Xinutop

Xinutop is a distribution of Linux derived from the Xfce edition of the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu, and specifically designed to be used by marine archaeologists who want to work only with open-source software.

It’s distributed as an IMG file suitable for USB devices

The distro can be downloaded from Softoware or directly from its official website as an IMG file of approximately 500MB in size, suitable for deployment only on USB devices of 512MB or higher capacity.

Therefore, the user must write the IMG file to a USB thumb drive using a software that can create bootable USB devices from an IMG image. Supported architectures include 32-bit (i386) and 64-bit (x86_64).

The operating system supports multiple languages

When booting the operating system from the BIOS of a PC using a USB flash drive, the user will be prompted by a boot menu that supports multiple languages, including English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and German.

For each of the aforementioned languages, there are several boot options provided to user. For example, they will be able to start the live system in standard or ramdisk modes, perform a system restore by reseting and moving their datas in home-save.

The desktop environment is traditional, powered by Xfce

As mentioned, the distro is based on Xubuntu and uses its Xfce graphical environment, which provides users with a traditional desktop experience that is familiar and easy to use.

It contains some of the best marine applications

The distribution contains some of the best marine application on the market. Among these, we can mention the Fldigi radio, weather-fax tool, OpenCPN chart plotter and GPS interface, as well as Polarcom virtual instrumentation that handles NMEA datas.

In addition, Xinutop includes the XTide application for worldwide tides coverage, Zygrib for downloading and displaying weather grib files, Muplex NMEA multiplexer and OSD Depth for viewing water depth.