TTOS Linux / Blog: Recent posts

So I had a few email reports about Calamares crashes in legacy BIOS mode. Legacy BIOS support has been discontinued with TTOS Linux "Chicago" and this has been stated previously. We just haven't prioritized blocking the ability to boot into legacy BIOS mode from the installer ISO because the ISO can still be used to troubleshoot older legacy BIOS installs. Since the emails keep coming, future updates will soon remove the feature to boot to legacy BIOS. The modern generations of hardware that this ISO is intended to run on are all new enough to support EFI/UEFI mode. A small BIOS edit to place it into EFI/UEFI boot mode is all that is needed to successfully boot and install TTOS Linux. In the meantime, please enjoy the current ISO's as the pending changes will have no difference in the OS except disabling the ability to boot into legacy mode for the installer.... read more

Alternative Desktop Environments
I have changed the default download to include the alternative desktop versions. The ISO uses a Net Installer to select and install the desktop environment during the Post Installation Setup process. The ISO does require internet to install. I have successfully tested each DE enabled in the installer under a VM in UEFI mode. I am not sure if Legacy BIOS can successfully install but most systems fitting the hardware requirements for install have UEFI boot support these days so Legacy BIOS is not a priority at the moment. ... read more

Alternative Desktop Environments
After playing with the Net Installation option of multiple desktop environments available upon selection, I manage to get the scripts working. But there are lots of bugs requiring manual command line tinkering to work. So far, Installing Trinity Desktop Environment only works 100% on the latest nightly images. Installing other DE's will bring you to a command line requiring that you setup their respective display managers. Installing multiple Desktop Environments should work if KDE is one of them as the default behavior is to use SDDM which is preconfigured on the system. With KDE unselected, you would have to choose a display manager from one of the desktop environments selected and set it up as default. I am currently working on the logic in the C++ binary "PostInstallationSetup" utility to determine the correct desktop environment to setup based on user selections and it should automatically install it and set it up via bash scripts tailored for each DE. IceWM also has a bug where it does not create a .desktop entry in the Xsessions making it invisible to the DE's until you manually add one. Other than that, the new ISO generations are coming along smoothly and automated nightly builds have been functioning all year so far. ... read more

Greetings everyone!
It's been a busy few months since the initial release of TTOS Linux Chicago! As demonstrated prior, this new release brings many new changes and improvements. Many of it's new features not found in any other distribution! To bring things up to speed for alternative DE builds, we now have some of them fully functional by switching the Installer into a net install giving the option for the user to select the Desktop Environment during the post installation process. We are also pleased to release that the TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment) is among the available desktops to select. All of this is available in our most recent nightly builds. We are aware that some bugs still exist but we are hard at work to bring this to the stable release. In the meantime, please feel free to download and enjoy!

TTOS Linux Video Showcase

Hi there fellow patrons,
I have uploaded a video to youtube showcasing both the install process and the features and software that are unique to TTOS Linux. I have seen a few video reviews online. Although they are mostly positive about their experience, none of the reviews go into what makes TTOS Linux different than other distributions. Only one video from 9to5 linux actually showed a glimpse of the ProShield security software in an early pre-release version. In order to get the full experience, it must be installed on bare metal hardware. Some of the features will not work properly on a VM without GPU passthrough. The GameStream Server would require both hardware LAN bridging and GPU passthrough to work. So without further hesitation, here is the youtube video for those that want to see it in action prior to installation.... https://youtu.be/7SL1PyvfrVk

It has been brought to my attention that calamares installer has been having segmentation faults starting with all 2024 ISO's. I have set the default download to 12/25/23 ISO as this is the ISO I last tested and comfirmed working. In the meantime, I will work on an updated install ISO by switching the installer to either testing or sid. The problem will work itself out whenever an update is published and it's likely to hit sid or testing first. ... read more

Hello patrons!

With the first month of the new year almost officially over, I thought I would share what we are hard at work on! The new release has been KDE based only since Christmas. By the end of the quarter, we are hoping to integrate a new DE selection and setup within our post installation utility. Once integrated into our CI/CD workflow, we will be able to speed up development by making all builds combined into one. This development will be tested on our boiler branch and brought into our stable as soon as it is functional. Here are the DE's we have been working on for this upcoming update ISO....
* GNOME
* MATE
* XFCE
* LXqt
* LXde
* IceWM
* WindowMaker / GNUstep
* TDE... read more

New Release

This past year marked a milestone with the major release. Many exciting new changes and additions were included. As we embark on a new year, we started work on bringing our alternative desktop environments into TTOS Linux 1.2 Chicago. As usual, stay posted here for the latest news and have a great year!

