kat800
TerminalA tabbed, dockable terminal for Linux Mint, with a current VTE, remote tmux sessions as native tabs, containers and sandboxes as ordinary panes, and the desktop's clipboard, history and notes in docks beside the shells.
~/amber
Amber Linux
Applications for Linux Mint, from one signed APT archive: a terminal, a searchable history of what you copy, run and open, an image viewer, an amber theme, and Amberlin, an assistant you talk to, with its models on your own machine.
What is in it
Made to be used all day
The applications share one store, Ambrosia, so what you copy in one is there in the others, and one assistant that any of them can ask.
Ambrosia
ServiceEverything you have copied, run, opened, bookmarked or noted, searchable one keypress away, and readable by other programs over D-Bus.
Amberlin
AssistantHold a key, ask out loud, and the answer is spoken back and laid out on the screen as notes. A speech-first assistant for the Mint desktop, with its models on your own machine.
Amber Theme
ThemeFive desktop profiles for Linux Mint, led by a dark amber one after the phosphor monitors of the 1980s, each made for GTK 3, GTK 4, libadwaita, the Cinnamon panel and the window borders, with folder icons and ten wallpapers.
Install
Three commands, then one
For Linux Mint 22. Add the signed archive once, then install the suite, or any single package from the packages page. Feedback is welcome.
bash
sudo curl -fsSL https://apt.amberlinux.org/amberlinux-archive-keyring.gpg \
-o /usr/share/keyrings/amberlinux-archive-keyring.gpg
echo 'deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/amberlinux-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.amberlinux.org amber main' \
| sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/amberlinux.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install amber-desktopTo check the key, gpg --show-keys /usr/share/keyrings/amberlinux-archive-keyring.gpg should print the fingerprint 481A 11AA 5483 3219 6B29 0D09 C5B0 67A7 99C4 3065.
A personal note
Ten years with Linux Mint
On 1 May 2017 I made my first monthly sponsorship donation to Linux Mint. Nobody asked me to. Linux Mint had become the operating system I reached for every morning, and I believed the people building it deserved steady funding.
Amber Linux, the project behind this site, is a celebration of that decade. As the sponsorship approaches its ten-year mark on1 May 2027, I am doing two things at once: fundraising openly for Linux Mint, and releasing the developer tools and workflows I have enjoyed throughout the past years. Some are older, some are new, and some are rewrites. The anniversary is the reason to share them.
The fundraiser is straightforward: encourage people who use and value Linux Mint to put money behind it. If Mint is your daily desktop too, consider joining the monthly sponsors at linuxmint.com/donors.php. Even the smallest tier counts. Everything on this site can be verified: the sponsorship history is on the Linux Mint forums, and the donation links point to linuxmint.com and nowhere else.
Fundraiser ends
1 May 2027
--days
--hrs
--min
--sec
The tenth anniversary of my first monthly donation to Linux Mint.
What is done and what is not
The suite installs today.sudo apt install amber-desktop works, the applications run, and testing them is useful to me: that is why it ships this early.
This site and every application in Amber Linux are written with AI. The libraries are written and audited by AI, and the tests are AI-driven: xdotool drives the applications, which is how I check that they work. Exploring local AI on Linux Mint without using AI to build it would make no sense to me.
If you would rather not use software made this way, that is a fair choice.
The applications are under the Amber Source License, free to use privately, and become GPL-3.0 on 1 May 2033; most of the shared Odin libraries, and this website's code, are BSD 3-Clause. The licence page says why, and lists the exceptions.
1 May 2027 is the date for version 1.0: the applications polished enough to call released, on the same anniversary the fundraiser runs to. Until then, things roll out as they are ready.
darkstar, tty1 — 1995
darkstar:~# uname -a
Linux darkstar 1.2.8 #1 Mon Jun 12 21:04:17 CDT 1995 i?86
darkstar:~# df
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Capacity
/dev/hda1 174080 172031 99%
[barely breathing]
darkstar:~# startx
Fatal server error: no screens found
[monitor: high-pitched whine]
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused
[this will be fine]
darkstar:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep cpu
cpu : 486? early Pentium?
[record corrupted — it was 1995]
darkstar:~# free
total used free
Mem: 3460 3412 48
[good luck]Fun fact
It started with Slackware
My first Linux distribution was Slackware, around 1995, and my copy came with a 150-page printed manual, which I am now auctioning for Linux Mint. I installed it with Slackware's setup.
The machine was home-built: a 486 or an early Pentium, I honestly cannot remember which, with 4 MB of RAM and a VGA card that had done nothing to deserve what I was about to put it through.
Three decades later I am still on Linux, with a theme that looks like an amber phosphor monitor.