Installation Notes for Giocoso 3 on antiX Linux

antiX (and the annoying choice of mis-capitalisation is deliberate, I'm afraid) was a fork of ye olde Mepis distro and designed to run lightweight window managers, rather than full-flavoured desktop environments. Since Mepis was originally based on Debian, antiX is also based on Debian (the stable branch), which makes for both a lightweight and stable experience. It's also ideally suited to being installed on older hardware (the kind of spare, ancient device that makes for a perfect, dedicated Giocoso player, in fact!), so there's a lot to recommend it. If only their website's stapline ("Proudly anti-fascist "antiX Magic" in an environment suitable for old and new computers.") wasn't a peculiar mixing of of technology and politics!

Anyway: the distro comes in a couple of flavours: a 'full' one, that includes multiple windows managers and an office suite; a 'base' one that comes with multiple windows managers and not much else; and a 'core' one that comes with practically nothing but a WiFi-enabled command line environment. I chose to install the 64-bit Version 23 'base' flavour into a Proxmox virtual machine.

The OS install looks identical to that for MX Linux (given the two distro's convoluted and entwined history, that's not a surprise). It exhibits one quirk which might trip the unwary: it offers not to set a root password (and thus behave more like Ubuntu, where everything is done as sudo). I'd strongly recommend setting a root password, though, otherwise the Giocoso installer will break: we're installing on a Debian-based distro, not an Ubuntu-based one, and we expect the distro to behave accordingly! That means a functioning root account is essential.

The Giocoso installation after that is a piece of cake: it does exactly what it's supposed to do and results in a Giocoso player that performs flawlessly, including managing to display album art in-terminal without drama: