Minimalist and lightweight layouts stand out mainly because they have the ability to run on many computers, where other systems fail.
Fortunately, there are many lightweight Linux distributions They could put those old computers in for some regular computing tasks like playing little games, watching movies, listening to music, and surfing the web.
About 4MLinux
This is one of those Linux distributions that requires less system resources and it can even run on 128MB of RAM. The desktop edition only applies to 32-bit architecture, while the server edition is 64 bit.
4MLinux too can be used as a rescue CD together with a complete working system or as a mini server.
The distribution can be used not only as a live environment for playing multimedia files and solving user problems, but also as a system for disaster recovery and a platform for running LAMP servers (Linux, Apache, MariaDB and PHP).
This little 32-bit Linux distribution focuses on four characteristics (already mentioned) and from which its name also comes:
- maintenance (such as restoring a CD)
- multimedia (for playing DVD video discs and other files)
- miniserver (using the inetd daemon)
- Mystery (providing various little Linux games).
The desk 4MLinux comes with JWM (Joe's Windows Manager) which is a lightweight stacking window manager for the X Window System.
While to manage the desktop backgrounds, a light and powerful feh is used. It uses PCMan File Manager, which is also a standard file manager for LXDE.
The default desktop screen has a dock at the top with the most common applications pinned.
There is a taskbar, a Conky theme with the option to activate and deactivate in the dock, and a clock in the lower right corner.
4MLinux 29.0 Main New Features
A stable version of 4MLinux 29.0 has recently been released, with which Updating packages and bug fixes have been added to the system.
As always, lThe new major version has some new features, such as a new desktop submenu called "Office" (with AbiWord, Gnumeric, LazPaint).
We can also find the functionality of spell check that has been added to Sylpheed and HexChat.
Regarding the applications, this new version of 4MLinux 29.0 offers an improved LibreOffice installation script.
In addition to this we can find in this new version of the distro, the new version of Audacious (a music player).
As well as better support for the MINIX file system (via util-linux and GParted), the Improved 3D acceleration in Quake2. And finally, the 4MServer now includes PHP 7.3 with NaCl crypto support.
Regarding the updates we can highlight updated versions of LibreOffice 6.2.4.2 and Gnome Office (AbiWord 3.0.2, GIMP 2.10.10, Gnumeric 1.12.44), DropBox client 73.4.118, Firefox 66.0.5 web browser, as well as Chromium version 74.0.3729.108 , Thunderbird 60.7.0 mail client, VLC 3.0.6 media player, mpv 0.29.1, Mesa 18.3.1 and Wine 4.7 drivers.
Finally the 4MLinux server package (LAMP Server)talso received updates where the packages of this have been updated to Linux kernel 4.19.41, Apache 2.4.39, MariaDB 10.3.14, PHP 5.6.40, PHP 7.3. 5, Perl 5.28.1, Python 2.7.15, Python 3.7.1.
Download and get 4MLinux 29.0
If you are not a user of the distribution and want to use it on your computer or test it in a virtual machine.
You can get the system image, soRegrettably, you must go to the official website of the project where you can find the links in its download section.
The size of the iso image is 819 MB for 32-bit and 64-bit architectures
At the end of your download you can use the Etcher multiplatform tool to save the image to a pendrive and thus boot your system from a USB.
Or use unetbootin which is another multi-platform tool. In the case of creation in Linux, you can also use the dd command.