>>> 29.06.2021
Installing Dragora
As I wanted to try out different fully free as in freedom operating systems I have tried to install Dragora.
The emphasis is on tried, because it isn't easy to find much information about installing it.
The first hurdle, after I have downloaded the two ISOs from the official website, or preferably one of the mirrors (none of which is located in Europe), is to log into the live installation environment.
Because of the nonexistent documentation, I have for some hours scoured the Internet, to no avail, for informations on the standard user and password.
The username is "root" and the password is "dragora", where I am supposed to know that from, I do not know. (After some further research, I have found the location of this information, in the release announcement of the beta, when you scroll completely to the bottom.)
After login, you actually get some information on how to proceed. You are told how to set the keymap, how to enable the mouse and how to run the installer.
So I ran "dragora-installer" and saw an information-screen that told me how to navigate the installer, or so I thought at first. In reality it tells you the most commonly used keys on a QWERTY layout, or something like that, I honestly didn't quite understand this screen.
You only get this far if you already have a linux partition on the hard drive. If you do not, you have to create one using cfdisk.
When you hit Enter you get asked to insert the "Dragora Packages" ISO, so I shut down the VM and created a second drive, inserted the "Dragora Packages" ISO and started the virtual machine again.
I chose the keyboard layout and logged in and started the installer again, hit Enter on the information screen, chose to proceed without swap, because I am installing on a VM.
Next I selected the partition(s) I wanted to use, and the mount points I wanted to mount these partitions to and chose "Done" and confirmed the generated fstab.
This brought me to a screen where I just had to hit Enter, then I chose some packages to install (I left the selection as it was), after which I could choose between a full or an Expert-Installation (I chose full). Now the System was finally installing.
After a few minutes of decompressing and moving files around, I got informed that I had not set a root-password yet, and got prompted to do so now. Next I had to choose the location for GRUB and install it, after which I chose to ignore the installation of GRUB (selected by default).
Now I chose the services I wanted to start automatically and rebooted the system.
I logged into my newly setup system, and I had sucsessfully installed a functioning, fully free as in freedom Linux distribution.
To start a graphical session I just typed xdm and hit Enter, which started a very basic configuration of twm (atleast I think it was).
To install packages (which is actually documented), you just type "qi -i <package-name>". So I wanted to install i3, and typed "qi /i i3" and hit Enter. What I at first didn't notice, is that the keyboard-layout was set to American, which is why my terminal-emulator was full of the qi helptext (which is useful by the way). So I exited back to tty1, by clicking shutdown (which logs you out of the X-Session) and tried to install it there, but to install a package it seems, you have to download a package before installing it. How to do this, I have no idea. (There seem to be two repositories, but I could not reach them in any way, so they are probably down.)
So I tried starting xfce with the command "startxfce4", which gave me an error, that I already had an X-session running. So I rebooted and tried again, this time with success.
Now I could see which programs were preinstalled, which were not many.
At this point I have stopped pursuing this operating system. It just isn't what I want from my computing experience. But if you want a fully free as in freedom operating system, and are not afraid of searching on forums (and can figure out how to install packages), you should definetly try Dragora.