GeckoLinux Mate Edition: OpenSUSE that "Just Works"?

hello and welcome to the otb channel have you ever thought about installing open souza well if you have it's a fine distro the only problem is it doesn't come with non-free codecs so you have to go through a process of installing third-party repos in order to install those codecs and make the desktop usable or usable for most people you no longer have to do that there's a distro called gecko linux which comes pre-configured with all of those non-free codecs out of the box that's what we're going to look at today see you after the intro [Music] hello welcome back first of all uh i apologize i've not been around more over the last week i've been feeling a little bit under the weather uh not the thing that's going around but just not feeling great and it's probably due to the extreme humidity that we've been experienced in lancashire i know it's unusual and i just don't think my body works when it's like that so um i felt a little bit lethargic but anyway let's let's get on with today i should say before we start please if you enjoy my videos please like and subscribe and if you'd like to support the channel on patreon please do so you can find us at patreon.com forward slash old tech bloke right open soozer um or a variant i'm going to look at today called gecko linux i've had mixed views about open souza over the years i mean it's it's one of the originals that's been around a long long time and it's worked okay for me i i had problems in the early days with nvidia drivers but i have to say i only use intel hardware now so i haven't experienced any problems with it i i'm still a little bit in two minds about what i think of yast and whether i think it's necessary but i understand why it's an important tool for sysadmins who have perhaps deployed opensuse in an enterprise it has lots of useful gui tools one of the problems with it is that it comes completely unencumbered with uh codex and uh anything that is non-free now i can understand that from a legal point of view opensuse can't bundle those things in there are of course third-party repos the pacman repo that you can install in opensuse and most people do in order to get hold of all of those codecs nevertheless for someone new to linux they i think deserve to have something more of a user-friendly experience perhaps some way to select those codecs or repos in the installer and just let it do it so it's up and running out of the box a minor niggle perhaps and for those people who use linux all the time and are experienced it's neither here nor there fedora and and other big distros do exactly the same but it would be nice to see something that i don't know was just a little bit more user-friendly from the get-go even though i really really like the opensuse installer i think that's brilliant and very feature-rich and uh flexible but enough about that um gecko linux gecko linux is a spin of open souza but it comes configured with all of these little things the paid patent encumbered codecs installed out of the box it uses the calamaris installer so it's an easy next next next next process although of course it uses some of the loses some of the flexibility of the traditional open souser installer but nevertheless it's simple to install and a couple of weeks ago someone asked me if i could take a look at it so i thought great i would i still i have to say haven't installed open souza on my main or on one of the ssds on my desktop even though i said i was thinking of doing it and if i'm honest i haven't done it because i couldn't bring myself to white void linux but that's nothing against open souza itself it's a great distribution um it's just that i'm really liking void linux at the moment and i don't want to get rid of it but enough of that let's take a look at gecko linux and see what we think let's go to the split screen and i'll show you the website and which distro i chose or which desktop environment i chose take a guess which one it is right so we're at the split screen now and you can see i've actually got my uh youtube channel open and that's because i wanted to start this by just pointing out something that's confusing me a little bit opensuse has been popular for years and years and years and i get the impression it's got a very loyal and enthusiastic community but at the same time we don't hear a great deal about it now and i have the feeling that its popularity for new users has started to decline slightly as arch and uh debian based distros seem to have come to the limelight and uh be taking all the plaudits at the moment and that seems to have been reinforce that view but by just looking at the videos i did an open souza tumbleweed video uh about a month ago or so and it's only had 3 000 views now on some of the videos i do things like the snipping tools one and my rambles i know i'm not going to get many views because some videos just don't and i know that and i do a mix but when i do a distro review especially with something like open souza i would have expected perhaps to have got more views than i did you can see it's only just hit over 3000 views which if you compare that to bodhi which i did the next week that's got 8 000 views and uh linux mint well that's 11 000 views and even the open box distro with uh manjaro and uh what was the other one called i can't even remember it um that's got three and a half thousand views and and and it's beating it so part of me is thinking that maybe open soozer is declining in popularity for new users and certainly doesn't seem to be growing so could part of that be because you have to mess about getting it configured well possibly and so we go to gekko linux which is linux for detail oriented orientated geckos hmm okay um it comes in a whole range of editions with diff different desktop environments and you won't be surprised to hear that i've chosen mate marty i said i was going to go back to calling it mate you know because that's the proper way that us uk english people would call it but i've been calling it mate for so long now it just just rolls off the tongue but actually it has quite a few additions available you can download it in cinnamon xfce gnome plasma mate lxqt or you can download a bare bones edition which i'm presuming just comes with a very light window manager or perhaps it doesn't come with any desktop environment or window manager installed at all i'm not sure but anyway um the distro itself comes with quite a few features now it's an open souza spin and if the only difference between this and open souza itself was theming and color schemes i wouldn't bother reviewing it but there seems to be quite a few things that set this apart from uh the standard distro i mean if we go there so it's an installable live dvd or usb image great it offers individual desktop environments brilliant it comes pre-installed with proprietary media codecs which is great it prefers packages from the pacman repo and uh it even it comes uh bundled already with the nvidia repo installed uh the google repo installed and the skype repo installed whether you see that as a good thing well that that's completely up to yourself and desktop programs can be uninstalled with all their dependencies where whereas opensuse is patterns often cause uninstalled programs to be automatically reinstalled okay i haven't played with it enough to confirm that that's the case with open souza but fine whatever it also comes with tlp pre-installed for uh your laptop's power management and it's meant to be an out of the box experience so i think that's a good thing and it's different enough from the standard open souza to justify to justify itself there are various additions you've got your static editions which are open soos a leap now i've gone for leap this time rather than tumbleweed but if you prefer tumbleweed you can also install that in uh gecko linux so you have the choice uh do you want completely stable or do you want to do a rolling release they also have something called the next