MX-21 Workbench

[Adrian]

I upgraded Workbench on the base of MX-21. I built only 64-bit ISO for now.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mx-lin ... Workbench/

Here's some general info for people who were not following this.

This is a personal respin, it's not officially supported by MX Linux.

It's meant to be a "Swiss Army knife" type of Linux running live mostly for sysadmins and people
who want to have a highly customizable Live USB/DVD that is able to run different recovery and admin tools.
(and also as sneaky demo of what MX Snapshot can do)

This ISO is NOT meant for installation. While this is possible, it's not recommended, especially that
for convenience purpose sudo is configured to give full access without a password.

Some added utilities:
arpwatch: Ethernet/FDDI station activity monitor
attr: utilities for manipulating filesystem extended attributes
bar: Show information about a data transfer
blockout2: Tetris like game (3D-tetris)
bluez-test-tools: test tools of bluez
bonnie++: Hard drive benchmark suite
can-utils: SocketCAN userspace utilities and tools
ceni: Curses interface to /etc/network/interfaces
chntpw: NT SAM password recovery utility
clamav: anti-virus utility for Unix - command-line interface
clamtk: graphical front-end for ClamAV
clonezilla: bare metal backup and recovery of disk drives
cmospwd: decrypt BIOS passwords from CMOS
cpuid: tool to dump x86 CPUID information about the CPU(s)
cpuidtool: custom-toolbox: dbench: The dbench (disk) and tbench (TCP) benchmarks
dc3dd: patched version of GNU dd with forensic features
dcfldd: enhanced version of dd for forensics and security
ddcutil: Control monitor settings
ddrutility: set of data recovery utilities for use with GNU ddrescue
detox: clean up filenames
di: advanced df like disk information utility
digitemp: read temperature sensors in a 1-Wire net
disktype: detection of content format of a disk or disk image
dislocker: read/write encrypted BitLocker volumes
dmraid: Device-Mapper Software RAID support tool
dpt-i2o-raidutils: Adaptec I2O hardware RAID management utilities
dvtm: Tiling window management for the console
evemu-tools: Linux Input Event Device Emulation Library - test tool
ext3grep: tool to help recover deleted files on ext3 filesystems
fio: flexible I/O tester
firmware-ti-connectivity: flashrom: Identify, read, write, erase, and verify BIOS/ROM/flash chips
fping: sends ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packets to network hosts
freefilesync: fsarchiver: file system archiver
fwupd: Firmware update daemon
geany: fast and lightweight IDE
gftp-gtk: X/GTK+ FTP client
ghex: GNOME Hex editor for files
glances: Curses-based monitoring tool
gnome-disk-utility: manage and configure disk drives and media
gpart: Guess PC disk partition table, find lost partitions
grsync: GTK+ frontend for rsync
i2c-tools: heterogeneous set of I2C tools for Linux
idle3-tools: change the idle3 timer of recent Western Digital Hard Disk Drives
iftop: displays bandwidth usage information on an network interface
ioping: Simple disk I/O latency measuring tool
iotop: simple top-like I/O monitor
iperf: Internet Protocol bandwidth measuring tool
iputils-arping: Tool to send ICMP echo requests to an ARP address
iputils-tracepath: Tools to trace the network path to a remote host
isomaster: Graphical CD image editor
linssid: graphical wireless scanner
linux-image-amd64: Linux for 64-bit PCs (meta-package)
lynx: classic non-graphical (text-mode) web browser
md5deep: transitional dummy package for hashdeep
meld: graphical tool to diff and merge files
memtester: Utility for testing the memory subsystem
mpt-status: get RAID status out of mpt (and other) HW RAID controllers
ncdu: ncurses disk usage viewer
netwag: graphical frontend for netwox
nmap: The Network Mapper
nmon: performance monitoring tool for Linux
nwipe: Utility to securely erase disks
obdgpslogger: suite of tools to log OBDII and GPS data
openipmi: Intelligent Platform Management Interface (for servers)
partclone: Utility to clone and restore a partition
qla-tools: QLogic Linux tools for work with QLogic HBAs
rdesktop: RDP client for Windows NT/2000 Terminal Server and Windows Servers
rdiff-backup: remote incremental backup
reglookup: utility to analysis for Windows NT-based registry
remmina: GTK+ Remote Desktop Client
remmina-plugin-exec: EXEC plugin for Remmina
remmina-plugin-nx: NX plugin for Remmina
remmina-plugin-rdp: RDP plugin for Remmina
remmina-plugin-secret: Secret plugin for Remmina
remmina-plugin-spice: Spice plugin for Remmina
remmina-plugin-vnc: VNC plugin for Remmina
rename: Perl extension for renaming multiple files
rkhunter: rootkit, backdoor, sniffer and exploit scanner
rtorrent: ncurses BitTorrent client based on LibTorrent from rakshasa
safecopy: data recovery tool for problematic or damaged media
screen: terminal multiplexer with VT100/ANSI terminal emulation
scrounge-ntfs: Data recovery program for NTFS filesystems
smbios-utils: Provide access to (SM)BIOS information -- utility binaries
stressapptest: stress test application for simulating high load situations
unhide: Forensic tool to find hidden processes and ports
vim: Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor
vmfs-tools: Tools to access VMFS filesystems
w3m: WWW browsable pager with excellent tables/frames support
wakeonlan: Sends 'magic packets' to wake-on-LAN enabled ethernet adapters
wipe: secure file deletion
wireshark: network traffic analyzer - meta-package
xinput-calibrator: Generic touchscreen calibration program for X.Org
zfs-fuse: ZFS on FUSE

