Catbird Linux: Turn on, tune in, capture, and master.

Introduction to Catbird Linux
Data Science
Content Creation Tools
Go: Elegant - Efficient - Fast
Javascript and Typescript: Dynamic Web Content
Office, Programming, and Multimedia Applications
Command Line Tools
For An Accessible and Secure Internet
Usage and Installation Options
Technical Notes
System Integrity and Authenticity
Disclaimer
Apps in this Version of Catbird Linux

Introduction

Welcome to Catbird Linux, an operating system built for internet content creation and use of automation to retrieve and analyze data from websites and online databases. It centers on Python and Go, with numerous packages for web scraping or downloading data via API calls. Using Catbird Linux, it is possible to accomplish in depth stock market analysis, track weather trends, follow social media sentiment, or do other tasks in data science. The system is programmer friendly, ready for creating and running the tools you use to measure and understand your world.

The Catbird Linux Desktop and Rofi menu.

Tiling a radio playlist and TwitGrid window.

JupyterLab with multiple kernels for coding.

Search with several custom Surfraw elvis!

Receiving BBC Radio 4 Longwave via WebSDR.

Editing Python in Neovim and JupyterLab

Data Science

Here are some of the main Python packages integrated into the system:

• Python 3.8, pure and simple. It is the base upon which capabilities are extended with extra custom modules.
• Alpha Vantage, connecting to the API of Alpha Vantage for vast stock, forex, and cryptocurrency data.
• Quandl, providing API access to millions of financial and economic datasets.
• PyEX, the tool for API access to data in the IEX Cloud: streaming quotes and fundamental data.
• Requests-HTML, a library providing intuitive HTML parsing.
• Ipython, a command shell for interactive computing in Python.
• JupyterLab, an application for creating, testing, and sharing documents containing live code. Jupyter Notebooks are configured for Python, Go, Javascript, Typescript, and Bash kernels.
• Pandas-Datareader, a library for managing and formatting for display or input to other applications.
• Matplotlib, a 2D mathematical plotting library.
• Scipy, a core Python library for computations in science and engineering.
• Sympy, the Python library for symbolic mathematics.
• Numpy, a core Python library for advanced mathematical computations.
• Astropy, containing essential computational tools for astronomy and astrophysics.
• MetPy, a Python library for reading, visualizing, and performing calculations with weather data.
• PRAW is the Python Reddit API Wrapper, a tool for accessing the vast universe of discussions and sentiment of Reddit users.
• Twint is an intelligence project for rapidly gathering data from Twitter, arguably the fastest source on the internet for both factual news and the worst socio-political propaganda. Gather the data with Twint and use other tools for augmented analysis.
• Tweepy is another Python tool for collecting data from Twitter. It accesses the API and can selectively access data in user profiles, hashtag searches, date ranges, and so forth.
• WorldWeather is the largest three-dimensional web-based interactive browser of satellite, weather, climate, and other publicly available time-aware geospatial data, built upon NASA's revolutionary World Wind technology.

For web scraping, these specialized packages are installed:

• Beautiful Soup, a library for exreacting data from HTML and XML documents.
• Selenium, a suite of tools automating web browsing.
• Scrapy, a powerful and extensible web scraping and crawling framework. It is not especially user friendly, but once set up, it really brings in the data you need.

Sentiment of scraped social media or news content can be measured with natural language processing (nlp) software tools. Whether favorable, neutral, unfavorable, or perhaps outright love and hate, populations can be evaluated by by what they say. Bots and trolls can be found and evaluated too! Catbird Linux contains multiple lexicons and language processing packages.

The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) is the main language processing tool in Catbird Linux. It has numerous components which parse, tokenize, classify, and evaluate the semantics of written language. Catbird Linux is configured for English, but it is possible to install modules for other languages. VADER Sentiment Analysis is a valence-aware dictionary and rules-based analysis tool crafted for social media analysis. WordNet is effective on groups of words, adept at assigning values based on phrases built on synonyms, antonyms, or neutral with respect to other words.

TextBlob is a package which your scripts will use to examine blocks of text - breaking phrases into parts, then tagging, evaluating, and quantifying sentiment. It is powerful, but easy to use: collect your text, with programmatic instructions, feed it to the processor for evaluation.

Catbird Linux includes a wide variety of python packages ready to work on start-up. If you have your own scripts or Jypyter Notebooks, copy them into the system and run them. Additional packages may be easily added with the pip install or other commands. It is suggested to set up separate Python virtual environments built around specific packages and tasks.

Content Creation Tools

Aside from writing text, creating content involves working with audio, video, and images. Catbird Linux is ready to work for you with these applications:

• Audacity, for audio editing. Plenty of processing and analysis plugins are installed.
• GIMP, for image editing in a gui.
• Imagemagick, for image editing on the command line.
• Inkscape, for vector graphic image editing.
• Shotcut, for video editing. Processing plugins included.

Go: Elegant - Efficient - Fast

Go is an open source programming language focused on simplicity, reliability, and efficiency. Using Go to create your applications, you work in a more direct manner, without the bloat and clutter of other programming languages. Code is compiled into lightweight, efficient binaries which run quickly and reliably.

