chooser a speaker test strangely enough the full libre office suites there which I'm quite surprised that considering this is all about keeping things tiny and on preferences you have a whole range of different things a disk manager a RNR a bluetooth manager a firewall configuration this looks to be GG ufw yeah and it is disabled by default which you tend to find in most distros these days I'm not quite sure about that to this day set your font size your DPI and you wallpaper chooser so that's obviously the wallpaper that's showing at the moment so if I hit select picture you've got a couple of options there including a light one okay you can choose random wallpaper or timed war wallpaper she knows something I think I prefer that one the default wallpaper but you can obviously install wallpapers as you wish um what else have we got here programming's you've got genie is that the full genie so it's Gorgon okay so it's the cut-down version or I'm assuming it's the cut-down version anyway and then on your system Wow so you've got a whole range of things you've got G Debbie there gr sync h top PC information let's just have a look select the info tool you wish to use and click the button find out if this is a 64-bit or a 32-bit CPU this is a 64-bit CPU okay that's quite nice I like that right let's just knock it off what else we got here synaptic package manager okay let's open that up and yeah you've got the full synaptic here which is great to see just out of interest what are the repositories and I can see that it's using the M X Linux repository there or the mirror Sheila say to Buster and it's also hooked up to Buster backports updates etc etc so it's a standard Debian system and you can do everything with this that you can do on any other Debian system what else you've got a task manager there I don't know what task manager this is it's a Lex task ok I see that my RAM usage has gone up a little bit now to 234 Meg's but I have been opening and closing apps laughs Writing Center so for something that's incredibly lightweight it pretty much comes fully loaded which is great to see I'm just wondering if there is an app installer here I'm sure the will be and I've probably just missed it I don't necessarily expect to see an app store but I would hope to see some sort of easy app installer let me just have a look we might not actually be there as yet but okay so personal menu help video recent files the desktop I'm pleased to see a simple switch there for conky on or konkey off so we've switched it off there and we can switch it back on I wish a few more air distros would do that with conky I'm not the greatest fan I must admit I've conky it's it's just one of those one of those things that I'm not that keen on it an app killer right so I'm not quite sure how this so let's open the terminal and let's click up killer and we just one selected we click on the app that we want to kill ok great we then have a control center so what's in the control center ok so don't forget that I stubble um though we've chosen it as our default default installation you could also have chosen JWM or fluxbox and i'll see the standard settings for the desktop are all pretty much here so if you wanted to edit your conky configuration you can bring up the configuration file straight away what about system right so manage packages that's going to bring up synaptic a package installer AHA this is the sort of thing that I was looking for so you can see here automatically that at the moment I have Firefox and chromium installed if I wanted to install let's say the brave browser let's give it a go and in the background this is running out get and just installing the browser I'm presuming that's it done already but we'll see in a second in fact we'll come back to that oh here we go do I want to continue yes I do whether you actually need this sort of configuration tool or not is a mute point I think it's quite nice having it and I have to say the the feel of this whole system at the moment reminds me very much of the old Metis days the tools look very similar and it comes fully loaded with just about everything that you could possibly need to make life easier so it's continuing to unpack the brave browser here and hopefully we'll all be done in a second right do you want to exit the packaging store more let's say yes let's go and have a look in our menu and see if it's there already under internet and there you go welcome to brave so easy to install stuff choose startup services this isn't system D this is the old system system 5 I think it was called and you have all of your run levels here and this is just your basic run level ad editor so you'll set up whatever you want to start it's nice to have the alternatives configurator right so I presume this means what you want to use as a default more than anything else ok I'd need to look at that in a bit more detail edit config files right okay so this presumably is giving you the option to look at yeah one of your additional sources lists so if you want to add the opera or the virtual box or the liquor external x' to this you would simply uncomment their respective repositories which is nice and then set date and time now there are a million ways here to set up your internet connection it doesn't really matter if you're on a wired connection because it picks it up automatically what I found when I use the the live version on a live USB booted it on my think pad was I used con man Wi-Fi connect to set up my wireless and it pretty much works straightaway so I have no issues with that at all you can set up your shares here droopy is apparently all about file sharing ok the session change your key map change the slim background I presume the slim background is what they use instead of grope okay I'm just gonna cancel that set a group Bobby a grub boot image password prompt for sudo let's have a look and see what that says okay and what the options here so do you want to use su what you want to use sudo and use it a desktop session oh so this is your basic start file what you want to start up when the system starts okay mount connected devices manage disks live USB Maker GUI imager partition and synchronized directories that's nice print settings sound settings Mouse configuration let's have a look at print settings and see what it brings up