Caprice Linux

I see no future in the most of Caprice side projects (and Caprice herself!)

2020-12-19T00:00:00+03:30

Earlier I posted this in the Caprice Linux telegram channel:

There’ll be a new devlog for today. Sorry guys I am not available on Telegram because I needed a bit of detoxication. The devlog I’ll post tonight is going to be a very sad post. Grab a box of tissues, ‘cause it may make you cry :P

What did I mean by that? Fine. I didn’t have any good experiments with making Linux distributions. Everytime I made a distro, the whole FLOSS community turned hostile towards me. Sometimes I did think their moms paid me to that! By the way, in my defence, each time I also found a world of cool and good friends. So, a Linux distribution for me is somehow like an Iron Man suite. Makes me a super hero that people like Whiplash and Mandarin hate, and people like Pepper and Rhodey love.

Let’s do a bit of flash-back and see what happened in the pas six months. In June, there was that Iranian Association of Free/Libre and Open Source Software disaster. I became a candidate to defend digital freedoms in a legal and good way, but again I found how asshole a community can be. It’s neither my nor their fault. It’s everyone’s! All of us failed at that point, so I apologize to people who I called assholes. Back then, most of so-called friends just left me alone in the project and called that I’m doing the project for the government. Which is false. It was another project which was not a government-funded project as well. It was Localized Free (as in Freedom) Operating System for Governmental Offices. That project is now failed as I know.

In the August, I could do a final release of 1.0-STABLE version of Caprice Linux. It was a really, really cool project. I learned a lot while making the operating system. Most of my friends just motivated to learn Linux more than the past, so they could be helpful in the project. After the initial realize, people didn’t show any passion to the project. It wasn’t because I’ve added another distro to the existing ten million, that was because I was a part of that FLOSSIR thing. I’m not blaming anyone, I’m not really a loved face in the community and I gave them strong enough excuse to be not-so-nice to me!

In October, I announced that we might have a server edition, and no-one did care. One month ago, I announced minimal edition and no-one cared either. I even had selling the project as a whole in mind, as most of “software companies” called me to make an operating system for them, but when I gave them the price, they also rejected my suggestion and they’re still looking for someone who can do that for them. So, I call the whole project a big but taughtful (Is it even a word?!) project. I’ve learned a lot. About both Linux and humans. I’ve learned how Linux is awesome, and how humans can become monsters. So today, Saturday December 19th 2020, I officially announce discontinuation of the whole Caprice Linux project. By the way, as long as the repositories get updated, you are able to get the latest updates. But there’ll be no Caprice Linux 2.0.

December 2020 ~ Muhammadreza Haghiri

Minimal Caprice is the new child of the family

2020-11-30T00:00:00+03:30

Although 2020 was a crazy year and still one month remains to give us more surprises, it wasn’t very bad for me. Caprice Linux was the project I’ve built in this crazy time and it had a lot of fun and benefits for me. For example, one of the most important events of this year for me, was creation of the Caprice Linux Community. A group of great people who helped the process of building a Linux distribution become as fast as possible. And now, I’m honored to announce a new child in our family!

The Minimal Caprice

Minimal in the world of Linux has a strong meaning. Minimal distributions are usually light-weight and suitable for old-ass computers. They usually do not have a big DE like GNOME or XFCE, they do not come with a ton of packages and they’re not easy-to-install for a newbie user. But then, who will use those? I tell you, my friends and me. Why? because sometimes you need an environment to help you focus on what the hell you’re doing and not bombarding you with un-needed announcements and notifications. Also, this is not the whole story. In past couple of months I was busy developung Caprice Unified Base System (CUBS for short) as a system installer so we needed a version (other than our enterprise one) to test cubs out. This is a preview of Minimal Caprice on my computer:

And as you can see, now it sucks less, at least in terms of the user interface.

Features and decided software

A light-weight and minimal window manager. Dynamic Window Manager aka dwm has been chosen as the main user interface. Special thanks to Hooman for coding the modifications on DWM.
cubs as the installer. It’s a bit hard to get it right, but hey, who cares? Let’s have a geeky version of our Linux distribution! BTW, we’re just going to pivot most of our focus on the server edition because that’s where we can make money from to keep the project alive. So, we give the community the ability to use the tools we’ve coded for the server to test them and tell us where they actually may suck. This is the whole concept and idea of doing this.
And now, it’s based on Debian’s testing branch. Minimal version will be on testing, while the main desktop branch will stay on stable.

