antiX 16 Is around the Corner!

Great news!  Soon antiX 16 will be released! 

Dolphin Oracle made this great video showing us what we can expect in this new release:

Thanks a lot, Anticapitalista and all at antiX headquarters! You're great!

News about Pisi Linux

Being a fan of former Pardus Linux (the new Debian-based version has somehow let me down lately), I cannot help following Pisi Linux, which keeps the PiSi packages and other exclusive tools that Pardus abandoned.

Even if Pisi is small and little known, and although I feel it has neglected its international helpers and user base, I am very pleased at the efforts of its few developers.

For example, Pisi 2.0 is said to bring two features that I've always appreciated: a live disk (it was about time!) and an iso image writer to USB.

If I'm not mistaken, the latter will mean one can make a customized iso, although this still needs to be confirmed.  If that is so, both features will mean a big step forward for the Linux kitten!

Of course, Pisi will bring newer packages, including KDE 5 (which is not precisely my cup of tea), and other system improvements.

Here you can check a video of KDE 5 running on Pisi.

How to Make an Ext4 Filesystem with User Permissions

Formatting a partition or a pendrive as Ext4 is quite simple.  However, soon one realizes that it can only be used as root.

But a fellow Linux user named Dolphin Oracle shared these useful tricks on MX forums:

sudo mkfs.ext4 -E root_owner=$UID:$GID /dev/sdXY

where /dev/sdXY should be replaced with /dev/designation_of_partition.

The command above will set as user whoever issued the sudo command. You will still need to mount the device as root, but you may use its files as a regular user.

If you want something a bit different, he also shared this one:

mkfs.ext4 -E root_owner=uid:gid /dev/sdaX

where uid is the user id of whoever you want to be owner (the user created at install will have a UID of 1000).

where gid is the group id of whoever you want to be owner (the user-group created at install will have a GID of 1000).

If you want to mount the devices as a regular user instead of root, you'll have to do this:

paste the contents below into a file called /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/50-udisks.pkla

[udisks]
Identity=unix-group:users
Action=org.freedesktop.udisks*
ResultAny=yes
ResultInactive=no
ResultActive=yes

Reboot and then you should be able to mount the devices as a regular user.