Gather an analyze data with Python, but use Go to do the heavy work with your refined data. It is 40x faster than Python, similar to Java or C++ but more probrammer-friendly.

Javascript and Typescript: Dynamic Web Content

Neovim and JupyterLab are both configured with syntax and formatting support for Javascript and Typescript. In fact, you can test your code incrementally in JupyterLab. Of course, Firefox is a web browser which will run Javascript or Typescript right out of the box.

Office, Programming, and Multimedia Applications

In addition to data science applications, Catbird Linux is equipped with the full LibreOffice productivity suite. For code writers, there is the Neovim editor, with included plugins supporting Python, Go, Java / Javascript, HTML, Markdown, and other languages. Multimedia files and data streams are available in the VLC Media Player. Web accessible software defined radio servers are bookmarked in Firefox, for accessing live, off-the-air broadcasts from around the world.

Command Line Tools

Catbird Linux contains a plethora of efficient and fast command line tools.

• Neovim and Nano are a pleasure to program in, in part, because they are so fast.
• Newsboat is an RSS / Atom feed reader.
• Castero is a lightweight podcast player.
• Browsing the web is a breeze in text mode with W3M.Navigate pages with Vim-like keys and enjoy cleaner, stripped text using the Readability utility.
• Surfraw is a search tool providing well over a hundred different websites to access for information not easy to find on the major portals. You can look for aircraft in flight by registration or ADSB hex code, find answers to computing or math problems, or even do lookups of slang phrases or rumors appearing in the news.
• TwitGrid pulls multiple Twitter feeds and displays them as a broadsheet in Firefox. Here, it is set up in "topics. "You select a topic and watch five feeds, updated at regular intervals.
• Irssi is a terminal based internet relay chat (irc) application for anyone wanting to go "old school" in text based communication.
• lf is a fast and efficient terminal file manager. Navigate with Vim-like keys, with previews and user configurable management commands.
• fzf, ripgrep, and fd are tiny yet very effective tools for searching and organizing files or text. With these, you can reach into dozens or hundreds of files to recursively find words, phrases, code, or even terminal command history.

For An Accessible and Secure Internet

Catbird Linux contains applications promoting a decentralised, content neutral, and censorship free internet. For evading national censorship barriers, Wireguard VPN, OpenVPN, and Sshuttle are effective tools. Support for remote Tor connections via ssh tunneling is included (set it up on a distant server). DNS queries are protected with DNS-over-TLS software, ensuring that censors cannot monitor or poison domain name lookups.

Local files need protection too! VeraCrypt provides strong cryptographic protection in the form of storage volumes which resist tampering or unauthorised access. Bleachbit is a powerful system cleaner which can also eliminate traces of deleted files by wiping free disk space.

Usage and Installation Options

Catbird Linux is built to run as a live environment. Write it to a flash drive or virtual machine and go forth to do great things. Also, the system may be installed as a persistent, uncompressed filesystem on your hard drive. See these options:

1. TimeShift is installed.From the live environment, back up the system to a separate medium.Thence, restore the backup as an uncompressed filesystem to the medium you want to operate from in daily computing. Systemback is another option, with the same method: back up to a separate medium then restore onto your working medium.
2. Clone it to the hard drive as a regular, uncompressed operating system with the included linux-clone script.
3. In Linux or Windows, create a bootable USB or SD card using Ventoy.
4. Run the iso in a virtual machine under Virtualbox, VMware, or in Qemu.

Ventoy is both capable of creating multiboot drives, so you can set up multiple operating systems for different computing tasks. You can create a persistent image file, with the label casper-rw, for persistent settings across reboots. See the Ventoy site for details!

It is not recommended to burn an actual DVD to run any live computing environment. It is far, far too slow! Use a flash drive or SSD. For ultimate performance, clone the environment to a regular uncompressed file system.

Technical Notes

Catbird Linux is a 64 bit system, derived derived from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which is itself derived from Debian Linux. Catbird Linux uses the MATE desktop environment and the i3 window manager to provide users with an effieient workflow light on resources. It carries The capabilities of its parent distros: easy software updating, great graphics, system resource management, and adaptability to user needs. The default username is user and there is no password in the default system.The system runs quite well on modest hardware, and truly shines on strong multi-Core CPUs with abundant memory.

Integrity and Authenticity of Catbird Linux

Great effort goes into making Catbird Linux safe and free of malware. To verify that your copy of the iso image file is authentic, undamaged, and unaltered, check the sha256sum against the official authentication document and verify the digital signature of Catbird Linux. The authentication document is available by the download link at Catbirdlinux.com. Use the Passwords and Keys or Seahorse application to check the signature. Import the Catbird Linux public key from pool.sks-keyservers.net or keyserver.ubuntu.com.

Disclaimer

Catbird Linux is provided as-is. No guarantees or warranties are applicable to Catbird Linux. Catbird Linux is derived from Ubuntu Linux and but not endorsed by or affiliated with Ubuntu, Canonical Ltd, or the Linux Mark Institute. End users bear all responsibility for access and use of data obtained with Catbird Linux and must accomplish their own due diligence before such data is used.

Integrated Changes for this Version of Catbird Linux

For older changes, visit the DOWNLOADS page.