Future plans and the GNOME version

Development process of the GNOME version has been frozen for some reasons, but we’re getting into it. More news and details about Caprice Linux, Minimal Caprice and Caprice Enterprise Linux will be available very very soon.

Traveling Khajit explores the continent of Tamriel

2020-11-04T00:00:00+03:30

Before getting to the main subject, I explain a bit about Khajit. Khajit is a half-monster race in the realm of Tamriel from The Elder Scrolls. These people are like “Two-legged cat men”. They’re nomadic and they’re cool! So we have a new project to announce!

So what’s the main subject? OK. Let’s cool down, grab a glass of our favorite drink (I personally have a glass of Pepsi on my desk!) and just dig deep into this. In the past few months, I personally experienced some big changes in life. One of them was moving from GNU/Linux to Apple’s macOS. Fine, it doesn’t sound FLOSS at all, but I needed diversity in my life and it was the best thing I could do. But I never stopped using and developing Linux. I still use Arvan Cloud (for those who don’t know, it’s the Iranian version of AWS) and most of my servers are still on Linux. I have installed Caprice Enterprise Linux on a server and it will become a mirror for downloading ISO’s. But I faced some problems as well! Let’s count the problems.

Problems we have faced

NVIDIA graphic cards: I think Linus Torvalds is the best person to explain why this is a problem, but I’m not that rude. So, I explain : You can’t easily enjoy power of your device and power of Debian GNU/Linux at the same time if you have one of these guys. So, this should be solved. At least it can help more people to get into the *nix world.
pkgsrc: Fine. I finally give up on this one. It was a smashing success to have this baby as the extra package manager, but let’s be honest, it was useless. I think getting something more serious and more useful can be more helpful! (Please don’t install a more counter here.)
XFCE: No. This is not an end-user problem. This is my personal problem actually. Configuring it was not really easy. So we had to pivot to something other than XFCE.

Traveling Khajit, the solution!

So, long story short. A newer version will be available with the name Traveling Khajit. This baby will be based on stable branch, but it will come with GNOME as the desktop environment and it also will be friendly with your NVIDIA graphics. There are a few tools I’m working on, for a better performance and better application/package management.

Caprice Enterprise Linux is almost ready

2020-10-13T00:00:00+03:30

I expected things get a bit better by the end of September, but for now I really beg Billie Joe Armstrong to sing another song Wake me up when October ends. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because the COVID-19 is getting worse again? I have no idea.

But let’s be honest, in this crazy time, we can help ourselves to feel a bit better and doing technical stuff is how I can help myself. In the whole time, almost two months, I was developing Caprice Enterprise Linux. The server edition of Caprice Linux, but with a little bit of difference between the community edition and enterprise edition.

In the previous blog post, I started talking about the importance of the monetization of the project. There’s no better way to monetize a linux distribution than having enterprise level support. There was some ideas and plans and I will explain them in the next couple of paragraphs.

Caprice Enterprise Linux for workstations (aka Caprice Enterprise Desktop)

So, this was one of the very first implementations of the enterprise edition. It had Cinnamon desktop and a bunch of necessary applications for the daily use. But keeping in mind that we had a desktop project previously and it works and it’s one the greatest projects I personally have done, we decided to drop this.

And to be honest, at least in my region, people do not really like to leave Windows. Desktop Linux users here are usually geeky/nerdy people who love the concepts of POSIX, freedom of software, etc. Other people prefer Microsoft Windows or if they’re a bit more fortunate, maybe macOS. So, instead of doing an awful lot of time-wasting jobs on making a workstation edition, we have dropped it. Now enterprise desktop.

Challenges for Caprice Enterprise Linux development.

The installer

On the desktop version we have released by August 1st, we have used the amazing calamares which is a distribution-agnostic graphical installer. It’s not really perfect yet, but it does what it should do.

In case of a server operating system, we needed something which works in the command line environment. I personally wanted to have calamares here as well. So I exchanged a few emails with Adriaan de Groot, the developer of this installer and asked him for some help about a CLI/TUI version of calamares.