edition which has a stable open soos elite base combined with additional obs repos to offer the latest version of popular desktop environments hmm well that might be quite interesting although it only seems to come in plasma at the moment so that's gecko linux uh what have we got we've got uh documentation here which is always good to see and it takes you through how to install non-english english languages it's very green by the looks of it how to update it but not a lot else and you've got a download link which if you click on the version that you want takes you to a sourceforge page or it will eventually when sourceforge gets itself moving there you go so gecko linux and it installs from sourceforge i had the usual problems with sourceforge in terms of finding a mirror that was fast enough but i did eventually manage to download it and it's not a huge iso so it doesn't take too long it's just over a gig in fact so it's pretty lightweight so enough of that let's get in let's have a look at the distro let's install it and see what we think okay so on your screen now you should see the live iso of gecko linux it booted without a problem in virtualbox it's got the normal settings on it i've given it a couple of cores or threads of my i5 processor eight gig of ram and i've created a 32 gig hard drive or virtual hard drive it booted straight in and it's gone straight to maximum resolution which is always good first impressions well it's very green i suppose i should have expected that with uh something based on open souza but nevertheless i'm really trying not to criticize any distro based on the color scheme that's uh chosen because these things are just so easy to change anyway we have uh it looks like the brisk menu let me just have a look and it is indeed the brisk menu which i actually install on my mate as a matter of course anyway um we have a little icon there to install the system and a language installer but anyway we can run through the desktop once we get it installed let's just double click on install system and see what happens okay well let's proceed onwards you've all seen this uh many many times so i'll just get it configured and started and then we'll come back once i've booted up because i don't want to put you through a calamaris installed yet again you all know it's next next next next so it's picked the right time zone which is always good it's picked the correct keyboard i'm just going to let it go with erase disk and it can create whatever it needs to create and it looks like it's creating an ext4 partition just a single partition right so let's go and set up my normal username i'll put a password in there um use the same password for admin yeah all good let's have a look at what we're doing i've just set it up as a standard bias mode not uefi it's got a single partition and i'll install now and we'll come back once i've booted into the install system okay so we're back i waited for the installation to finish which to be fair took less than five minutes i rebooted and it came back in full screen mode uh 1920 by 1080 which is all good and i logged in i updated the system i installed a few extra themes along with h top so we can have a look at how it can be customized and what sort of resource usage it's actually uh using and uh i've tried for the life of me also to change this locale up here in uh light dm it shows as you can see that it's using the on underscore us locale i don't know if this is a bug in light dm as opposed to geeko or gekko but uh i've tried everything that i can to try and change this and we'll talk a little bit about that as we go along but let me just log in for now and i've kept everything as default but i have installed htop and a few additional themes and you'll see that that language installer is still there for people who don't uh use english as their uh as their native language so let's open the terminal and let's run h top and see where we are on a nice clean install and according to that it's running 434 megs which is pretty lightweight and to be honest i'd sort of expect that from a mate desktop anyway so that's all good so what have we got installed by default uh not a huge amount to be honest needless to say you've got yast installed because it is based on open souza in grampa calculator what a name uh the mate search tomb tomb tool parcel light a clipboard manager okay you've got plumer which is the default text editor and a screenshot tool you then have a whole range of admin tools many of which have just been broken out from yest and we'll go into yast in a second but you've also got this sax3 which is configuring your x server hopefully you don't need to do that too often these days under graphics well not a huge amount pics to organize your images i have marte the mate color selection tool a document scanner what about internet firefox pidgin thunderbird and transmission and we have the open office or libreoffice suite there which is good with the atrial document viewer and sound and video we've got clementine and vlc so actually overall it it's a sensible starter selection of apps for you to use you then have a range of preferences and system tools cardio or carhar being the file manager that's default g parted h top that i've installed just so i could see what ram usage it was using i'm just looking here now okay it's gone up as we're clicking around to 639 but hey ho and there is no swap installed on this you could of course create a swap file if that's what you wanted to do so this is your standard mart a control center and if we go into appearance which you can also access by the way by change your desktop background and we can see what sort of images or desktop backgrounds are installed by default and at first look here i would say pretty much standard marty desktop backgrounds um yeah not a huge selection but you know you can always install them one of the things i am going to do though i'm going to change this blue or perhaps perhaps something like that yeah something like that green doesn't do it for me now in terms of the theme that's installed already um this is just personal preference i don't like it that's what it looks like if i look at the file manager so let's see what was actually what it's got at the moment so it's got the new mix controls the new mix window borders and it's using fianza dark right well i installed a few additional themes earlier on so i just want to uh have a little bit of a play with this and i'm going to go for arc dark and it's already looking better the window border i'm going to set that to arc dark am i [Music] yeah i am and the icons well let's find some icons that kind of suit everything i like papyrus there you go that's looking much nicer for me clearly all of this is personal preference but i think just by doing a few little tweaks i've got rid of all the green and i much prefer the look and feel now so all good in terms of the setup they're obviously putting the panel here at the bottom you can stick the panel wherever you want i mean it's easy enough to stick it at the top if that's where you prefer it i personally do but i'm just going to leave it there for the time being because we'll leave this as default so you can see what you get out of the box and let's go to yast be an open souza it obviously has all the yast utilities now i said before that i really disliked the fact that everything seemed to be set to uk when i was installing it and in fact if i go to the mate control center and open my keyboard indeed english uk is already set which i have to say in marty is actually quite unusual because after an installation you normally have to set your keyboard but i thought okay so everything's set to uk but the locale seems to be set to uh us so i thought well you're using a souza system here let's go and have a quick look at how we can change that so i went into the system config editor and i went down to the system here and to environment and to language and i had a look at rc language all and it was actually set