It was unveiled on llaunch of the new version of Lumina Desktop 1.6.2 in which, in addition to integrating improvements and bug fixes, it is noted that the qsudo code from PC-BSD / TrueOS / Project-Trident has been merged into Lumina-Desktop as a default utility.
For those who do not know about Lumina, they should know that this it is an extremely minimal environment and can be used on systems with as little as 1GB of memory. It is very self contained and does not require any particular utility or library apart from a few. Lumina is designed around the concept of complete modularity. Its applications are completely independent of the desktop and can be added / removed at will without loss of functionality.
The environment components are written using the Qt5 library (without using QML), in addition to Lumina taking a classic approach to organizing user environments, this includes a desktop, an application bar, a session manager, an application menu, a system for configuring environment settings, a task manager, a systray, a virtual desktop system.
Fluxbox is used as a window managers and the project is also developing its own Insight file manager, which has capabilities such as tab support for working with multiple directories at the same time, accumulation of links to selected directories in the bookmarks section, the presence of a built-in media player and a photo viewer with support for slideshows, tools for managing ZFS snapshots, support for connecting external plugins-drivers.
Main new features of Lumina Desktop 1.6.2
In this new version of the environment we can find that Lumina-checkpass utility is disabled and it is that it was designed to verify the accuracy of entering passwords in applications such as the screen saver. This utility is being developed for Lumina 2.0, it is not ready yet and it was included in version 1.6.1 by mistake.
Another change that stands out is that the file manager Lumina-FM has returned the option to open the selected file as root.
Also, as mentioned at the beginning, PC-BSD / TrueOS / Project-Trident code has been ported for qsudo, a component to provide graphical applications with sudo functionality to execute elevated privileged tasks. This is a graphical utility that was originally written for PC-BSD for when a graphical user interface application needed access to sudo, historically this was used by the PC-BSD package manager, however it has been included in Lumina in the future.
Packagers can disable this in the project file if they wish; however if they do, they will also disable the 'Open as root' feature in Lumina-FM as a result.
We can also find that the ability to customize the app bar icon and user menu is provided, as the start menu icon has been done. This option is available in Lumina-Configuration under «General options».
On the other hand, it is mentioned that a bug was fixed that prevented the Fluxbox window theme from being activated in Lumina-Config. The initial default size of Lumina-Config has been increased so that scrolling is not necessary when initially starting the utility.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Build scripts have been added for Fedora, Slackware, and Gentoo Linux.
- The icon for the application panel.
- Fixed Lumina-Archiver title displayed in window title bar.
- Two of Lumina's icons that were low-grade PNGs and have been replaced by scalable SVG icons.
- Various build scripts for various distributions have been added to the Lumina port directory.
- The docs have been updated to reflect that the minimum Qt version for Lumina is 5.12.0.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about this new version, you can consult the details In the following link.
How to install Lumina desktop?
If we want to install the desktop environment, it is necessary to download the source code to start compiling it from there, it is a task that a new user cannot do, although I must tell you that we have a guide to carry out this process we can check it here.