Bodhi, A minimal, enlightened, Linux

http://www.bodhilinux.com/

by jancona • 15 years ago

73 52 15 years ago

bodhilinux.com

simonsarris• 15 years ago

That's funny. I never even knew Bodhi was a Sanskrit word that is usually translated as "enlightenment."

In the 2000 RPG-of-the-year Baldur's Gate II, Bodhi was one of the major villains, a sadistic vampire character.

http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Bodhi

So the name has always had an eerie/negative connotation for me.

TY• 15 years ago

And Bodhi was the name of Patrick Swayze's character in "Point Break", so in a mind of a movie geek it makes total sense to think of this distro as Linux for (web) surfers...

planckscnst2• 15 years ago

I see nothing good here. It is Ubuntu stripped down to nothing more than Enlightenment (with a butt-ugly theme, of course), Midori (a light-weight WebKit/GTK+ browswer), Leafpad (a poor excuse for an editor), PCManFM (a file manager), a terminal, and a package manager. You can get the same system by spending 10 minutes on a base Arch install.

If they really want to do something significant, they should make an good Enlightenment theme (if that's even possible - I can't seem to find a good one), and make a desktop-suitable version of Eve (a WebKit browser made with Enlightenment's toolkit) as well as other Enlightenment-based tools.

P.S. Sorry to the folks who contribute to this project about the negative tone. I hope you only use it as motivation to do something more than pollute the Linux distribution space.

wewyor• 15 years ago

For those who prefer the ubuntu package release cycle (or overall system) there is a minimal ubuntu installation:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD

Needs an internet connection to install (I think wired).

u489982• 15 years ago

That minimal CD wouldn't be as same as minimal install, would it?

wtracy• 15 years ago

Enlightenment 0.16 had a ton of themes (some quite gorgeous) up on Freshmeat and that alone I considered a reason to stick with Enlightenment 0.16.

Then Freshmeat decided that they no longer wanted to be a repository for themes, and deleted everything. Gaah!

dkersten4• 15 years ago

The Arch package manager is also much more awesome than that of Ubuntu (IMHO, of course). :-P

lukeschlather2• 15 years ago

Yes, I love package managers that don't provide a mechanism for signing code. I also love compromised mirrors.

aw3c22• 15 years ago

How that? You cannot even properly search for packages by name. It always searches the description too. Try searching for opera or even only packages that start with opera*.

I love Archlinux but I really miss aptitude.

astrofinch• 15 years ago

"I hope you only use it as motivation to do something more than pollute the Linux distribution space."

If there weren't all these extraneous niche Linux distributions, maybe promising ones like http://nixos.org/ would actually get the attention they deserve.

planckscnst2• 15 years ago

Now there is an interesting project! That's going to be the next OS on my netbook.

I love that the package manager makes it trivial to have multiple versions of the same program. There are always some programs I like to have a stable distribution-maintained package of as well as the latest development version.

And this:

  $ nixos-rebuild test

This builds and activates the new configuration, but doesn’t make it the boot default. Thus, rebooting the system will take you back to the previous, known-good configuration.

An even nicer way to test changes is the following:

  $ nixos-rebuild build-vm
  $ ./result/bin/run-*-vm

This builds and starts a virtual machine that contains the new system configuration (i.e. a clone of the configuration of the host machine, with any changes that you made to configuration.nix).

barista2• 15 years ago

Isn't this the point of open source though. They have a vision of making a fast lightweight desktop based on linux and they did it. If people don't like it, they won't use it.

oconnore2• 15 years ago

The other point is getting lots of smart people to cooperate, instead of reinventing everything under the sun.

listic• 15 years ago

What do you recommend to those who just want to try out Enlightenment, instead?

I have just familiarized myself with Linux via Ubuntu. I saw this Bodhi on Distrowatch and thought it's a good way to look at Enlightenment.

exch• 15 years ago

I'm not a big fan of Ubuntu spin offs, but this one at least has the merit of booting very quickly. The 'lightweight' label is not misplaced. I did find some bugs in the UI. Most notably the layout of the "Run Everything" menu (tab headers) was a bit messed up.

Which brings me to the name of this menu item. Seeing something labeled "Run Everything" does not inspire me with confidence and zest to click it. Of course I did anyway and was relieved to find that it did, in fact, not actually run everything, but just let you pick a specific application to run.

I will have to play with it some more for a better feel. It definitely needs polishing, but it's not a bad start.

I do agree with the choice of editor and file manager pointed out by a poster below me. I'm sure there are some other applications I would have changed, but to be honest, that is all mostly a matter of taste.

spudlyo• 15 years ago

I can't read "Enlightenment: the lightest desktop manager there is" without smirking.

sceadu• 15 years ago

Maybe they're only going after the non-power users who never venture beyond KDE or Gnome and don't know any better. :)

u489982• 15 years ago

I'd agree. I'm a windows user for many years (XP) with couple of old machines laying around. I have recently tried PeppermintOS, Joli, Lubuntu. I think I have found Peppermint to be better than all of them and I think there is a market growing for lightweight Linux distros. With a lot better software manager, file manager, windows' look-alike environment and simplicity, I think it is time for a linux comeback with all these distros competing with each other.

dkersten4• 15 years ago

I like my "desktop manager" to.. not have a desktop (I have a desktop background image, no icons, no menus (that are always visible)) and my window management to be as simple and automatic as possible. I also want the mouse to be 100% optional. Its nice to use it when I'm pointing and clicking anyway, but when I'm not, eg, when I'm coding or in a terminal, I want to be able to control everything without leaving the main keyboard. As such, my window manager of choice is, of course, a tiling window manager (musca), and it is truely lightweight - a few K lines of C code, a few KB compiled binary, very fast, very low memory usage. Hell, it delegates its menu to dmenu (which I find to be an awesome little program - useful, very fast, tiny, easy to use and no dependencies besides xlib).