He told me that they don’t have any command-line options yet. So, he just guided me about how the installer works and it really made me happy. I had the skeleton of what I needed. So, I asked one of my interns to work on that. She came up with a pretty good algorithm and after a few days, I came up with the idea of Caprice Unified Base System or cubs for short as the backend for a good system installer.

More information on cubs will be available soon. But I’m proud I wrote it from scratch and it now can be used as a very versatile and flexible installation framework for other distributions as well!

Repositories

Although we still have access to Iranian Free Software Association servers and even our desktop version is still using those mirrors, but we wanted to have the full authority over our product. So, Finding a server with reliable uptime and enough space, wasn’t an easy task to be done.

I was searching over the internet in past couple of days to find a good provider. Fortunately, I found one. I ordered my desired server and I also asked them for custom operating system installation. When everything was all set, I created the mirror and it will be announced very very soon.

Target market of Caprice Enterprise Linux

For now, we only targeted the Iranian market. To be honest, for the last two months, we actually became a startup or a new-born company called Caprice Enterprise Solution and we introduce ourselves as an enterprise solutions company. Somehow like RedHat, but not that big.

Why only Iran you ask? There are a few reasons. First, we have almost no competitors in Iran. So it can be a very successful market for us. Second, business with foreign countries is a bit hard for people inside Iran or Iranian citizens in general. We just want to make the strong basis here, then start business with others as well.

Importance of the monetization of the project and possibility of an enterprise edition

2020-08-27T00:00:00+04:30

We all live in a world that made us earn money to get ourselves a life. No doubt of that. Of course, most of things we do are for money, if not all. In the past few months, I was paid for making a desktop-ready Debian based Linux distribution for Persian-speaking users called Sana Desktop. In parallel, I started Caprice Linux as a hobby project and of course, a test ground for ideas I had for Sana Desktop.

Now, conditions have been changed. I still collaborate with Sana. I’m not ashamed of being a part of a professional team who develop Free/Libre Software. At least, we’re proud of being the developers of a piece of free software and not Not having bash on our computers. Anyway, that collaboration is not monetized for now. We have been told that this will happen, so I’m not sad, mad or angry about that.

But it made me think about my personal project, Caprice Linux. Of course this project will be alive as long as I can pay for servers and the domain we have. But I was thinking of the monetization of the project. In this article, there’ll be a few ideas about monetization.

Ideas for monetization of the project

Don’t know if you have watched the movie The Social Network by David Fincher, which shows us how one of our real-life evil technology companies came to existence. In one scene, Mark Zuckerberg says :

Facebook is cool, but we still don’t know what it is.

I still have the same opinion about Caprice Linux. But let’s be honest, the project has the chance to be monetized. So I list a few things in the list below :

Support: Of course having a professional support team helps. But it helps when the project is vastly used. For now, I don’t even know how many people installed Caprice Linux as their desktop operating system.
Selling Merch: It is a good idea. I still doubt it’s helpfulness, but it’s a way to advertise the project and make money at the same time.
Donations: We don’t have any good donation platform which can cover All people of the world. We still may need PayPal or WebMoney for countries other than Iran, and using services like ZarinPal for people who live inside Iran. It just makes it a bit difficult. But if you want be a donor, let me know in the chat room or the community forums.

These were the possible ways to monetize it as a normal hobby project, but something bigger came to my mind. I decided to write it in a separate section in this article!

Caprice Enterprise Linux

A few weeks ago, I made a Debian GNU/Linux image, installed it on a virtual machine, made it cloud-ready and uploaded it to my panel on Arvan Cloud and it worked. I just simply called the image Cloud Enterprise Linux and I had spoke to one of my greatest friends Amirmohammad Kouyeshpour, who currently leads Ilam Linux Users Group (Ilam Lug for short) and he was positive about the project.

It’s a long time we haven’t talked about this project but the conversations we had about an enterprise solution, just made me think and even work hard to get an acceptable output for the project. There’s a big possibility of having Caprice Enterprise Linux in the near future.

What will happen to Caprice Linux (The desktop edition)?

Nothing will happen to that baby. It’s based on the Debian Stable and it will be updated with the next stable release of the Debian GNU/Linux. Nothing will change. We will work on our desktop edition and it will be called Caprice Linux Community. As it’s made by the help of a community of great people.