TTOS Linux Version 1.2 (Chicago) Release

As we close out the end of the year, we would like to thank everyone for their patience in what is our biggest change release yet. With this release, we managed to convert most projects and sub projects into a CI/CD workflow, we integrated our web security technologies with advanced setup for installing 3rd party apps such as Steam. We added UEFI support, and Wayland support. We also added our most prized addition... a GameStream Server. ... read more

Merry Christmas

And happy holidays!

We are pleased to announce the official release of TTOS Linux 1.2 Chicago available as the default download today! We have many exciting new changes! This build is a KDE only build but other DE respins will follow within this year!

As we have been shifting towards CI/CD automation, I have found that tasks can improve speed and efficiency with projects when the work flow automatically compiles and deploys changes. We are gearing towards building a rolling release to base our testing and final releases on. This new development workflow will drastically speed up ISO design and deploy time while also giving more time to develop the custom software that sets us apart. We are also looking at ways to integrate AI in both the work flow and in the final builds. We have so far seen multiple AI assistants and desktop widgets pop up on github and the upcoming rolling release builds will be a perfect test bed to try these out! ... read more

Release date
As we near our release date, we are hard at work fixing bugs. If you encounter any new bugs not listed below, please feel free to contact by email, facebook, or any of our public platforms. The more we find and fix prior to release, the better polished our release will be. We aim to provide release candidates prior to Christmas and will publish an official release right around Christmas. ... read more

Solution found!
Modern linux distributions take care of the setup in the installer. Seeing that there is some compatibility issues with the elaborate configuration and setup, our two solutions are
1. create an OS image that is pre-configured that calamares installs. This drastically increases the ISO size and this method is how TTOS Linux 1.1 does it's thing.
2. create a post installation setup utility that does all the required tasks upon first boot. This method may be a bit of an annoyance to see an archaic concept on a modern distribution but for the time being, it completely works and we will work in the future to make it more seamless and interactive with the desktop.
Now that we have the ability to create completely functional builds, we are taking the time to fix a few cosmetic bugs such as KDE Default Browser not being set showing a zombie icon in the taskbar for browser, and a few minor other ones. Nightly images are very close to what the final long awaited build will look like and we are on schedule for a Christmas release! ... read more

As we are nearing the holidays, our teams have been hard at work in fixing the automated nightly builds. In the meantime, we put a lot of effort and focus on the features that make TTOS Linux unique! And that hard work is finally paying off. We now have functional UEFI builds based on Debian 12 in our nightly images! Our automated build system will be back online after thanksgiving weekend! Until then, here is a list of what's new!... read more

Greetings! We've had a long development road this past year and made great progress! We have many new improvements in the upcoming release that we are excited to share!
* ProShield Internet Security - We've had some makeshift UI's for ClamAV ine past under the ProShield AV Branding. But this time, it has been overhauled to be multi-engine compatible. Clam AV is obviously the first choice for a functioning module. In the new AV UI, we feature a real time detection engine. We also are including a new Firewall UI with built in IDS/IPS capabilities. It is based on a UFW + Fail2ban backend with an information pipeline called ProShield Sentry Pipe.
Welcome 2 - The old TTOS Welcome on-boarding app is getting dated and is very generic. We wanted to bring a new experience into a modern desktop world. The next generation on-boarding app features an animated video introduction, as well as animated graphical UI installers coded in house!
* GameStream Server - With the deminse of NVIDIA GameStream services for streaming games from your PC to the Shield, we were left this big void for those of us that still use the NVIDIA Shield TV and tablets. Other services such as the built in streaming for Steam, and Parsec still don't match the performance of NVIDIA GameStream PC service. But there is an open source implementation called Sunshine that does the trick paired with the open source NVIDIA client Moonlight. The TTOS Linux GameStream Server is software that installs and sets up Sunshine on TTOS Linux as well as display QR codes to install Moonlight on your mobile devices.
Installers - our installers have been updated to installed kernel modules (what windows calls drivers and Mac OS X calls kernel extensions) for popular hardware at the click of a button. The Pimp My Box section will install software that commonly requires 3rd party repositories to be set up with ease.... read more

TTOS Live Image Installer is successfully booting on a Debian 12 base! The next step is to iron out Calamares configuration and the new release will be ready for testing! Have a great day everyone!

