IN-DEPTH Seeing the light

Three humble developers of Bodhi Linux enlighten Jonni Bidwell on the ways of Zen and the art of distro maintenance.

W e’re almost as guilty as some of our readers when it comes to hoarding old hardware. If it ain’t broke don’t throw it away, we always say.

However, tracking down a distro that runs on older hardware can be a challenge, and finding one that holds its own against mainstream desktops seems very tricky indeed. But it needn’t be this way. Bodhi Linux will run on anything with 512MB of RAM and will occupy less than a gigabyte of its precious storage. There’s even a 32-bit version that will probably run on your dusty old Pentium III. Not only that, but Bodhi is pretty much unique in that it offers a fully configured Enlightenmentbased desktop out of the box. This means you get speed, usability and a unique style.

For those unfamiliar with the lore, the Enlightenment (E for short) toolkit was for a long time a rival to GTK and Qt, and in many ways was ahead of both of them. It’s still around today, now at version 25, but is used more by embedded offerings (for example, Samsung’s Tizen) rather than Linux distros. Bodhi’s Moksha desktop was forked from an older (and lighter) E release, but a special E25 BodhiDev release is available.

We were honoured to share some words with Bodhi lead dev Robert Wiley (aka ylee), Moksha guru Štefan Uram (aka the_ waiter) and community and theming don Gareth Williams (aka hippytaff). These legends, and a handful of other community members, have been running things since original Bodhi founder Jeff Hoogland took a step back from the project in 2018, after eight years at the helm. So put some Tibetan bowl music on, take a deep breath and perhaps you’ll even glimpse satori.

Back in 2011 mathematician and coder Jeff Hoogland had a vision. Not necessarily a Saul on the road to Damascus vision (wasn’t he blinded? – Ed) but nonetheless one that encouraged him to share Bodhi Linux 0.1.6, the first official version, with the rest of the world. Jeff’s vision was for an ‘enlightened’, minimalistic distribution free of bloat, but without sacrificing elegance or usability. Very quickly the distro gained traction, and soon Jeff had a veritable band of coders, artists and translators helping him on the project. Against a backdrop of criticism for ‘modern’ desktops such as Gnome 3 and Unity, Bodhi’s early popularity was surely in large part due to its unique use of an Enlightenment-based desktop.