Plans for Caprice Linux Community will be published soon. Do not worry, we’ll never give up on the desktop market.

Caprice Linux 1.0-STABLE “Atmora” Release Notes

2020-08-01T00:00:00+04:30

A few hours prior to this post in the development blogs, I said August 1st 2020 will be a historical day. One of my friends thought I managed to find a cure for COVID-19 (I wish I could), or I found a way to prevent Trump from being elected again. But things are not going the ways we like! I still could make a historical way for you though, I did it by easily releasing my project, Caprice Linux.

Development Timeline

Fine, as I knew it might be a good idea to have a development timeline, I put the development timeline completely in the wiki. This post will be added to the wiki as soon as I push the final change to github.

Atmora, what’s special?

As I explained in the wiki as well as the previous post in this website, Atmora is a fictional continent on the planet Nirn and it’s the birth place of Nords. Nords were a group of humans who traveled to Tamriel and made the province of Skyrim their new home. This is a reference to the Elder Scrolls lore.

By the way, there something special in this release (and I personally put most of my effort to keep them alive for future releases):

Implementation of pkgsrc as a package/port management system in the distribution.
Trying to get rid of systemd as much as possible. Although we still kept systemd, but it can be easily ignored. (Just read A Hitchhiker’s Guide to pkgsrc in the wiki to find out how it works)
Providing a better looking desktop session :

Documents and Guidelines

Although I really wanted to write installation guides before doing the 1.0-STABLE release, I couldn’t. I was too busy working on some projects and I couldn’t spend enough time on writing some guides for Caprice Linux. By the way, the wiki new registrations will become open very soon and you people can help on writing new guides and tutorials on the wiki. Stay tuned!

Caprice Linux has a very straight forward installation process, if you have any difficulties, check the forums and ask a question. People will kindly answer your questions!

Download Links

These are links to Caprice Linux 1.0-STABLE Atmora images :

CD/DVD Image : Hybrid Boot ISO - BIOS and UEFI
MD5Sum : 9b4e771ab68355a49dd8a1bf4a6a270d
USB Memory Stick Image : USB Memstick Hybrid Boot - BIOS and UEFI
MD5Sum: d9e1bd4329fff4ad4d2aa816dba69ea6

And in case you may miss this article, they’re always available in downloads section of the website.

Future of the project

This project will have future updates and releases, of course. I can’t promise it would be a long-lasting project such as Ubuntu or Linux Mint. But we developed a very good community. The community can easily help us get on top of the mountain. So, I personally am happy about what I did, not creation of yet another linux distribution, but for development of a great and lovely community. And as I said in the first days of the project, Caprice Linux is community driven. So, I’m not the only developer. 30 other people are as well!

I hope you have a great time using Caprice Linux and let us know your opinion on Caprice Linux using the community.

Caprice Linux 1.0-STABLE is almost finished!

2020-07-23T00:00:00+04:30

It’s a week since the last post. In this post, I actually give you some good news about Caprice Linux and her process of development. Now, we chose a code name, we have a community forum and we also have a wiki!

Code name : Atmora

I’m a big fan of The Elder Scrolls games. I even had references from the games, specially the fifth version Skyrim in my daily life. Sometimes, I even said Thanks Talos instead of saying Thanks God. It’s all because I spent a lot of time in playing the game and it still has something to surprise me. So, Atmora is from the Elder Scrolls franchise.

If you play the games, you will understand that most of the game happens in a continent called Tamriel and the names such as Morrowind or Skyrim are provinces of this continent. But there is an icy continent in north of Tamriel which is home to Nords, a group of humans now living in Tamriel. As Atmora gets colder and colder, they try to find a new land. They just start their journey through the sea and find Skyrim. They make cities and holds in the province. It’s a long story, and you can find the reason behind this naming here.

Wiki and Forums

A good project always have a place to find the documentations or even contribute to the documentations. This is why I installed a wiki management system on one of Caprice Linux servers! The wiki is accessible using this link. And of course, although we have something like capricelinux:mozilla.org on Matrix or Caprice Linux Chat on Telegram, but forums are for more trustable. So I also installed a forum management system and the forums are accessible through this link as well!

From now on, we have pretty much everything a project needed. So the focus will be on the release process of the project!