BTW, I set up zsh instead of bash and used my custom .zshrc, mostly to demo zsh, no particular need (I do find using cd with fuzzy completion much easier to use -- I bet if people get used to this they will ask for it for the regular MX release). But if you don't like it you can always change back to bash which is also installed. That's one of the point about this respin, it's meant to show what MX Snapshot can do... so if you don't like something, remove it, if you need a specific tool, install it and then take another snapshot.

[Jerry3904]

Nice, Adrian! If you would like to, we could cooperate on a vid...

[figueroa]

I have no doubt this will be useful. I've been needing a new rescue disk. Very thankful for your innovation.

I've downloaded, and launched iso directly in VirtualBox. Lovely wallpaper. It did not resize the VirtualBox video on startup (which the MX-21 iso does fine), but was able to use the display settings in preferences to select video of choice. Negative about zsh; maybe less fancy default settings. That just hurt my eyes. Changing to bash was a relief.

Why include a word processor? Eager to read reply about AbiWord.

[Adrian]

This is not meant to run in VirtualBox so I didn't install the VBox stuff.
You can change the Zsh prompt to whatever you want if that's what bothers you.
I include work processor for editing and viewing text files which might be useful, let's say you troubleshoot something that has a Word documentation file...

[figueroa]

Thank you, @Adrian
Not including VirtualBox extras makes sense. The guest module loaded and the screen resized just fine using settings/display. I just used VirtualBox to see how it flew without writing it to a flash drive. I'm creating the Live-usb now on another computer.

I will change the shell to bash in /etc/passwd. The default bash settings are nice and I'm well experienced with it. I used to use zsh under Unix back in the mid 90s. At the time, I found some of it's features a helpful upgrade to csh. I'm looking forward to experimenting with it again, even thought I'm a big fan of bash.

I don't think I've ever experienced Linux documentation in MS Word, but certainly other word processing formats. I appreciate the explanation for the choice.

That's quite a tool kit you put together. I'm thankful for your sharing it.

[figueroa]

@Adrian
I thought I would do a little zombie resurrection of this thread to provide a little positive feedback about MX-Workbench. I have the original only slightly customized as I'd described earlier in this thread on a 16 GB USB flash drive. I've been using a snapshot of that as a raw iso stored on my server and booting the iso directly over an NFS connection using VirtualBox running on my main desktop PC to provide me an opportunity to explore MX-Workbench and become more familiar with its tools. Although it's not meant to run under VirtualBox, this gives me safe, reasonably immutable, and convenient environment for learning.

