antiX Linux is a lightweight desktop Linux distribution based on Debian for 32 and 64 bit Intel-AMD x86 compatible architectures and is fully systemd-free. Put simply, it is Debian without systemd.
antiX Linux targeted to the very old hardware and systems. You need at least 256 MB RAM, and the installer needs a minimum 4.0 GB hard disk size. As you can see, if you are looking to revive your super-old hardware with Linux, then this might be the perfect distro.
Coming after 8 months since antiX 19.4 release, this fifth point antiX 19.5 release brings usual Kernel updates, the latest Debian 10 “Buster” packages, and the respective application’s stable version. Let’s take a look in brief at what’s new in antiX 19.5.
antiX 19.5 Highlights
The Linux Kernel is updated to 4.9.0-294 in this release. Because it’s an LTS release, the Linux kernel 4.9 will get backporting bugs and important security fixes until January 2023.
On the desktop side, antiX 19.5 runs the extremely lightweight IceWM desktop environment by default. It’s a window manager for the X Window System with the main goal of being fast, easy to use, and not getting in the user’s way. The newest version of the distro ships the latest IceWM version 2.9.5.
On top of that, many upstream core Debian packages have been rebuilt to remove a hard dependency on libsystemd0/libelogind0. These include apt, cups, dbus, gvfs, openssh, policykit-1, procps, pulseaudio, rpcbind, rsyslog, samba, sane-backends, udisks2, util-linux, webkit2gtk and xorg-server.
The list of other changes since AntiX 19.4 is rather short. It has included the latest software packages such as Firefox ESR 91.5, SeaMonkey 2.53, and LibreOffice 7.0.4.
For detailed information, please refer to the official announcement.
Download
For a typical user, the best option is to download the antiX 19.5 full ISO file (1.2GB). It contains four windows managers: IceWM (default), Fluxbox, jwm and herbstluftwm. Additional windows manager variations of these four are included.
- Base (720MB) is more limited with just four windows managers. You get IceWM (default), Fluxbox, jwm and herbstluftwm + full LibreOffice suite.
- Core (477MB) lacks X but has a CLI-installer without UEFI support nor encryption. It should support most wireless cards.
- Net (178MB) has the same missing items as shown in the Core version. It comes with just enough to get you connected and ready to build.
Those using previous versions of antiX 19.x branch do not need to download this new version. Simply upgrade via the apt command.
