Getting to Know TinkerOS
In this chapter we'll take a tour of TinkerOS, the Debian Linux distribution from ASUS for the Tinker Board.
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Getting to Know TinkerOS In this chapter we’ll take a tour of TinkerOS, the Debian Linux distribution from ASUS for the Tinker Board.
Note In the upcoming chapters it will be assumed that you are familiar with the concepts of commands and practices with the Linux terminal, such as sudo, apt-get, cmake, cd, and so on. Finally, after a lot of preparation, you have everything you need to start using the Tinker Board with an operating system installed. The first OS we’re going to tour is TinkerOS. Based on Debian Linux, it’s maintained by ASUS and has a traditional desktop environment.
First Boot If you have followed the disk imaging steps from the previous chapter, you may have already booted into the TinkerOS desktop by powering on the board with your chosen storage solution. Again, the first boot will take a bit longer than you might expect because of the file structures being installed.
© Liz Clark 2019 L. Clark, Practical Tinker Board, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3826-4_4
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Once you get to the desktop, though, if you’re new to Linux, you may notice that it looks a lot like a traditional Windows desktop with a task bar at the bottom of the screen and trash can icon for deleted files in the top left corner, as shown in Figure 4-1.
Figure 4-1. The TinkerOS desktop
What Is TinkerOS? First, some background on TinkerOS. It is based on Debian Linux, and at the time this book is written utilizes Debian Stretch, which is Debian 9. Linux distributions also number their releases, similar to Windows and macOS. TinkerOS uses the LXDE desktop environment for Debian Stretch. There are a few different desktop environments available for Debian, and which one is best often comes down to personal preference. LXDE stands for lightweight desktop environment, and it definitely lives up to its name as it does not use a lot of resources and is fairly lightweight in its hardware utilization. Because of this, it makes a great choice for a single-board computer to run, leaving valuable hardware resources available for tasks. 50
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The LXDE desktop environment is made-up of panels, which appear at the bottom of the desktop, in the area that would be called the task bar in Windows and macOS. These panels, controlled by the LXPanel utility, are completely customizable. As you become more comfortable with TinkerOS, you may want to change the default panel setup. We will go over how to do that shortly, but first let’s take a quick tour of the default panel configuration for TinkerOS.
Getting Your Bearings Starting at the bottom-left corner on the panel, you’ll see the LXDE logo. When you click the icon, a menu will open, which resembles the Start menu in Windows and shows the preinstalled programs for TinkerOS. Don’t worry; these programs are not bloatware. They’re standard Linux programs, and in fact TinkerOS has fewer preinstalled programs than many other popular SBC Linux distributions, which may or may not be a good thing depending on your preferen
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