FDGnuX Light For Linux

FDGnuX Light is a special edition of FDGnuX, an open source and completely free distribution of Linux derived from the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu, and built around the lightweight Xfce desktop environment. It is a distro for radio operators and French-speaking users.

The Light edition of FDGnuX is available for download as a dual-arch Live CD ISO image, designed to work well with computers that support both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x86_64) instruction set architectures.

From the boot prompt of the Live CD, the user can press the Enter key on his/her keyboard to start the live system, type ‘xforcevesa’ and hit Enter to boot the live OS in safe graphics mode, as well as to type ‘install’ and hit Enter to directly start the installer.

You can type ‘check’ and hit Enter to verify the integrity of the bootable medium, type ‘memtest’ and hit Enter to perform a system memory diagnostic test, and type ‘hd’ and hit Enter to boot from a local drive.

Being designed from the ground up to be installed on slow computers, FDGnuX Light uses Xfce as its default and only desktop environment. The graphical session comprises of a two minimal panels, one located on the upper side of the screen and the other one on the bottom edge of the screen.

The user can use the top panel to navigate the main and launch applications, and the bottom panel to interact with opened programs or cycle between virtual workspaces. Keep in mind though, that the default language is French.

Besides Xfce, the main difference between the main edition of FDGnuX and this Light flavor is that the latter contains a small set of open source applications. Among some of them, we can mention Mozilla Firefox web browser, AbiWord word processor, Gnumeric spreadsheet editor, Transmission torrent downloader, Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client, XChat IRC client and Pidgin IM client.