Final Release details

We’ll have a release very soon. The final release requires a lot of things. I just list a few of them here :

A guide on pkgsrc for people who prefer The BSD Way.
A guide on installing services using pkgsrc and get its init system to work.
Creation of memestick image, it’s done once and it was working really well. But there was a few changes in the main file system. So, it should be made again.
Uploading images! I personally live in a place with really shitty connection. My previous home was better because I had an LTE connection. But in this home I don’t have any faster connection than my ADSL. So, It will take at least 2 days for two images to be uploaded.

I can’t give you an exact release date. But by the August, you can install Caprice Linux and celebrate your very new operating system.

Caprice Linux 1.0-STABLE is under development (2020/16/07)

2020-07-16T00:00:00+04:30

There was a hope to have the final release of Caprice Linux 1.0-STABLE by the month of July, but something went a bit out of control and then, the development process went a bit slower. I really wanted to write this devlog in a more appropriate time to just tell you the development process. The Iranian FLOSS community (I promise, one of the most passive communities in the world) just started doubting that Caprice Linux is government funded. This article is more about clarifications about the releationship between Caprice Linux and Iranian government.

Funds and helps

Caprice Linux got a lot of help from community, and not the government or any government-funded company. The Caprice Community is much bigger than Iranian FLOSS community as a lot of my friends from all around the world help me in the process.

But about helps, the only help we got was a server. It’s not actually from the government by the way. It’s actually a server for Sana Desktop, a GNU+Linux based desktop operating system I worked on (and it became one of my biggest regrets) for a private corporation. The server used to be a mirror for Sana Desktop and I only asked my friends at work about how I can use it. They gave me the permission to host Caprice Linux repository on that server. This is the only thing we have from a company or corporation and Caprice Linux is not national operating system or something like that.

Development Process

Past week, I sent the secret key to my plain of Oblivion to some of my friends. Actually, It was a link to 1.0-STABLE. It had some bugs and problems and I even couldn’t install the damn thing on my oldass HP laptop easily.

I listed those errors and problems, so I will check them out and solve them with the help of a lot of powerful developers in Caprice Community. The final release will be ready in a week or two.

Caprice Linux 1.0-STABLE is under development (2020/04/07)

2020-07-04T00:00:00+04:30

In past couple of months, I worked on this project in any free time I had. By beginning of the July, I had more free time and so I decided to dedicate more of my potentials on the project. In this article, I’m going to explain what have I done with the help of Caprice Linux Community.

A new look

First of all, a new interface is designed for Caprice Linux desktop. This is how it looks like:

For now, it includes :

A dock. Dock makes access to favorite software easier. This is why we decided to add the dock to the desktop.
Global menus. Global menus are also beautiful and useful. They give you the ability to use more space on your display.
A new desktop background. I just contacted a few friends, and one of them offered this beautiful photo and people of the Caprice Linux Community just voted for this and we decided to pay for the photo to use it as the main background.

Stability of Linux, Flexibility of NetBSD

To be honest, this sections title should be Stability of Debian GNU/Linux. Debian is famous for being stable. But I personally was a BSD user and administrator as well (I even had FreeBSD as my desktop operating system back then), I decided to bring something from BSD’s to this project.

First, I was thinking of making something like Caprice kFreeBSD, but it’s really useless and pointless. Waste of time and resources. I decided to bring something better to this project. So, I decided to bring pkgsrc, which is one of NetBSD’s great creations. It has a few benefits. I list them below:

It brings a few useful tools from BSD operating systems to this one. The boldest one for me, was bmake, which is an equivalent to GNU Make and it made me happy. Of course, it has a few other tools from BSD to create packages and install them.
It makes Caprice Linux a source based Linux distribution. The most famous source based Linux distribution is Gentoo and as you may know, it also borrowed a lot from BSD operating systems. So, why not?

Of course, there are a few challenges in the process of changing the package manager, but we can solve the problems with the help of Caprice Linux Community and IRBUG (stands for Iranian BSD Users’ Group) members.

The first challenge, might be the update process of the system. The second one is that services need another init system. These problems will be solved by the release of future versions of Caprice Linux.

And final words …

One of the most asked questions about Caprice Linux is this:

What makes Caprice Linux a different distribution?