For those that download daily... apologies for the lack of nightly images lately. I have been hard at work on rebasing TTOS Linux Chicago to Debian Bookworm base. The build currently fails hence the lack of images. In the mean time, nightly images based on bullseye showcase some of the upcoming features! Please feel free to browse through our nightly images to try it out! Also, any volunteers to speed things up would be welcome. ... read more

Those that have been watching our uploads may have noticed we are now maintaining two distros for the upcoming Chicago release. We are close to a release however there are a few bugs to work out. But for now, the ISO images being uploaded are operational with some minor tweaks. First off, and Internet connection is required for successful install. Secondly, this release WILL have UEFI support and is currently functioning in the nightly builds. Third, ProShield AV needs clamdscan to be configured for ClamAV backend to function. As of today, we completed porting the Live Wallpapers and dreamscene packages from Boston to Chicago. The GameOn Edition will feature a post installation utility that converts Chicago into a gaming distro including a more up to date kernel as well as debian backports repo for more up to date GPU kernel modules. This is still a work in progress and so far, we only touched the tip of the ice burg with build hooks and a post install setup utility is in initial design stages of development. ... read more

We've been working hard with adding UEFI to our build system... and sadly, it is not compatible without a complete re-write. The reason is that our build system started in 2002 and UEFI was not a widely used standard back then. The code base has been updated to support newer Linux Kernel based operating systems but not UEFI. After attempting to add UEFI support, it has failed to produce bootable ISO's. In the meantime, we have decided to give live-build scripts a try. The problem with this is that the current version of debian is not running custom hooks and installing packages. A known issue fixed in git but not in mainstream. Scripting everything for cron scripts makes live-build a bit difficult if it has to build from git. Sometimes, this works, and sometimes this fails. Sometimes, updates break things. It is not a reliable build process. Due to this issue, I have attempted to try live build with Ubuntu. Even though it share's many similarities with Debian, it is vastly different. Using Ubuntu as a base, I was able to build a successful UEFI ISO and include the TTOS Repository. Just a warning though... it does boot and shows that UEFI TTOS Linux is possible with live-build on top of stock debian but just be warned, an apt upgrade breaks the system as the TTOS repository Chicago and Boiler is also a Debian mirror for Bullseye and Sid. The ttos-experimental was uploaded as a hint of what a UEFI TTOS Linux experience could be like. While we wait for the official build to be completed, the experimental Ubuntu based build can give everyone something to play around with. The trick is that we want everything to work with our automated build systems and CI/CD workflow. Debian Sid works perfectly for this because of it's rolling release nature. We can develop on boiler, and bring stable packages to testing, and then stable. ... read more

Greetings supporters!
We have successfully built live UEFI images! It boots to the live desktop however the Installer fails to install in UEFI mode but works flawlessly in Legacy BIOS Mode. Since the remaining issues are just a matter of working on the Installer configuration and modules, this means we are close to a stable and installable build of TTOS Linux 1.2 Chicago as a pre-release candidate. Once the Installer is configured, things will move along a lot faster as we can easily produce images for various desktop configurations.... read more

Happy New Years Everyone!
We have been making great progress with TTOS Linux Chicago. Here is a run down of the status of the project...
* We have completed our repository setup for both Chicago and Boiler. Boiler will be our rolling release build and test repo. Chicago is the next stable release.
* We have created our base scripts for building UEFI/EFI installable images.
* We have integrated new internet security tools with graphical interfaces.... read more

TTOS Linux Updates for November, 2021

I apologize for the lack of blog post updates recently. But a lot of progress has been made on Project Chicago as well as updates to TTOS Linux Boston. We are still shooting for a New Year's Official Release but here are our goals / wishlist for the new build...

