Variety is the taste, and that is something that applies very well to Linux systems. Within this ecosystem we can find a large number of different distributions. Some allow us to give Linux computers a second life, others replace Windows with an aesthetically similar system, others have absolute control of our hardware, and others, for example, carry out computer security practices. Today we are going to talk about 4MLinux , a light and simple distro that wants to cover basically 4 aspects of computing: 4M.
4MLinux is not as well known a distro as Ubuntu or Linux Mint can be. However, although it is not so well known, it occupies an important place within this ecosystem. Its name, 4MLinux, comes from the fact that its developers have created it to cover mainly 4 aspects of computing:
- Maintenance (maintenance, because it can be run in Live mode)
- Multimedia (to play all kinds of videos and DVDs)
- Miniserver (thanks to the inetd daemon it can work as a small server)
- Mystery (Linux is not for playing? 4M breaks with this premise including several basic console games)
This distro does not include a package manager installed by default, it uses a JWM window system and brings desktop widgets (Conky) installed by default. It also comes by default with Wine installed and configured, so users will have no trouble running Microsoft system programs on this distro.
The different editions of 4MLinux
Within this distro we can find several versions, or rather, editions, that we can choose according to our needs. 4MLinux is the most complete edition that comes with everything we have mentioned above and that can work with just 128 MB of RAM (or 1 GB, if we run it in Live Mode).
Some of the programs that we will find installed by default in 4MLinux are:
- Abiword.
- Bash.
- Gnumeric.
- FFmpeg.
- ImageMagick.
- Firefox.
- Chromium.
We can also find the 4MServer edition , a 4MLInux edition specially designed to work as a server. This distro removes many packages to prioritize performance and stability, and can work with 256 MB of RAM when it is already installed or with 2 GB of RAM if we run it in Live Mode.
4MServer allows us to mount a LAMP server with: Apache, MariaDB, PHP Python.
In addition, on its main website we can also find 3 official 4MLinux forks (or derived distros) specialized in different tasks:
- Antivirus Live CD : includes ClamAV to be able to scan our computer for malware and other threats.
- BakAndImgCD : Linux distro intended primarily for backing up and creating disk images.
- TheSSS (The Smallest Server Suite): Similar to 4MServer, but much smaller. Support DNS, FTP, HTTP, MySQL, NFS, SFTP, SMTP, SSH and Telnet services, it has a firewall and an antivirus.
All 4M editions are available for 32-bit and 64-bit.
to download
4MLinux is a totally free Linux distro for all users. However, from their website the developers ask us to make a donation if we want to download and try this new distro.
From that same website they indicate that, if we do not want to make the donation, we can download the latest version manually from Sourceforge. Therefore, to download this version, we can access the following link , where we will find the ISO images that we can download to install 4MLinux, both on any PC and in a virtual machine.
Update 4MLinux
If we already have an old version of 4MLinux installed, we can automatically update it to the latest version by executing the following command in a terminal:
zk update
