siduction noX

siduction noX is a special edition of the open source and free Debian-based Linux operating system forked from aptosid. It comes without the X11 Window System and it's oriented toward people who are looking for a barebone, small and minimal Linux distribution to build their own siduction flavor.

Availability and supported platforms

This special siduction edition is available for download as two Live CD ISO images that have been designed from the ground up to be deployed onto CD discs or written on USB thumb drives. They are supported on both 64-bit (amd64) and 32-bit (i386) instruction set architectures.

Powerful boot options

To our surprise, the same boot menu that is implemented into all of the other siduction editions is also available on this noX flavor, allowing users to start the live environment with default options or in safe graphics mode, boot an existing operating system from the first disk, or run a memory diagnostic test.

In addition, the user can add additional options to any of the aforementioned boot entries, switch to a specific timezone, change the language (default is English US), add extra kernel parameters, as well as to change the boot source.

It has no desktop environment, nor does it have any software suites

As mentioned, this is a special edition of the Debian-based siduction Linux distribution that features no X.Org display server, which means that users will be dropped to a shell prompt where they must login in order to use the live environment. While the default username is siducer, the default password is live.

Bottom line

Summing up, siduction noX is a the smallest siduction edition that was ever built, providing users with a  minimal Linux environment for building custom operating systems based on this Debian-based distro, as well as to rescue broken OSes.

What is new in this release:

• The released images are a snapshot of Debian unstable, that also goes by the name of Sid, from 2018-05-12. They are enhanced with some useful packages and scripts, an installer based on Calamares and a custom patched version of the linux-kernel 4.16.8, accompanied by X-Server 1.19.6-1 and systemd 238.4.
• KDE Plasma stands at version 5.12.5, while GNOME comes in at 3.28.1, with 3.28.2 waiting in the wings. LXQt ships at 0.12.0 and Xfce at 4.12.4, while Cinnamon comes in at 3.6.7-8 and MATE at 1.20.0.

What is new in version :

• Recommends enabled:
• Years ago we decided to not install recommends anymore for our releases or when the user installs a package. The handling of that feature in Debian was not as we thought it should be. A lot of cruft was installed to the system and we wanted to prevent that. Times have changed and so has the handling of recommends. So now the recommends that the maintainer sets for a package are installed in siduction. If you would like recommends not installed, you can override our decision in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/80-siduction in the line APT::Install-Recommends "1";.
• Rotation for Journald:
• To prevent the journal from growing too large we have implemented a journal-rotation and a maximum size to the journal. You can overrule this setting by editing the files in /etc/journal.conf.d/. There will be a blog post on this topic within the next days.
• SSH Handling:
• We built two small scripts to turn SSH on and off in the live and in the
• installed system. They are aptly named SSH Activate and SSH Deactivate
• and you can find them in your menu.
• Calamares - our new installer:
• This is the 2nd release with the new installer built from the
• Calamares Installer Framework and we are quite happy with it. It is under steady developement and will in the near future improve quite a bit on LVM and LUKS2.
• The partitioning is done by the brand new kpmcore 3.3.0, which is also at the heart of the KDE Partition Manager (KPM). The corresponding package for that is called partitionmanager.
• UEFI installs made easy:
• With Calamares we can proclaim full implementation of UEFI-Installs since 2017.1.0. For now we still have encryption with LUKS and LVM turned off, which Calamares offers as an option. We want to be on top of that feature before we offer it to you. Offering it means we need to be able to support this critical functionality. We do not feel we can do this adequatly at the moment, as it is an ongoing developement, that should be more mature with kpmcore 3.4.
• Non-free software:
• The installer does not offer the option to opt-out software that does not
• comply with DFSG, the Debian Free Software Guidelines. That means that non-free packages would be installed by default on the system. The command vrms will list these packages. One can remove not wanted packages manually or remove them all by issuing apt purge $(vrms -s) before or after installation
• The very same topic has ruffled feathers on the debian deverloper mailing list last month with two extensive threads and a
• possible future solution layed out by Russ Allbery.
• The following non-free and contrib packages are installed by default:
• non-free:
• * amd64-microcode - Processor microcode firmware for AMD CPUs
• * firmware-amd-graphics - Binary firmware for AMD/ATI graphics chips
• * firmware-atheros - Binary firmware for Atheros wireless cards
• * firmware-bnx2 - Binary firmware for Broadcom NetXtremeII
• * firmware-bnx2x - Binary firmware for Broadcom NetXtreme II 10Gb
• * firmware-brcm80211 - Binary firmware for Broadcom 802.11 wireless card
• * firmware-crystalhd - Crystal HD Video Decoder (firmware)
• * firmware-intelwimax - Binary firmware for Intel WiMAX Connection
• * firmware-iwlwifi - Binary firmware for Intel Wireless cards
• * firmware-libertas - Binary firmware for Marvell Libertas 8xxx wireless car
• * firmware-linux-nonfree - Binary firmware for various drivers in the Linux kernel
• * firmware-misc-nonfree - Binary firmware for various drivers in the Linux kernel
• * firmware-myricom - Binary firmware for Myri-10G Ethernet adapters
• * firmware-netxen - Binary firmware for QLogic Intelligent Ethernet (3000)
• * firmware-qlogic - Binary firmware for QLogic HBAs
• * firmware-realtek - Binary firmware for Realtek wired/wifi/BT adapters
• * firmware-ti-connectivity - Binary firmware for TI Connectivity wireless network
• * firmware-zd1211 - binary firmware for the zd1211rw wireless driver
• * intel-microcode - Processor microcode firmware for Intel CPUs
• Contrib packages:
• * b43-fwcutter - utility for extracting Broadcom 43xx firmware
• * firmware-b43-installer - firmware installer for the b43 driver
• * firmware-b43legacy-installer - firmware installer for the b43legacy driver
• * iucode-tool - Intel processor microcode
• New paste script:
• We have retired the old paste-script, that ran under the name siduction-paste. It's place was taken by what is now called simple-paste. Simple-paste is a cli swiss army-knife for pasting, written in bash, powered by pb. It supports command output, different kinds of screenshots, (auto-)deletable pastes and much more.