• EFI/UEFI support during install process (our build system was designed prior to standardizing EFI and has not seen significant updates to it's code base other than compatibility and maintenance updates since 2002. This will be a much needed major overhaul of outdated code in the build system without having to change our build process and flow)
• A single "merged" repo. Current versions of TTOS Linux utilize both TTOS repositories and Debian Repositories. The Chicago repo's are not yet setup and we are going to make some changes to how we do this. First, we are switching all development to a Debian Sid based repository that will will call "Boiler". We will actually produce "TTOS Boiler" releases. This will effectively be a rolling release distribution always up to date (but not without bugs). We will then mirror debian repositories as well as adding our own packages to the repo from now on. Chicago will be a mirror of Debian 11 Stable with TTOS Chicago specific packages included. All development will be on Boiler and then builds will be made for Chicago (or future current) when they are proven stable releases of the applications.
• ProShield Internet Security Suite - We made huge efforts to bring a new Internet Security Suite into TTOS Linux. Since ufw-kcm was only compatible with QT4 and KCM4, this option hasn't been available in all TTOS Builds based on Plasma 5 (without KCM4 installed). To replace ufw-kcm, we started ProShield Sentry project to go along with our ProShield AV. A Stable release will be included in the Chicago official release by default. Much of the UI is modeled after the beloved kcm-ufw. ProShield Suite is independent of KDE libraries so it currently is not for KCM however the advantage of a standalone is that ProShield does not require all the KDE dependencies to run on other desktop environments. It only requires the correct QT dependencies.
• TTOS Welcome - The current version of TTOS Welcome is completely functional however it is a jumbled mess of scripts and in code commands. It is not easily portable to other DE's because of this. The new TTOS Welcome is being designed to be a completely modular build. Most of the functions will be in a separate project. The UI's will include the ttos welcome header file to add all of it's functions. Keeping one code base means that when we code a UI, we are only coding a simple push button that performs the actions of the functions called. This way, a single change to a function can change functionality for all version of TTOS Welcome (ttos-welcome qt, ttos-welcome gtk, ttos-welcome gnustep ect... any language we want to code a UI in basically).
• Builds - The initial build of TTOS Linux Chicago will be a KDE release with a Linux Enterprise Server release shortly after. This time around, we plan to make a net installer where any release can be selected during install (requiring active internet connection). We also plan to release nightly builds of alternative DE's and base the TTOS Linux Game distro after the debian backports giving a more up to date system close to Boiler distribution but more stable for every day use.
• We are still working on some artwork. Currently, we are stuck with a lack of artwork other than branding. Any artwork submissions or donations are more than welcome. Our theme for this distribution is the city of chicago. Some original photography of the city will be more than happily accepted.
• Thank you all for your continued support, and please stay on alert for the release of TTOS Linux Chicago in less than a couple months!!! :)

With the official release of our parent distro's Debian 11, we have been hard at work paving the way for TTOS Linux Chicago. There are many changes in the new release that need to be fixed and ironed out prior to a working pre-release. Here are some of the issues we have...
* We first have to branch our repo's for software built on the new Debian 11 base as to not break systems running TTOS Linux Boston.
We have to finish a build module in TTOS Linux Studio so we can successfully build an installable ISO of our TTOS Linux Chicago chroot
* modify our calamares config for a netinstall ISO (TTOS Linux will have the ability to install any desktop environment with only one release. We will also eventually add the ability to install with non-free enabled system off the bat in order to fix hardware compatibility with proprietary graphics cards and WiFi without having to use our "enable non-free" script and a rj45 patch cable.
Welcome 2 - our new TTOS Welcome utility has been revamped and redesigned as a front end / back end system. This way, we can have a native gtk frontend as well as a qt frontend and even a gnustep frontend for our various desktop environments.
* ProShield Sentry - for those that keep a watchful eye on our source repositories, there have been numerous repo's pop up and disappear under the name "Firewall". After various tests and UI tweaks, we now have a somewhat working prototype for ProShield Sentry firewall. This firewall features a frontend for various command line utilities and also offers Intrusion Detection and Prevention as well as IP lookup features.... read more

With official Debian 11 nearing release, we are working hard to rebase TTOS Linux to a Debian 11 base for the next generation of TTOS Linux operating system. With this base change, we will also be bringing lots of changes to the software unique to TTOS Linux. Until an official release is published, many nightly builds will fail until the kinks in the automated build process are ironed out. So for now, please download the official TTOS Linux Boston 1.1 release and please be patient until the TTOS Linux Chicago 1.2 release is ready. Thank you all for your continued support and have a great day!

We are pleased that there has been a review of TTOS Linux. However, there seem to be some things to clear up. First, the author was using AMD GPU with his bare metal hardware. All of our test hardware is either Intel Integrated graphics or NVIDIA GPU. AMD is currently un-tested and with the recent surge in downloads, the AMD GPU bug has been reported via email by several contributors. Since it wasn't posted on our sourceforge, I decided to open a ticket myself. As the author of the review pointed out, startx will get you into a graphical environment. ... read more

During the update process, I have accidentally damage a 10TB hard drive. The drives were configured in stripe + parity so no data was lost however it will be down until the replacement arrives and i begin the volume heal process to restore the system. Until then, our websites and services will be down. Thank you for your patience, and enjoy your day!