Today, I booted the Live-USB on my test server (a third machine), installed all the updates, then I also installed the VirtualBox guest additions similar to what's on the standard MX-21 distribution ISOs just in order to make it more convenient for me to run a snapshot iso under VirtualBox as I described above. I've never succeeded running an actual hardware live-usb under VirtualBox.

Anyway, after the updates, I remastered, then upon reboot updated the kernel on the live-usb to the current 5.10.0-12-amd64 (aka 5.10.103). Then upon reboot I made a fresh snapshot to have as a backup and to use for continued study/familiarization as I described in the first paragraph.

With the updates (which includes an additional kernel) and additions the snapshot ISO is now about 150 MB larger, about as expected. It sill boots like greased lightning.

I bragged about MX-Workbench on the Gentoo forums yesterday as an example of what a rescue/admin/maintenance disk should look like. I hope other users are discovering and using this excellent piece of work.

[BitJam]

I bragged about MX-Workbench on the Gentoo forums yesterday as an example of what a rescue/admin/maintenance disk should look like. I hope other users are discovering and using this excellent piece of work.

I started working on the antiX/MX live system (many years ago) to make a fast-booting rescue/install system for Gentoo. At that point in time SysRescueCD was having issues that were unacceptable to me. I starting working on live persistence because I wanted to use Zsh instead of Bash. Oddly, antiX has inherited some quirks and feel from early Gentoo.

I'd love to see an antiX-Workbench respin but I'm not volunteering to make it.

[figueroa]

...
I'd love to see an antiX-Workbench respin but I'm not volunteering to make it.

With the very slick MX-Workbench already done, what would be gained by having an antiX equivalent, other than a bit smaller, and maybe banning systemd and pulseaudio from the workbench disk.

I don't see the need for any further effort. It would be easy to just run MX-Workbench under a window manager only GUI, or even just drop to the console.

On the other hand, I'd be interested in knowing what you thought was important.

[BitJam]

With the very slick MX-Workbench already done, what would be gained by having an antiX equivalent, other than a bit smaller, and maybe banning systemd and pulseaudio from the workbench disk.

In my experience antiX boots much faster. I also like that it has more of a focus on the command line and the virtual consoles. For example, a year or two ago I was building a new small system with a Ryzen APU. For some strange reason amdgpu refused to work when I had a monitor with a non-standard resolution connected. It took me a while to figure out the problem was the monitor resolution. I think I actually started using MX ahs but quickly switched to antiX because for me it was less frustrating. I can be fanatical about reducing the time of my development cycle.

I'm sure that for people who are used to MX, switching to antiX would be seen as a step back.

Funny story. Shortly after the IBM-PC came out I used it as a platform to create a controller system. The only compiled language available was Microsoft's compiled Basic which was a horror show. It would literally take hours to compile so I could usually only get in one, maybe two, compiles per day. On top of that, once the program got to a certain size, the compiler would throw in random bugs in the code it generated. Then Borland introduced Turbo Pascal and my productivity shot up by a factor of 5 or more.

I have another horror story about working around an idiotic bug in Microsoft's QuickBasic compiler which was Microsoft's response to the Borland Turbo compilers.

[operadude]

@Adrian !

Yes, thanks for the "minimal" size for an awesome Live Linux, loaded with goodies!

Quick question: I don't see "chntpw" anywhere on the Live Workbench (after making a Live USB, and successfully starting-up a PC with it).

The system tells me that "chntpw" can be downloaded and installed with apt-get.

Unfortunately, when I made the Live USB with Workbench, I did not make it writable. I put it on a 2GB flash drive (I appreciate the small size).

Anyway, I don't know if this was simply an oversight, or if I'm missing something. I downloaded the latest version from sourceforge.net (April 16, 2022).

Wait...Double-checking...Ahh...now I see that the list on the sourceforge.net site (link provided by MX blog) shows at the bottom of the list: "Source: README-MX-Workbench, updated 2021-10-23", which pre-dates the most current version of your Workbench.

So, maybe you removed the "chntpw"? I do see on the Workbench "ophcrack" (or something to that effect). I tried it, but unsuccessfully. Anyway, that's my problem.

I was able to find "chntpw" (it's been around for a long time), and used it successfully.

Thanks again for all of your hard work!!!