Ninja OS was a LiveUSB stick based on Arch Linux.

Overview

This project is currently inactive. Active dates: 2010-2022

Ninja OS was a USB Stick based LiveOS based on Arch Linux and XFCE4. It is/was compiled with Larch(Live Arch) utility for makeing LiveCDs. While we have some privacy, and some security tools, we bill ourselves as a "break glass" OS. The one OS to keep in your pocket that should fix most problems. A Swiss Army boot knife.

We now only ship 64-bit versions only as Arch has discontinued i686 upstream, and Archlinux32 is not up to the same standard of build and not in sync with upstream.

License

Ninja OS is licensed under the GPLv3.
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Featured Software

Base: Arch Linux + X11 + XFCE4.
Text editors: vi, nano, mousepad
Internet: Firefox, Sylpheed(email), Pidgin, Hexchat, gFTP, Transmission
Media: Parole, Ristretto, Audacity, PiTiVi, GIMP, Transmageddon, Sound Converter, SOX, DeevedeNG, AcidRip, Asunder, lots more
Office: AbiWord, Gnumeric, xpdf, Galculator, more Privacy:: TOR, I2P, Privoxy, torsocks, GNUPG with GPA front end, GPG-Crypter, more...
NetSec: The usual ones :)
Disk Encryption: Zulucrypt, which does both Truecrypt, Veracrypt, LUKS, all with a reasonable GUI, that supports keyfiles, yubikeys, passwords, and most of the features of TC/VC like hidden paritions and all the various encryption ciphers. Ninja Tools: Zeroize, Clone and Forge, lots of controls and custom scripts

Philosphy

We aim to be a complete desktop enviroment that runs off a USB Stick. We chose Lightweight to Medium weight utilities and aim to run on the humblest low end machine from several years ago, to the latest and greatest high-power rigs and all in between. Universal compability with found hardware. We are aware this does come with caveats and limitations, many we are fine with. We only ship a 64-bit version because upstream Arch dropped their i686 builds. We previously had released both i686 and X86_64 images of Ninja OS. We still maintain an i686 repository, but there will be no future i686 releases.

We ship a full suite of Media tools, as well as privacy, and information/network security tools. While not exhaustive, we go for the most often used, familiar ones, while keeping in mind space and resouce constraints.

While using lightweight tools we aim to ship and integrate tools to open and edit as many types of common files as possible. This gives the completeness and "just works" impression to users.

Ninja OS ships as an ext4 image, and a MBR Bootloader as well as forge script for installing. Because Ninja OS is only a parition image, not a full disk image . you are free to use the rest of the stick for other data. This can be very useful as second partition can be used to save persistant data. This way, you only take up one USB stick and do not lose whatever you saved.