I run Musca on an Arch install (on an eee PC) for true lightweight minimalism :)

nicpottier• 15 years ago

Ya, I did the same thing.

I remember first messing with Enlightenment in '95 or so. And it was the bleeding edge, the realm of "latest hardware only". I think my overclocked pentium 120 did an ok job of it, but only barely.

But I guess fast forward 15 years and it is pretty fast. Kind of like Emacs eh? :)

rch• 15 years ago

"we are sure you will be impressed!" I'm not. So, what now?

jessedhillon5• 15 years ago

I'm glad we had a 3000 year old spiritual tradition that is sacred to millions just lying around, waiting to be plumbed for names that are exotic-sounding to Western ears. It just wouldn't do to call your OS "Salvation" or "Revelation" would it?

I'm sure some would interpret this as admiration; is it really admiration to take sacred concepts and redefine them to have profoundly dull associations? And, is it admiration for the people who devote their lives to pursuing these concepts, or for idealized representations of Eastern spiritual traditions?

(written as an atheist, FYI)

EDIT: From /about.html: "Bodhi comes from the Buddhist term for 'enlightenment'. It is also a type of sacred tree, thus the leaf used in our logo."

res0nat0r• 15 years ago

Oh, I just thought this was named after Patrick Swayzes' character from Point Break.

andrewvc• 15 years ago

Well, since it uses 'Enlightenment' as a WM it makes sense.

I'll tell you what, as an Atheist, if any Christians want to name their next bible reading app Secular Humanism v3.0 it'll be fine with me.

jessedhillon5• 15 years ago

I haven't seen anything that suggests the Enlightenment WM is named after the Buddhist concept. The Bodhi distro could easily be called Locke or Descartes if you consider that the WM could be named after the age of enlightenment in Western philosophy instead.

And if it is named after the Buddhist concept, then my question still stands: why can the names of significant concepts from other cultures be appropriated and applied to utterly mundane notions like software packages and OSes?

How is this different than when people who know zero Japanese or Chinese get tattoos of CJK characters -- I think most people can see how that is an example of shallow fetishization of a culture, appropriating superficial symbols and detaching them from the significant context and value that they are assigned in other cultures.

If it's a serious comment, witness the sibling to your comment where a person thought that the only significance of "Bodhi" is the name of a character from a movie.

tree_of_item2• 15 years ago

http://god.rubyforge.org/

zavulon• 15 years ago

If it wasn't for that about.html, I would've thought it was named after a Baldur's Gate II character, and was prepared to make a joke about sucking blood..

Estragon• 15 years ago

Speaking as a practitioner of Buddhist meditation, get off your high horse, Jesse. It's just a name. "Buddhist" is just an identity, and a core goal of the practice is to bring an end to such things.

jessedhillon5• 15 years ago

Get off my high horse?

People value elements of their culture and would like them not to be debased or conflated with the mundane. I'm glad you were able to glean something valuable from an ages-old culture. Try giving back some time.

> "Buddhist" is just an identity, and a core goal of the practice is to bring an end to such things.

First, this is not even the point of the comment.

Second, this is so inane, and a typical attitude of Western admirers of Eastern traditions. Like somehow, Buddhism couldn't manage itself until you came along and told everyone what it really meant.

Try this: go to India, go stop at Bodh Gaya and urinate on the Bodhi tree.

Before the monks who tend the tree beat you up, let them know that they're mistakenly identifying with concepts like "trees" and "cleanliness." But never fear, you have come to set them free and let them know the true meaning of Buddhism, by bringing an end to identities!

whalesalad• 15 years ago

Hideous.

socksy• 15 years ago

For a more minimal system, one might want to check out SliTaz: http://slitaz.org/en

Under 30mb (compressed, in RAM — just over 100mb uncompressed), and quite fast. No Ubuntu distribution, but packages available for it should be at least adequate for most users.

andrewflnr2• 15 years ago

This was the first thing I thought of when I saw the website: http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho...

They need some help with design.

ramchip• 15 years ago

That was quite an interesting read. I don't know if it has been on HN before, but if it hasn't you should submit it.

andrewflnr2• 15 years ago

It was originally a comment here, on the post about a site that had reduced movies to a big color band.

limmeau• 15 years ago

For minimalism, I still prefer grml[1], the live CD with zsh.

1. http://www.grml.org/

gimpf• 15 years ago

The live CD with an actually really cool configuration of zsh. Whatever linux distro you're using, get the zsh config from grml!

yannickmahe• 15 years ago

Side question: how many users can these minor linux distros hope to get? Linux is still not mainstream for desktop computers (i.e. non geeks are a very small minority of users), and there are dozens of distros with very little differences between them. With the majority of the user base using the major distros (Ubuntu, etc.), what is left for small distros such as this? Thousands, hundreds, dozens of users?

tjavailable• 15 years ago

Bodhi Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution that uses the Enlightenment desktop in place of the usual desktop environment. Check it out http://ubuntumanual.org/posts/274/bodhi-linux-the-enlightene...

Bodhi, A minimal, enlightened, Linux

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