Uruk 2.0 Last Touches

Hi Hayderctee

I enjoyed the Uruk Control center, that's what gave Uruk some "particularity" or "singularity"
so i would vote for "keep it as is".

Bravo anyways, and thanks to both of you ;-)

I only ran the last Beta version live without installing and it was a little while ago, but here's what I remember:

(1) I liked the default MATE configuration better than Trisquel's, primarily because it had a search bar, making it easier to find the things I wanted to change.
(2) The default theme and icons were lovely.
(3) install-guix.sh (or whatever it was called) did not work. I know that isn't helpful feedback without the specific error message, but I've forgotten what it was.
(4) It would be amazing if Guix were pre-installed and fully configured out-of-the-box. I'd probably start using Uruk as my main OS.

The last time I installed the Uruk 2 beta, the firmware for this Wi-Fi adapter was missing. Maybe you have fixed this already, but I just wanted to let you know.

Will Uruk use the Trisquel repository or will it have its own?

It has its own and uses the Trisquel repository.

if Guix were pre-installed- I will be happy. I also want Uruk 2.0 with xfce4 desktop. Because my pc configuration is low. Mate menu is not so fast.

The Uruk Website is down it seems. Is there no other website? I want somewhere to direct friends to.

Thanks.

Here you are, mate Mattress -> https://sourceforge.net/projects/urukos/files/2.0/Beta2/

Been a long time since I posted. Running Uruk on a Librebooted Thinkpad T500 and its running really smooth.
The installation worked without a hitch. Once installed and rebooted I run the updates and rebooted again. No issues.

The control center is great. Nice short cuts to just about everything you may need. Not had any problems with it.

I tip my hat to you sirs. Very good work. Looking forward to final release.

If I log into the beta (in a second partition on my PC), and download and install all updates, will that result in an installed system equivalent to a release candidate? If so, I will do that and post any notes here in the next couple of days.

TL;DR
I've tried out Uruk GNU/Linux 2.0 beta2.
I liked it.

What this is:
This post is a little feedback / review on trying to try out the second beta of Uruk 2. I half expected that the final release would be out before this post, and that's indeed what happened, but I'll post this nonetheless.
My understanding of software and hardware is limited.
I have only tried it on old hardware from a live DVD and have not installed it, so this is *not* a review of what an *installed* Uruk is like.
I'm sorry I'm posting it here, but my access to the WWW is too restricted to find out the proper addressee for each issue, find out the proper channel to address each addressee, set things up and then give feedback / bug reports. [Edit: I see Uruk bug reports should go to https://urukproject.org//bt/login_page.php ]

Preparation:
I wanted to try Uruk on an elderly, heavy, loud Acer notebook.
Using an assistant to create a bootable USB drive, I put the Uruk ISO image on a thumb drive, put that in the notebook, instructed the notebook to boot from removable media, but the notebook skipped the thumb drive and instead booted Windows XP, which was installed on the internal hard drive. (When I used that to examine the thumb drive, there was no trace of the contents except the "EFI" folder, despite Trisquel perfectly recognizing everything on that very same thumb drive. This is why I don't think I simply made a mistake when writing the image to the thumb drive. Could it have something to do with all other folders having lowercase labels?) After two tries, I gave up.
Next, I burned the very same ISO on a DVD. That worked. If memory serves me right, the screen was black and there was no sign of the DVD working as intended for quite some time, just noise coming from the optical drive. I was worried. Finally, Uruk's options menu (in English) silently appeared and I chose to run the vanilla live trial version from DVD. If I recall correctly, I failed to spot any accessibility, language, or IME options at this stage, but I assume there is a well-known keystroke sequence for voice guidance. After more waiting, Uruk's top panel, various widget (?) icons, desktop background and an unfamiliar panel-like thing in the centre of the bottom slowly appeared, one by one, not necessarily in this order. Everything was slow and stayed that way.

Settings:
As with other distros, you can choose to access system settings either from a larger super-menu leading to more specific menus, or use the start menu to go straight to the more specific ones.
There were one or two settings I wanted to check/adjust but was unable to find; unfortunately I forgot what they were.
The ISO comes with a handful of West European languages (I think en, es, fr, it, nl) and Arabic. No CJK fonts, I think, and no character utility such as gucharmap. (I know I can easily install software from the online repositories.) I switched to Dutch, after which many things were in Dutch and some in English, the fallback language.

A few things that I think could be better, in no particular order:

System settings:
In the settings super-menu mentioned above, you cannot see which settings are in which category unless you click on each category and wait for it to load. I think the content of each category should not be hidden behind a category, but listed under a category heading instead, so that you can see everything already when in the super-menu. To help you understand, this is the way it was in at least one edition of Mint, and probably other distros. It looks less tidy, but makes finding things less tedious, especially on a slow system.

