Taking Dragora 3.0 beta 2 for a spin
Here's a screen shot from my live session. It's using the Trinity Desktop Environment, which is a fork of the old KDE 3 desktop environment.
I downloaded the ISO from the fsf mirror: https://mirror.fsf.org/dragora/
When booting you get a "Live" option, which sends you to a tty logged in as the root user. I believe that the root password is "dragora" if you ever need it - I have not needed it yet.
I typed the 'startx' command to see if it would send me into a desktop environment, and that's when I got the Trinity Desktop.
It's got a lot of unique features. It's using musl instead of glibc, for one thing. It's using sysvinit instead of systemd. It actually seems very zippy - I know from running musl on another distro that it can speed things up a bit, or it uses fewer resources than a glibc system.
Memory usage is interesting - it's only using 233mb of ram when in the desktop environment. And when I open the Konqueror web browser, the ram usage does not increase for some reason. So I assume that Konqueror is running in the background all the time.
Konqueror itself is quite old and not compatible with much of the modern web, and possibly not even secure enough to use. But of course I should be able to install a more modern browser.
I can't figure out how to search for new packages yet. Dragora uses a package manager called "qi", which apparently builds the packages, but I don't understand how it works yet.
There seems to be a list of some of the available packages here: https://mirror.fsf.org/dragora/current/packages/amd64/
I tried downloading the Libre Moon web browser binary tarball and running it as a browser, but it won't run. I think if I install Dragora rather than using it as a Live ISO that I'll get a separate user account than root and maybe I'll be able to download and run some programs.
If anyone has any experience with Dragora, especially in terms of using the 'qi' package manager to find and install packages, I'd love to hear from you about how this distro works.
| Attachment | Size |
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| Dragora.jpg | 142.62 KB |
Oh now that I think about it, without glibc I don't think that normal binaries built for other distros will run. I might have to figure out a way to build a modern web browser on musl or find one that's pre-built.
This is an interesting dilemma.
> Oh now that I think about it, without glibc I don't think that normal
> binaries built for other distros will run. I might have to figure out a way
> to build a modern web browser on musl or find one that's pre-built.
>
> This is an interesting dilemma.
Wasn't musl designed to be ABI-compatible with glibc? Hopefully, the
problems you are experiencing are related to some corner cases (where
the compatibility has not been maintained) and won't occur with other
programs
>"Wasn't musl designed to be ABI-compatible with glibc? Hopefully, the problems you are experiencing are related to some corner cases (where the compatibility has not been maintained) and won't occur with other programs"
I think that only works in some cases but not all cases. I've tried the Void distro which has a musl variant, and I recall that there's quite a bit of typical software that won't work with it. Also I've read the page where the Alpine devs talk about how to get compatible software, and they have to use flatpak and some emulation or vm's to get some software running.
I recently tried Dragora GNU/Linux libre and found it good enough.
Some QI package manager documentation: https://www.dragora.org/en/manual/dragora-handbook.html#Introduction-to-package-management-in-Dragora.
Lot of important sections are missing but is enough to learn the basics.
First time seeing Dragora screenshot. Waiting for a long time for a stable release, very surprising if it uses TDE like Q4OS. Thank you andy.
Sincerely yours,
Malsasa