to en us so the locale was still set to to us rather than gb okay so i changed that and uh all good once i'd done that i launched the terminal and uh let me just open this up and i went to cat etc locale dot conf language engb okay that's all set correctly no problem there but i was still getting that on us environment varial variable in light dm so i thought well let's try and force the locale here and uh go to etc environment and manually set it there didn't work not at all it's still showing us on us so i actually think that what we have here is uh a system that is using the gb the uk locale but i think it's something to do with the way that light dm is working here so okay so let let's have a quick look at uh yast you've obviously got the online update which applies patches you may or may not want to use that or you may just want to run software management and update your system from the standard repositories and the way that you would do this in yast once it starts is you would simply go to the package menu all packages update if newer version available so you can do it like that you could also use zipper and just run sudo zipper dup to do a full update now that's what i've just done you can also search for and uh install all sorts of packages from here or you can just use a zipper sorry sudo zipper installed sudo is configured out of the box so completely up to yourself i thought i'd then have a look at what repos are installed by default and there's quite a few you've got the standard opensuse leap ones the uh oss updates and non-oss updates and standard repos there but you've definitely got pacman installed by default you also have google chrome repo installed by default the google talk plugin the nvidia repo and the skype repo installed so okay i don't have too much of a problem with that because opensuse can be a bit of a fiddle to get going if you're new to linux because for legal reasons it doesn't come with all the proprietary codecs et cetera that you're gonna need so everything else is pretty much standard here system keyboard layout it's set to english uk which is all good kernel settings services manager the sys config editor which you saw me just uh have a look at now for some of the etc configuration files and then a whole range of different options for administering your system configure a firewall interesting uh gecko does not appear to have firewall d installed at the moment personally i wouldn't bother i would install ufw so yeah that's just it's pretty much as you'd expect let's try one more thing normally if i wanted to install my printer in mate i would go to the marte control center and system config printer would probably be installed and i could configure it from here as we have yast installed that would be a little bit like doubling everything up and i think we have to configure the printer from yast so let's see if we can do that so configure printers right there is no print queue right so how do we actually do this how about add let's see if it can detect printers so it's doing something but if you remember and open sues we had the same issue that it didn't automatically spot my printer i have to see say with debian based systems and arch based systems on the whole my printer is identified straight away so retrieving printer driver information i think this is quite interesting given that it doesn't really seem to have detected my printer but we'll let it do that and come back in a sec let's try connection wizard so access network printer okay try lpd i don't know what the uh let me just see if i can find uh the ip address of this printer okay i'm coming back now because i've managed to find the ip address of my network printer so let's give this a go and it's 179 okay fine we'll see if this works test connection test okay select the printer manufacturer this is a lot of messing isn't it i'm not really impressed with this at all determining matching printer drivers there we go canner captain pixma mg 5650 so [Music] i'm assuming it's going to do it this time right so it says it's ready well the proof is in the pudding let's print a test page okay it's happening right so we'll leave that for now um i'll shut this down once the printing's finished and it's time for a chat right so that's gecko linux what do i think of it overall it's a nice marte desktop environment i didn't have any showstopper problems with it i think it's reasonably well configured with a sensible selection of software and it installs incredibly simply just using calamaris at the same time i i had that irritation with the wrong locale showing on the top of light dm and having to set my locale to uk english in the system configure editor right from the get go so perhaps not quite as out of the box as a new user would want i do like the fact that it comes with all of those repos the pacman repo there already and with the non-patent or with the patent encumbered codex so you can get on and play your music i know it's not somebody something everyone believes in but i also know that in distros like open source and fedora many desktop users will jump through the hoops that are necessary so that they can play their music and do whatever they need to do with non-free components it's completely up to you whether you want to do that i understand why open souza and fedora don't do it out of the box but it's a definite bonus for this um printing well i got it to print in the end but it's a bit of a faff and i have to say i had the same issue with open sues so i think it's kind of inherited that would i have had the same issue if i just use the system config printer dialogue that i found afterwards um i don't know it's too late i've done it now but uh yeah having to find the ip address on my printer which um took a bit of doing i have to say i had to go into my router and find out which one it was because it's dynamically allocated and once i'd done that okay it was fine it worked but um just just something that perhaps i think needs to be worked on i'm also in two minds about not having a firewall installed it may not need to be switched on by default but i think it would be quite a good idea if firewall d or out of my preference ufw was installed but putting those things aside and none of them are show stoppers uh it's a way to get an open souza distro installed very quickly and it's polished it it's the out of the box experience is what i would expect from marty um is it as easy as the likes of ubuntu mate or manjaro marte probably not but it's getting there and i think for new users i would advise that they go to gecko before they perhaps dive in to the full open souza experience so yeah not a bad distro now this week uh guys i'm uh i'm doing another four o'clock in the morning run down to london on monday so you may not hear much of me next week i'm hoping that's going to be it for a while uh and i'm hoping the weather isn't too hot down there but uh we're just getting back up and running the company that i work for at the moment so we're getting absolutely battered as far as works concerned and i'm not complaining about that because i know that there's companies that are folding all over the place at the moment with this damn virus so hey you know it's just one of those things so i will see you next saturday before i go though i would just like to thank those wonderful people my patrons corbinian schilderman robert boudreau gary moore aristotelis papa giorgio storm picks stephen cross mike long david bird entropy uk richard wade tiger philip s b and forest roads thanks guys you're going to make this uh channel all it can be over the next year i'll do um probably a ramble next week because i've got quite a lot to update you on in terms of my constant fight for a decent internet connection which i'm just about to get and my window manager my tiling window manager hopping which has moved on to another stage so we'll have a good old traditional ramble next week until then though guys have a great weekend and i'll see you next saturday

