Antergos

Antergos

Antergos using GNOME 3.8
Developer	Alexandre Filgueira and team^[1]
OS family	Unix-like
Source model	Open source
Initial release	7 May 2012 (2012-05-07)
Latest release	2015.04.12 / 12 April 2015 (2015-04-12)
Package manager	Pacman
Platforms	x86 and x86-64
Kernel type	Monolithic
Default user interface	GNOME Shell, Cinnamon, Xfce, Razor-qt, Command Line, KDE, Openbox, MATE
License	GNU GPL and various other free software licenses
Official website	antergos.com

Antergos (previously known as Cinnarch) is a Linux distribution based upon Arch Linux. It uses the GNOME 3 desktop environment by default but it can also employ the Cinnamon, Razor-qt and Xfce desktops. It was released on July 2012 as Cinnarch and by May 2013 it ranked among the top 30 most popular distributions at Distrowatch.^[2] The Galician word Antergos (meaning: ancestors) was chosen "to link the past with the present".^[3]

History and development

Initially the project began as Cinnarch^[4]^[5] and the desktop environment used by this distribution was Cinnamon, a fork of GNOME Shell developed by the Linux Mint team. In April 2013 the team switched the default desktop environment from Cinnamon to GNOME version 3.6, given the difficulty of keeping Cinnamon (which did not make it a priority to stay compatible with the latest GTK libraries) in the repositories of a rolling release like Arch Linux. The distribution was accordingly renamed to Antergos and released under the new name in May 2013.^[6]^[7]^[8]

Other changes in the default configuration of the system included: Nautilus replacing the Nemo file Manager, GDM replacing MDM (Mint Display Manager) as desktop manager and Empathy replacing Pidgin as the messaging client.

Since version 2014.05.26, Antergos partnered with the Numix project to bring Numix-Square icons and an exclusive Numix-Frost theme to the operating system.^[9]

On 7 March 2015, an Antergos Minimal ISO was made available, providing only necessary components for the installer to function.^[10]

Installation

Antergos features the graphical installer Cnchi alongside a text-based installer. The installer boots into a GNOME desktop, but during installation gives the options to choose between Gnome 3, Cinnamon, Mate, KDE, Xfce, Openbox and Razor-qt desktop environments.^[11]^[12] A network connection is required to begin the installation and to automatically update the Cnchi installer prior to installation.

Package management

Antergos is a rolling release and utilizes Arch Linux official repositories and the AUR, along with its own software repositories.^[13] It's a Pacman based distribution with a minimal text based installer similar to that of Arch Linux.

Package management is via pacman and PacmanXG4 (a GUI front-end for pacman.)^[14]

It doesn't come with a default office suite. However, since the earliest Cinnarch release, it has had the "LibreOffice Installer for Arch Linux" which makes it easy to select and download the required LibreOffice components.^[15]

Releases

The first ISO by the name of Cinnarch was launched on 7 May 2012 accompanied by a message in the Arch Linux forum notifying users of the release.^[16] The first version under the Antergos name was released on 12 May 2013.^[17]^[18]

References