Jul 142011
 

ububox-salentosArticle by Gabriele
After about a month of work and various tests I’m proud to make public the result of this commitment:

UbuBox “SalentOS” live 11.04.

The idea to make a personal operating system, flashed in my head for quite some time, but for one reason or another I never managed to get to work seriously on such a project. In these days I decided to commit myself “full time” to it and I did it, also pushed by the wave of news that are coming in the world of the penguin! I did not, initially, planned to make UbuBox “SalentOS” public. Then, along the way, thanks to the advice of some friends and the realization that the system satisfy me, I said “Who knows … maybe this could satisfy someone else too. Why not make it public?”.


Well, the premise it’s over, now the presentation of UbuBox “SalentOS” 11.04.

I started with a minimal install (with only a command-line) and I chose Ubuntu Natty with Openbox as window manager. The criterion that guided me in building UbuBox “SalentOS” was to find the right balance between lightweight and efficiency, so for this reason I’ve added to Openbox software coming from Gnome or XFCE environments. For the creation of the iso I used remastersys.

1 – THE NAME: “SalentOS”

I decided to make a tribute to my beloved land, Salento, choosing to put some of the wallpapers that immortalize the beautiful landscapes, places and moments of Salento. Many are made with my camera, others come from the network.

2 – THE BASE

Ubuntu 11.04, in my opinion, was the right choice for the basis of UbuBox “SalentOS” for several reasons: the kernel 2.6.38, the robustness of the system from Canonical, the ease of installation of the packages .deb and the will to don’t wanting to give up instruments such as the Software Center and Synaptic.

3 – THE WINDOW MANAGER

The choice of Openbox was made because I am interested in having very light but elegant graphics system, which combine Docky, the popular Mac-style dock! The bottom panel is Tint2, which is also very light and extremely configurable (it can be customized by modifying the file tint2rc with a simple text editor), like Conky that i’ve inserted with his default configuration on the desktop. The compositing manager (shadows, fades and other small effects) that I’ve chose is the very light xcompmgr, set to be active at startup, but without any effects.

The software that I’ve decided to pre-install is :

ACCESSORIES: calculator, Leafpad (Text Editor), Disk Usage Analyzer (baobab), screen capture tool (xfce4-screenshooter), Notes (xfce4-notes), file search tool (Catfish)

AUDIO/VIDEO: Audacity, Avidemux (video editor), Cheese, Desktop Recorder (recordmydesktop) EasyTAG (edit mp3 tags), Audacious (music player), words (multimedia player), Gtkpod (iPod Manager), VLC, Xfburn (burner cd / dvd)

GRAPHIC: Gimp, Simple scan, Ristretto (image viewer)

INTERNET: aMule, Sylpheed (email client), Midori (browser default), Firefox, Pidgin (IM accounts manager), Gwibber (social network account manager), FileZilla, Liferea (manager feeds), Uget (download manager), qBittorrent.

OFFICE: Suite LibreOffice

SYSTEM TOOL: Ubuntu Tweak, Unetbootin, Virtualbox

Among the other tools there are GDM-tweaker (aesthetic graphical tool for configuring the login manager that allows you to set-background and icons of the same theme), Gmrun (application launcher that is started by pressing Alt-F2), and Gparted and Remastersys backup.

Some screenshots:

 

Menu openbox (Tasto destro su una parte vuota della scrivania)

Thunar file manager

 

Multimedia

 

Tools

Download

– ISO UbuBox “SalentOS” 11.04 Live (32bit) –

– md5 (32bit) verification file-

– ISO UbuBox “SalentOS” 11.04 Live (64bit) –

– md5 (64bit) verification file-

The ISO is around 1.1GB and is recordable on a DVD. This, I repeat, is a live system, but it’s also possible to do an HD install by clicking on “Install UbuBox” SalentOS” from the main menu (the installer is for Ubuntu). If for any reason you should need the username and password during the live session, they are:

USER: live

PASSWORD: leave blank and press enter

SESSION DESKTOP: openbox-session (The only one installed and running)

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  7 Responses to “UbuBox “SalentOS” 11.04”

  1. I really liked your desktop configuration..I never thought that openbox can be this much beautiful using docky and tint2 panel.. you could have used plank( a new dock by docky team written in vala) or dockbarx as it is lightweight..

    eventhough i won’t use salentos as my default os ( currently using ubuntu 11.04 with unity as default) i will follow this like i’m following bodhi,arios,pinguy and elementary os..

  2. Hello! I know the dock plank and I also did some testing during the development of ububox salentOS. In the end I chose Docky because Planck is still a young project and is not easily configurable for the common user. I do not exclude the use of Planck in the next releases of ububox salentOS because it is a promising project! Thank you for your interest and continue to follow UbuBox salentOS! 😉

    thanks

  3. I know this sounds daft but, if I install it using English in the Installer, will it translate the menu entries in to English?
    If I don’t ask I’ll never know!

    Very slick and impressive – thanks.

  4. Many thanks for all your efforts. Some say there are now too many ‘Buntu variants about but then choice is what Linux is all about.

    I visited your part of the world several times many years ago so thanks for bringing back some nice memories of that too 🙂

    Download for me is quite slow and erratic so not sure if I’ll make the whole 1.1GB

    Please advise if this ever appears on a torrent somewhere?

  5. Can you also tell me please if this will offer to replace an existing Linux installation which is part of a dual boot with Windows XP? I have just done this automatically by replacing Ubuntu 11.04 with Kororaa alongside XP and would like to know if UbuBox provides the same possibility during install?

  6. New release of Ubuntu means new release of UbuBox.
    Here is my review of latest version based on 11.10:

    http://linuxblog.darkduck.com/2011/11/italian-job-ububox-salentos.html

  7. ho erroneamente eliminato il film .conkyrc qualcuno sarebbe così gentile da suggerirmi come ripristinarlo? grazie

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