right this is the first time I've clicked on this and it's already picked up my printer the Canon ng 6500 5600 should I say let's just see if it works let me hit print test page and I'll let you know if anything to happen oh you probably can hear in the background my printer starting off now that's quite impressive and I'm just looking behind me and yes indeed the test page is printing out which is good to say the fact that this actually came up without me doing any sort of configuration is great drivers so there's not a Matt again video driver installer their Windows wireless drivers a codecs installer do you assume responsibility for downloading these yeah I do why not they've been downloaded and installed and maintenance do an ISO snapshot a system backup boot repair what does B repair do you can hear the prints are still going in the background so just bear with the noise so if I wanted to reinstall grub or repair the configuration file this is a utility that allows me to do that let me just be quiet wireless printer finishes right I think that's finished doing what it's doing so that's a nice little utility to have an D user man manager so presumably this allows you to add a new user ok so that's a nice set of tools there as I say it's very reminiscent of what map is used to be like refresh the menu for anything I've just installed and then we have some links to videos the antics F FAQ the antics live how-to let's just click on that right I like having manuals and the like on a system I just think they they make so much difference so not just want expert and to the MX and the antics wiki but I still um the applications so we've got to think about the firewall and a selection of mam pages there ok a run dialogue great what else have we got here focus sloppy mouse focus strict mouths mouths focus okay if you want to focus your mouse and then preferences so I'm just having a look on this I would need to look in a bit more detail to see what exactly what this is about but this myth would appear to give me a whole change of options as to what a show on the menu bar etc etc okay along with a whole range of key bindings many of which already appear to be set and standard configuration options I'll then have many many themes so blue day medium is currently the one that is active so if I chose another one antics blue large right okay I can see that's made a change oh and I don't like that so how blue day medium is a much nicer theme I think let's pick something from down here simplest black medium okay our ultra black medium hmm I have to say I think antics as pickups I think antics has picked the correct theme in blue day medium it's a much nicer easy to look at system okay so I mean this is all I wanted to do I've gone through the menu system I think it's a very simple clean very usable distro this interface actually no I've recently started exploring window managers including open box which um actually booted into at the moments I could live with this let's go and have a chat right so let's have a chat I have to say for me those of you watch my channel will know that there are two distros that are quite close to my heart Debian Debian stable and arch and I use both I use arch for playing um and I tend to use Debian stable for my work well antics is based on Debian stable it's essentially a straightforward Debian installation but with special custom tools built on top to make life a lot easier for the user and I wasn't really sure what to expect when a fired up this distro I suppose I had in my mind the old days of DSL where you had a flex box window manager not there's anything wrong with fluxbox but it used to be pretty basic so I wasn't expecting this to be as fully featured as it was and I was pleasantly surprised to the extent that now that I've kind of moved away from using full desktop environments I started to ask myself the question okay I can live in open box really easily I know that I've been doing it for the last month or so could I'll live in this as my main distro absolutely I could I really could I'm not the sort of user who's too concerned about bloat I've got 16 Giga RAM on my system you'd need a big program that would overpower that and many of us are in the same situation but if you have an old computer that only has a small amount of RAM and you're not able to upgrade it you know to what perhaps you need for one of the modern distros this is a great alternative more than that though even if you have a computer with plenty of RAM this is a great distro anyway it's a full Debian system it comes fully loaded with apps you can install what you want on it it's easy to configure the tools that the antics developers have added make it really easy to administer to the point that there seems to be a tool to do everything a tool to run a command line command ahem without you having to member what he was so overall I'm really impressed with it and I have to say there's not that many distros leave me with that impression some of them I think are quite good but we seem to be on a bit of a roll here I was impressed with Ferran which was the last distro where I thought wow that's really good but antics yeah I think that's really good as well I'd recommend you go out and try it and see what you think even if you're gonna put it on a live USB stick rather than a hard drive so that's it for today guys I'm gonna go back to bed I think I'm not quite recovered but hopefully see you in a couple of days happy Easter by the way I know it's a bit of a mute point given the lockdown at the moment but try and have a great day and I hope you and your families all stay well and we'll see you in a day or two [Music]

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 22,617

Keywords: oldtechbloke, antix, antix linux, antix linux installation, antix usb install, antix old hardware, antix 256mb ram, antix persistant install, antix frugal install, mepis linux, mx linux, antix 19, antix linux review, antix linux 19 review, antix linux wifi setup, linux distro for beginners, lightweight linux, lightweight linux distros, debian, debian 10 debian buster, icewm, fluxbox, jwm, herbsluftwm, first look, review, distro, linux distro for old laptop, antix linux 19 установка

Id: VHnhdDRxtX8

Length: 41min 12sec (2472 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020