A New Hope

PakOS is a humble attempt to make an OS primarily for Pakistani People with their peculier problems, limitations in terms of resources availiable at their disposal and tastes. If this effort results in an OS which can be used by others, i will be honored.
Pakistan as a nation has very resources at its disposal. Most of the people who use computers have very old hardware availiable. This makes the PC owners forced to use outdated OSs like Windows XP which is extremely outdated and resultently full of viruses.
People are glued to Windows OS and can't think outside the box.
Hence PakOS, a completly open souce OS with extrmemely light foot print in terms of RAM and processor usage. I hope to make it work in 256 MB RAM and a single core processor in real world use, with visual outlook similar to windows.
Also it has to be resonably secue for home, office and Internet use. It can be achieved by these means:

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• Continous Security Updates (Debian Stable).
• Option to Encrypt Drive which unlocks at boot time (Debian Installer).
• Open Source Anti Virus Pre-Installed (ClamAV, ClamTk).
• Fire Wall Pre-Installed and Pre-Activated (UFW, GUFW).
• Web Applications Further secured using Application Firewall (FireJail).
• Browser Pre-Installed with open source plugins (Still learning how to do it).
• Any and all means to improve security...All suggestions are welcome.

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Happy Coding
SubhaniMinhas
2 Jan 2019

[Eznix]

PakOS looks great so far. I would add leafpad and nano for gui and cli text editing. System-wide firefox browser plugins go in /usr/lib/firefox/browser/extensions/. Also, a gui package manager would be handy - synaptic perhaps. You can remove hplip and simple-scan since you did not include any other printer utilities. Without foomatic-db and system-config-printer, the hplip software will not do much on its own. For a firewall, ufw is great but its command line. The gui is gufw which brings in almost 100mb, so its not light. Thanks for uploading.

[subhaniminhas]

@eznix  Sir, grateful for looking at PakOS. This iso is the base, as the name also Indictates on which everything will be built. I intend building the base to include only basic drivers so it works on all Hardware including printing and scanning.
I have built a Full version as well, however it is 2.2 GB in size and will take considerable time to upload, as my upload speed is just 100k :(
I have included most of the functionality you suggested, and will keep on seeking your suggestions in all future builds.

[Eznix]

I wanted to ask your permission before I do a video on your creation. I am very impressed with the full version and I would like to do a look at video and point people to your download. Is that ok?

[subhaniminhas]

Dear Sir, you greatly flatter me. It is your base i am using. I am still bug fixing many of the issues like better network drivers, working add-ons in the browser and auto changing wallpaper :). please allow me to upload the latest Full Build tonight, and if i am successful, then i will humbly requeest your attention to a newbie's 1st steps.

[Eznix]

Thank you. I will await your new release and look forward to it. Tbh, I pointed you in the direction of the build tools, but it is you who has done all the work. PakOS is uniquely your own creation and a wonderful system.

[subhaniminhas]

Well the latest version of Full PakOS has been uploaded. A few small issues at the moment. In order for network card to work inside virtual box, you have to select the default driver from drop down. It is set to wlan0 for wireless to work immediately, as many users are not aware why to write wlan0 manually. Also there is noscript add on installed in Firefox browser only. It has to be disabled for most of web pages to work. I intend disabling it by default. Also desktop image properties require a bit of tweaking to make images fit nicely. And you have to disable the auto rotatewallpapers.sh script from lxde autostart to stop wallpapers changing every 5 mnutes. That's all i had issues with. If anyone finds a few more, please drop in comments. Again thanks.

[Eznix]

I am anxious to do a video on your project. Do you think it is a good time with the current release? If you are planning an update to address any of the issues you raised, I will hold off until you are ready. Thank you for your involvement and I look forward to hearing from you. :-)

[subhaniminhas]

Sir, I think threre are many issues so far. Frankly speaking I am a novice, and once I try to use my own release for day to day use, I find that I cannot launch many a tools like Software-center, etc. Finally I found that I needed to add gksu in front of launch shortcut. Which I am planning to do shortly. Also pcmanfm does not mount partitions automatically. I had to find a small script to do it. But still the default behavior is not what I want from a daily driver.
I am humbled by your interest in my build, and you are requested to proceed if you think it is worthy of your attention. However I would only request that you point all the issues and if possible the pointets to the solutions in your video. It will help me greatly in building and improving the next version.

Sir, again thanks for your interest. I am honored.

[subhaniminhas]

Also I have yet to find a working iso writing tool or script to to make USB boot bak
able in debain. I tried a lot but iI have to switch to unetbootin to make my iso boot able from windows or Ubuntu. What is it you use. I would like to make it part of my iso along with VirtualBox, which is throwing a lot of errors during installation.

[Eznix]

I installed PakOS in Virtualbox and successfully used a usb flash drive the was automounted by PCManFM. Is that your script at work? As for Virtualbox guest additions in the ISO, is that what you mean? If so, the deb packages virtualbox-guest-utils, virtualbox-guest-dkms, and virtualbox-guest-x11 need to be included in the live build. The instructions are in the text file prepare-howto.txt:

Download the three .deb files for getting the Virtualbox guest additions installed.
virtualbox-guest-dkms
virtualbox-guest-utils
virtualbox-guest-x11

Rename each of the three .deb files so they begin with dpkg-:
dpkg-virtualbox-guest-dkms
dpkg-virtualbox-guest-utils
dpkg-virtualbox-guest-x11

Copy the renamed files into your /prep1/vbox64

You will also need to install these other packages to get the virtualbox modules to build within the live build:
build-essential
dkms
linux-headers-4.9.0-8-686
linux-headers-4.9.0-8-686-pae

[subhaniminhas]

Sir, thanks a lot for your input. I have 3 issues at present:
1. Making a Physical USB drive bootable using the the PakOS iso.
For that so far, i use unetbootin. However i cannot run it from inside PakOS / Debian. I can either use dd or some GUI tool. Any input to make the physical usb bootable from iso from debain is requested.
2. As there are no partitions inside a virtual machine, and we are already with root privilages in live iso inside virtual box, so all drives are accessible. However once i install the iso on a physical machine and then try to access any of the HDD partitions, it throws an error. For that i used a script to mount all external drives, which i will include in the admin script. However running the script is not a desirable solution as it is still a manual solution. pcmanfm should be able to mount all HDD partitions automatiocaly. Also mounting USB is normal and without any issues, nothing to do with my script :)
3. About installing the Virtual Box 5.2 or 6 as part of PakOS, i think last part of your answer solves my issue. I will try it and let you know.
Sir, thanks a lot for your guidence.

[Eznix]

I put a video up on PakOS: https://youtu.be/pj7Q9wrtLuo
I hope you get some feedback and further help in your efforts. I wish you well.

[subhaniminhas]

Wow, Sir, your support mean a lot to me. I am grateful. Thanks a lot.