Terminology inconsistency:
The explanation or help of the included firewall uses the terms "toestaan", "weigeren", "afwijzen", and "beperken", but the labels on the actual buttons are "toestaan" (which I guess means "allow"), "weigeren" ("deny"?), and "verwerpen" ("dismiss"?), so I suspect this is a bug. But my understanding of Dutch is poor.
I think there was a similar inconsistency in another piece of software, but unfortunately I don't even remember which one, nor if that was Dutch or English.

Does the system give away users' location?
The top panel shows (a widget with?) the date. You can specify one or more geographic locations and specify which of them is your current location, and can see the current time for each. As soon as you connect to the internet, information about the current weather for each location will be shown, even if you have given instructions to show *no* weather information! I assume that Uruk tells a weather server which location(s) the user is interested in, which, depending on how it is done, might give away the user's geographic location to any party intercepting that traffic.

User's work undone:
In one of the package managers, selecting some packages for installation and then switching to "expert mode" voids all selections of packages, so you have to start over.

???:
I can't read my own handwriting but made a note saying something like "USCenter: Select [unreadable] information; nothing happens", probably about the "Uruk Software Center" or "Uruk Settings Center", but I don't think the latter is a thing.

Searching / filtering in one of the package managers, I forgot which:
You can't cancel a search. You have to wait until all results are listed. This is a problem on slow systems such as Uruk-from-live-DVD-on-old-notebook. Similar issues in other pieces of software; it's not obvious how to cancel things when they turn out to take long.

It would be good if package managers had a one-click way to get an estimate of how much space an installation will take up *including* those dependencies that are not already installed.

I first tried "Uruk Software Center" and then switched to Synaptic, simply because I am somewhat familiar with the latter, but both seemed perfectly usable. I don't think there must be only one application for each task. Each application has its strengths and weaknesses.

Using the unfamiliar panel-like thing that lives on the bottom of the screen which is probably what's called "Plank", which does double duty as taskbar and quickstart shortcut holder, and which auto-adjusts its girth, I felt it was easy to accidentally start up something I assumed was already running and intended to minimize. I understand that the bright dots below each icon help to prevent this, but I think it can be bothersome nonetheless on slow, overburdened systems where there are time gaps between instructions, things happening, and happenings becoming visible.

Generally, everything was clearly not geared towards live DVDs used with old notebooks; the System Monitor I used would agree. While the package manager was downloading things and trying to install them, even the clock sometimes froze for minutes. During one of those times, shortly after the clock stopped, I went to sleep. When I checked 8½ hours later, the clock showed the same old time, the optical drive was still audibly busy, and I decided to end the suffering by a hard switch-off.

Summary:
As far as my system speed issues allowed me to try this beta release, I was happy. Internet worked as soon as I plugged in the cable, without so much as a click being required. I don't think there was anything that totally didn't work. If you install it on decent hardware and don't mind using the mouse, you will probably like it.
I am happy to know there will be [Edit: now is] a nice stable Uruk release I can install and use as my main system. All the more so until the release of the next stable Trisquel, and until the release of a Parabola that I can install, which I haven't tried yet.
I am grateful to all people who contributed to Uruk and let me use their work. Thank you.

Hello,
I installed uruk_2.0-xfce-i686.iso on an Asus Eee PC with 989 M of ram.
The system boots and runs well for the most part.
I have had one occurance where letting it load to the default system
without hitting return caused the system to freeze on the splash screen
after the grub menu was no longer displayed.

I was able to connect to wifi LAN, the internet, and to install a wireless
printer.
I downloaded Dr. Racket and have it running in my Home directory.
Other packages do not seem to be available. I am not skilled enough to create
them. Additionally, I do not know how to connect to other repositories such
as the Trisquel 8 repositories to see if some of the missing packages might
be available. Two packages I have searched for are not visible.
Build-essential and scrot(which are available in Trisquel 7).
My reason for wanting these is to compile C code using stdio.h and to take screen shots in
order to make system responses clearer to other folks like you all when I
ask a question.
Does anyone know how I might access these so I might continue testing this
lovely distribution?
I have tried several times to load Trisquel 8.0 for i686 but cannot get it
to run in QEMU or as a bootable usb system. Therefore I have not tried it nor seen if the packages i am not finding are available in the repositories for Trisquel 8.

I do like the Uruk distribution and find its memory usage is lower
than Trisquel 7 mini.
Thank you for your hard work and time. Please continue to develop both systems.

Thank you both for answering me. I tried the options which you suggested. There are issues with scrot and with finding additional library dependencies. I am sure that I do not have the required skills to reliably perform these operations. I will stay with Trisquel 7.0 for the time being.
Dave O