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 6,431

Keywords: oldtechbloke, otb, linux, oldtechbloke youtube, old tech bloke youtube, geckolinux, opensuse, geckolinux opensuse spin, geckolinux installation, mate, mate desktop environment, easy linux installation, easy opensuse installation, yast, yast printer configuration, opensuse locale setting, geckolinux 2020, old tech bloke, opensuse review, opensuse 2020, linux tutorial, mate desktop, geckolinux theming, geckolinux review, linux review, user friendly opensuse, linux for beginners

Id: uo3tmSk3pz4

Length: 32min 10sec (1930 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SmegHeadOz]

I'm worried what the temperature is going to be in Summer at home (Ipswich, Australia), we are seeing high 20's in the middle of Winter (July/August). I suspect we're going to see too many low to mid 40's days starting from late Spring (November).

If I was still looking for a Linux Distro GeckoLinux would definitely be on the shortlist.

Interesting to see your experience with Void Linux, watched a video from DT in the last couple of weeks and he wasn't complimentary about Void Linux, for those that have watched many videos from DT that would not come as a shock.

But another enjoyable video, great work.

[u/gabriel_3]

You did it, thank you for picking up my suggestion.

Entertaining review, good pace: great work!

Apparently you didn't notice the yast entry labelled "Firewall", I didn't need to find the ip of my network printer to make it work.

openSUSE video views: it's the subject, but also is the number of recommendations on socials, which are not coming if the videos does not appeal the enthusiasts - check Tyler's Tech openSUSE videos views out for a comparison.

And by the way, we're not vocal:

https://preview.redd.it/y8i0nqnpetg51.jpg?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=6b309e0f8599387ad05dcfec8c6317cac1b64a3b