Simon Peter, creator of the self-contained AppImage format, has released version 0.5 of the helloSystem distribution, based on FreeBSD and positioned as a system for ordinary users, which macOS enthusiasts dissatisfied with Apple's policies can transition to. The system is free of the complications typical of modern Linux distributions, is fully under user control, and allows former macOS users to feel at ease. For getting acquainted with the distribution, a bootable image of 1.2 GB has been created.
The interface resembles macOS and includes two panels — a top one with a global menu and a bottom one with an application panel. The global menu and status bar are powered by the panda-statusbar package, developed by the CyberOS distribution (formerly PandaOS). The application panel Dock is based on the cyber-dock project, also from the CyberOS developers. For file management and placing shortcuts on the desktop, the Filer file manager, based on pcmanfm-qt from the LXQt project, is in development. The Falkon browser is offered by default, but Chromium is also available as an option.
The primary file system used is ZFS, and supported mounting options include exFAT, NTFS, EXT4, HFS+, XFS, and MTP. Applications are provided in self-contained packages. The launch utility is used to start applications, which finds the program and analyzes errors during execution. The system for building Live images is based on the tools of the FuryBSD project.
The project is developing a series of its own applications, such as a configurator, installer, mountarchive utility for mounting archives into the filesystem tree, data recovery tool for ZFS, disk partitioning interface, network setup indicator, screenshot utility, Zeroconf server browser, volume control indicator, and boot environment configuration utility. Development uses the Python language and the Qt library. The supported components for application development, in order of preference, are PyQt, QML, Qt, KDE Frameworks, and GTK.
The main innovations in helloSystem 0.5 are:
- The base environment has been synchronized with FreeBSD 12.2.
- The size of the ISO image has been significantly reduced (from 1.7 to 1.27 GB).
- Implementirana je automatska nadogradnja sustavnog izbornika prilikom dodavanja, premještanja ili brisanja poddirektorija i aplikacija.
- U konfiguratoru je dodana mogućnost odabira različitih rasporeda tipkovnice. Osigurana je podrška za spremanje postavki tipkovnice između ponovnih pokretanja.
- U setu /Applications/Developer unaprijed je instalirana aplikacija QHexEdit.
- Dodana je podrška za GPU AMD Radeon HD 6630M/6650M/6750M/7670M/7690M, korištene u Mac modelima iz 2011. godine.
- U upravitelju datoteka Filer implementirana je osnovna podrška za prostorni način rada, u kojem se svaki katalog otvara u zasebnom prozoru. Također je dodan novi izbornik „Idi na…“, opcija za otvaranje datoteka/kataloga s root pravima, kontekstni izbornik za odspajanje uređaja, prečac Command+Up za prelazak na nadređeni katalog i Command+I za ispisanje svojstava datoteke.
- Dodana je utilita za pristup datotekama na mobilnim telefonima korištenjem MTP protokola.
- Implementirana je podrška za skrivanje područja s naslovom prozora dvostrukim klikom na naslov.
- U globalnom izborniku dodana je mogućnost upravljanja glasnoćom pokrenutih aplikacija (desni klik).
Izvor: opennet.ru