Now I have a strong answer for this. You have the stability of Debian GNU/Linux, beauty of Apple’s macOS and flexibility of NetBSD in one package. It has these benefits and best of all, it’s Caprice Linux and not replication of other distibutions or operating systems.

I hope I can make the final builds for a release in maximum of ten days. Please wait for a revolutionary project!

Caprice Linux 1.0-BETA Release Notes

2020-06-13T00:00:00+04:30

In past few months, the Iranian FLOSS community and I worked on this project. A lot of friends, a lot of enthusiasts and even a lot of people who were attracted to the open source and free software, joined us in this journey.

So for now, I’m pleased to announce that the very first beta release of Caprice Linux is here. In this post, we review what happened, what’s new in Caprice Linux and why you should use Caprice Linux.

Development Timeline

In last days of March, a group of people contacted me to join them in creating a desktop operating system suitable for Iranian/Persian-speaking users. I said “Hell Yeah! I’m in!” and I joined them. One or two weeks after that, I thought to myself that I need a playground or a test base for that project. As the company’s project is based on Debian GNU/Linux, I decided to make a very simple Debian based distribution. So, Caprice Linux is born! This is the development timeline:

16/04/2020 : Caprice is here!
20/04/2020 : An Introduction
02/05/2020 : Caprice is under development (as 02/05/2020)
10/05/2020 : Caprice is under development (as 10/05/2020)
22/05/2020 : Caprice 1.0-BETA is under development
27/05/2020 : 1.0-BETA development is about to be finished

So now, we have are on a very good point of development. We finished the first beta of the version 1.0.

What’s new in Caprice Linux 1.0-BETA

In this version, we have added these :

Full UEFI support. The development release (which even didn’t have any official announcement on the website) didn’t have any regards for UEFI. But in this version, we have added that support. Thanks to the minds behind that old tool remastersys, their boot scripts helped solving this problem.
VLC as a media player. Altough we had Parole and Rhythmbox, which both are great tools written in GTK+ and we tried to avoid using too much Qt, I decided to add VLC. Because VLC is a good media player and sometimes, it can be considered much more than a simple media player.
Improved performance of the repositories. As Caprice Linux has her very own repositroies now, we had to work on those repositories to have the best performance. Altough we even forked our own repositories, we didn’t really changed anything and we inherit everything from Debian, with a little bit of difference in update/release cycle. So we tried to fix everything to have the best performance possible and now, we have some sort of fast and great repositories for our project.

Why you should use Caprice Linux?

Ok, this is one of the questions I personally bombarded with. Something like Why someone should use Caprice?. I ask you, why do you use Ubuntu, Linux Mint, MX Linux or any other operating systems available? My personal answer is They have something I need.. About Caprice, she was the need herself and answered very well.

A lot of people out there want to try a Debian Stable based operating system. But most of Linux distributions available are based on testing or unstable branches. Of course they had a point to do that. But Caprice will always remain based on stable branch of Debian GNU/Linux. Why? because we just want to provide safe and easy form of computation to desktop users. So if you have the question of Why should I try Caprice Linux? we tell you that Caprice Linux has a package of different things available (which are not usually shipped with Debian official images) and it also has a different type of release and development structure.

After talking too much, I make the long story short. If you’re enthusiastic about Debian GNU/Linux, but don’t want to fall into the hard process of the installation, just use Caprice Linux. We’re not trying to replace Debian, but we’re going to offer a better Debian user experiment.

Where and how can I download Caprice Linux?

Just visit downloads page and there, you can grab ISO images and checksums. There are some different download mirrors available.

Main download server is located in France. If you live in Europe or the Americas, I think it’s a better choice. Ilam LUG server is located in Iran. If you live in the Middle East, Russia, Turkey and North Africa, it’s a better choice. By the way, we need some mirrors for east Asia as well. So if you can help us mirror in east Asia (China, Japan, Korea, etc.) please let us know using this github repository

Special Thanks

Ilam Linux Users’ Group for their kind support and letting us using their servers as a mirror.
Shiraz Linux Users’ Group for their kind support of the project.
Iranian Free/Libre/Open Source Association for their kind support of the project, providing a platform for creation of the project and repositories.
Caprice Linux Community for their kind support and technical helps. A bunch of really cool kids joined us in the process of making Caprice Linux and withouth their help, it wasn’t possible to create this big project!