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Projects

Everything in Amber Linux, in three groups: the applications for Linux Mint, Amberlin, the assistant they share, and Acue, the tools that turn story files into pictures and narration. Each card opens the project's page: what it does, where it stands, and how to get it.

01Projects 5

Amber Linux

Amber Linux is a set of applications for Linux Mint, installed from one signed APT archive. It is not a distribution: Mint stays Mint. Where a program needs a newer library than Mint ships, such as GTK 4.16, it brings its own copy in a folder of its own, so nothing else on the system changes.

The suite is everything in Amberlin AI below, plus a terminal, an image viewer that is also a comic reader, the house fonts, and a theme that turns the desktop into an amber monitor from the 1980s. The dashboard that turns story files into pictures and narration is in Acue, with the tools around it.

Pinax

Viewer

An image viewer for one folder at a time: the newest picture large, the rest in justified rows around it, a comic reader, photo books made from a folder, and a small browser that saves a page's pictures as a comic book.

Amber Theme

Theme

Five 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.

Yggr

Test bed

A small GTK 4 code editor that is a test bed, not a product: editor features are proven here before they reach kat800, and so is shipping Odin software as a Flatpak.

02Projects 12

Amberlin AI

Amberlin is an assistant for the whole desktop. Hold a key, ask out loud, and the answer is spoken back and laid out as notes on the screen. Listening and speaking always run on your own machine. The language model runs there too, on the CPU or the graphics card, unless you choose a server of your own or a hosted one instead.

The overlay is one of three programs that talk to the same broker on the session bus. Katai, the panel in kat800, and the terminal chat elektron are the other two, and any application can ask the broker the same way. Ambrosia keeps what you copy, run and open, and Copal lays it across the screen at a keypress. Around them sit a tool server that lets the model look things up instead of guessing, a calendar service, a settings window and the inspector. The speech models, the training pipeline and amberlin.ai support the suite without being part of it.

Amberlin

Assistant

Hold 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.

Copal

Overlay

The desktop overlay: one keypress lays your newest notes, bookmarks and clips from Ambrosia across the screen, magnified under the pointer, and searchable.

Amber Settings

Settings

One settings window for the suite. A page appears for each program you have installed: Ambrosia, the kat800 terminal, Amberlin and its services. It keeps no configuration of its own.

amberlin-inspector

Developer tool

A proxy for developers that sits between a program and a model server and records what went in and what came out: the request, the prompt, the raw output, the timings and token counts.

amberlin-trainstation

Measurement

Where the model behind Amberlin's tool calling is chosen and measured. The current phase trains nothing, on purpose: a small model under a grammar already scores 114 of 119 held-out questions.

03Projects 3

Acue Media

Acue Media — Latin, sharpen! Notes in a text file, roused into pictures, narration and film.

A story file is a story in plain text with a few lines that start with two dashes: this is the scene, this is a picture, read this line aloud in this voice. Acue is a suite of three tools that read story files.

acue studio is a small server with a dashboard in the browser. Drop a file on it, and it sends each request to the model servers you point it at and keeps what comes back: text, pictures, a narration, short clips. The acue book maker drives the image and music servers on your own graphics card and turns a folder of story files into an illustrated book with a soundtrack. It is where you compare image models: its profiles switch Forge Neo from one model to another the same way every time, and a proof lays the results side by side. Once one is chosen, acue studio refines the story against that fixed model stack, often on another machine. amber-acue is the format itself, with the reader both of them share and the editor support that marks a wrong line as you type.

A finished book is one .acue file, and Pinax in Amber Linux is where you read it.

acue studio

Service

A small server and a browser dashboard that turn story files into text, pictures, narration and clips, using the model servers you point it at, and keep each result as a bundle on disk.

amber-acue

Format

The story language: the one reader acue studio, the acue book maker and Pinax share, the .acue book that acue studio and the book maker write, and editor support that marks a wrong line as you type. An Odin library and a C library.

  • The acue guide

    PDF, 50 pages, 0.7 MB. The acue book maker from the first picture to a finished book, and how to write a picture story and its soundtrack.

    SHA-256 82329b7185b57a68819cecd3287b76c63ec36a4cfc9babc2235c5797dcf1ea82.sha256

  • A sample book

    .acue, 21 MB. Michelle in Paris: one day in four chapters of four pictures, drawn by Z-Image, with two example desktop themes inside. Pinax opens it.

    SHA-256 8dab989cfdd535553531ec0ea6ae735b2ab9846b8e030b2e69296a0216a56d3e.sha256

  • An example proof

    PDF, 24 pages, 14 MB. The same day drawn by four models side by side, as acue prints a proof.

    SHA-256 3d219ae4abb983bfebc02f83e8b795fc52e566663603823d159ae550849f935a.sha256

To check a download, put it and its .sha256 in one folder and run sha256sum -c on the checksum file; it prints the file's name and OK.

How they meet

One session bus

Most of the talking goes over the session bus, the per-user message bus every Linux desktop already runs. The few services that speak HTTP answer only on this machine, on 127.0.0.1, unless you point them somewhere else.

The surfaces you use, the session bus they meet on, and the services that answer.

Most of it is written in Odin, built with the compiler from amber-odin; the tool server, the calendar and the inspector are Go.