Auxtral is a project whose main objective is to spread the virtues and advantages of "free software" and the GNU / Linux operating system, and fundamentally Debian, which is considered by many to be the best OS distribution.
It is made up of a careful selection of software on a Debian "base system", designed especially for users of other OS, mainly proprietary ones, so that they can experience at least an approach to GNU / Linux and free software in general. .
I hope you find it a pleasant experience to navigate the pages of this site, as well as an interesting and productive one for those who decide to download the Auxtral 3 (Alsephina) ISO and give it a try.
Thank you.
Arq. Guillermo E. Sosa
San Nicolás - Bs. AS. - Argentina
Auxtral's policy regarding pre-installed applications is to have only the basic ones of an OS, plus the system administration ones, typical of the selected graphical environment. All software packages in this distribution are "free software" and come mostly from the "main" section of the "official Debian Bullseye repositories". Those of another origin are specified under the title "II. Of the packages of Other Sources" of the page "Licenses" of this site
Cinnamon is the desktop environment (DE) designed by the Linux Mint team for their distributions, and it has currently been adopted by several of the most important, either for their official versions or their "community editions". It is undoubtedly the most suitable DE for those making a transition from Windows as they will find it very familiar, making it easier for them to adapt to GNU / Linux. Based on modern technology but preserving traditional operating concepts, it results in a highly configurable and functional environment
Xfce is a "desktop environment" for GNU / Linux that in Auxtral is presented with a configuration similar to that of the Cinnamon version, (a single panel located at the bottom of the screen). Although it is somewhat lighter than this in terms of the demand on system resources, it is still very functional and aesthetically attractive as well as highly configurable and easy to use. Designed with a modular approach, it allows you to "build" it with its native packages or by selecting applications from other desktops such as Cinnamon or Mate.
MATE is a desktop environment derived from the GNOME 2 base code. It is an Argentine development, and its name comes from yerba mate, a native plant of subtropical South America that is used to prepare a very popular drink called mate.It is a very light DE and also very versatile, it has few but good native applications such as the "file manager" Caja and like Cinnamon it has compatibility with Gnome apps. Its visual and customization effects do not reach the level of the latter mentioned, but at least I find it interesting, aesthetic and it works
KDE Plasma 5 has been built using Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks. Qt 5 uses a hardware-accelerated OpenGL ES scene graph to compose and render graphics on the screen, enabling the delegation of computationally expensive graphics rendering tasks to the GPU, freeing up resources on the system's main processor and is faster and more efficient.
It is clarified that this version of Auxtral does not have two of its native applications since, following the policies of this Distro, it is offered with some non-native apps from the main desktop environment, such as Cinnamon, which does not come with Gnome-Terminal or Gedit. by default but with "Feather" and "Matte-Terminal". This KDE-Plasma does not use Konsole or Dolphin, but Terminal-Mate and Box as File Manager. If this is not to your liking, simply do: (1) # apt remove --purge box box-admin mate-terminall (2) # apt autoremove (3) apt install konsole dolphin. and matter fixed. After a long time of not working in this DE, I was struck by its low memory consumption at the beginning, opening only the terminal and executing "neofetch" around 600Mb
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Auxtral comes pre-installed only the necessary basic software: web-browser Brave, image viewer Mirage, terminal Mate-Terminal in Cinnamon and Xfce4-Terminal in Xfce, video player SM-Player, music player Audacious, plain text editor Pluma, partition manager GParted, soft for webcam Cheese, app store Gnome Software, flashUSB balena-Etcher, USB multiboot USB-Creator
You will install the specific applications yourself, according to your software needs according to the destination you want to give your PC, being able to choose "free", "open source", or "not free" applications. "Freedom is yours."
Installation is quick and easy, being able to do it from Debian's online repositories or by downloading the packages ".deb", "appimages" or other formats from their developers' site or with "Flatpak"
Auxtral 3 (Alsephina), is installed with some "main" repositories (free) according to the Debian "free software guidelines" (DFSG). However, Debian also supports those users who develop and run non-free software in Debian, so when installing Auxtral, (which by default is installed with a minimum configuration of "free" repositories) you can enable the "contrib" repositories (free software packages that require other software (dependencies) other than 100 % free) and "non-free" (packages that are not considered free software). Some because, although they can be freely distributed and installed, there is no access to their source code, others, in which their source code is available, but the software license is not contemplated in the Debian directives). To do so, and complete the list of repositories, at the first start of the system, from the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and as "root user" execute the script "main" to enable the "free repositories" or execute "nonfree" for the repositories "non-free + contrib + the multimedia repository"..
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These are the icons that appear in the system tray to indicate the "status of your system updates
The first "green arrows" indicates that your system is up to date; the second "yellow" that there are updates available; and the third "orange" alerts you to "urgent or large quantity" updates.
To update Auxtral, the correct thing is to do it through the console (or terminal), you open it from the panel icon or with the key combination Ctrl + Alt + T; you log in as Superuser (root) with the command "su" (without quotes), you give "enter", you enter your administrator password, again "enter" and you write "upgr", if when it asks for "confirmation" you see as in In the case of the figure below that tells you, for example, x updated, xxxxxx, xxxx and 1 not updated, put "n" and instead of "upgr" use "fupgr"; since that indicates that a "major update" is available, such as the base system or the kernel.
NOTE: "upgr" is equivalent to: (pt update && apt upgrade); and "fupgr" is equal to: (apt update && full-upgrade).
If the system tells you (with the tray icons) that there are updates and you want to see what they are before installing them, run:
"lupgr", which is equivalent to: (apt update && apt list --upgradable)
The best way to present it is to try it from the "Live System" (without the need to install Auxtral on your PC's HDD or SSD)
If you use linux,to copy to a DVD download "Brasero" ; "DVD Creator" for windows. For a bootable USB drive, download "balena-Etcher" for both SO. Start your PC and in the BIOS screen press "Del", "Esc" or "F2" depending on your Machine. Once in the SETUP screen configure in the Boot section so that it boots from the external drive you chose.
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