I am extremely proud and happy to announce the immediate availability of the coolest no-X release in Debian country, that’s the 32-bit version of LinuxBBQ “Virgin”, sporting a pure tmux session with all productivity CLI applications an average virgin-lover needs:

  •     alsa
  •     wyrd calendar
  •     bc calculator
  •     abook address book
  •     tina personal manager
  •     wordgrinder text processor (yes, .doc stuff)
  •     sc spreadsheet (yes, .xls stuff)    bbqradio radio player (“bbqradio”)
  •     shell.fm last.fm frontend
  •     streamripper
  •     moc music player
  •     mpg123 command line mp3 player
  •     sox swiss army knife for audio
  •     mc twopane file manager
  •     ranger file manager
  •     wikipedia2text wikipedia lookup
  •     unp unpacker (incl. unzip)
  •     lynx web browser
  •     elinks web browser
  •     newsbeuter RSS fetcher
  •     mutt mail client
  •     dvtm tiling window manager
  •     ceni network configurator
  •     bbqstart application launcher (“start”)
  •     bbqsnapshot image creator
  •     zsh shell (bash disabled, “ins bash” then “chsh” to change)
  •     sudo enabled

All BBQ apps are reworked and slightly polished. The kernel in question is still coming from siduction in version 3.7-1. systemd is now slightly optimized: no more RAID (mdadm) as service, no DHCP (at first run please use ‘ceni’ to configure the network). There are a couple of upstream annoyances:

  •     systemd and kernel debug spams into the login message (bug is reported, fix is promised for 3.8)
  •     on certain screen resolutions ‘Ceni’ complains that the terminal window is too small. Reason: seemingly curses needs fixed positions. Workaround: sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup -> UTF -> VGA -> choose font size 8×8 -> run ceni again -> configure network -> change fonts back if wished. Annoying, yes. Predicatble? No. Another option is to pick one of the other boot menu entries and edit the dimensions there (see nomode, i915 etc).

Now the end-user info that you should please scribble down:

login: bbq, password: bbq (remember, the login is probably buried under systemd’s puke)

After logging in, you find yourself in a tmux session. Run ‘bbq’ for a quick overview of starter tools. Run ‘bbqfix’ to get networking and to adjust alsamixer. Run ‘start’ for the application launcher. The BBQ tools link to each other, so you won’t get lost (hopefully). You want to look into ‘tmuxhelp’ to find out how to navigate in tmux. Give yourself a few minutes, it is definitely worth it. A nice (side) effect is that the mouse works, so you can use copy-paste (with middle-mouse click) like in graphical terminal sessions. The display of images or videos is not enabled, but doing so is easy and a nice way to dive into the beauty of framebuffer imaging.

What it is:

  •     a bare-virgin system without X
  •     ~920MB in installed size
  •     the BBQ base in perfection
  •     the base system for future 64-bit BBQ releases with version >1.0.5
  •     offering more comfort and functionality than a Debian netinstall
  •     a fully-functional desktop
  •     very 1980s hacker style

What it is not:

  •     a competitor of Ubuntu, Linux Mint, the Other Distro or anything that comes with an X session
  •     a one-click solution for lazy users
  •     beginner-friendly

If you think want to pop the cherry, feel free to dd it to a stick or burn a CD (<4x) and have a ride. The system is installable (“bbqinstaller”) and a produced bbqsnapshot will contain the traditional live-installer (GUI) as well as the CLI installer. But you don’t want GUI anymore, I promise.

Direct download: http://linuxbbq.org/releases/noX/linuxbbq-virgin.iso

md5: 7d499cc1ebd25658b47a43e86ff8862c
size: 283,115,520