Amber Linux
Home of Amber Linux — a collection of applications, services, themes, and tutorials for sharing AI agents on top of Linux Mint.
Projects
Source-available tools built to make AI agents a first-class citizen on Linux Mint.
Kat800
AppA terminal multiplexer built for AI agent workflows on Linux Mint. Run multiple agents, monitor sessions, and orchestrate pipelines — all from one terminal.
KatKlips
ServiceA DBus service for Linux Mint that manages your clipboard history, bookmarks, and notes — making context instantly available to AI agents running on your system.
Amber Phosphorus
ThemeA Linux Mint theme inspired by the warm amber glow of 1990s CRT phosphor monitors. Brings a coherent, nostalgic aesthetic to your entire Mint desktop.
Amber LIB
LibraryThe Amber Linux package library for Odin. Go-modelled packages for filesystem paths, HTTP, DBus, GTK4, PTYs and more, with allocator-aware APIs throughout.
Amberlin
AppA centered Spotlight-style GTK4 launcher for Linux Mint Cinnamon. Search KatKlips clipboard history, pick an entry, and paste it back into your workflow.
Amber Odin
PackageA Debian package wrapper for the upstream Odin compiler. Installs a predictable /usr/bin/odin on Linux Mint without colliding with Ubuntu's unrelated odin package.
Ten years with Linux Mint
On 1 May 2017 I made my first monthly sponsorship donation to Linux Mint. Not because anyone asked me to, not for exposure, but because Linux Mint had become the operating system I reached for every morning — and I believed the people building it deserved sustained, reliable funding.
Amber Linux is my celebration of that decade. As my sponsorship window approaches its ten-year mark on 1 May 2027, I am doing two things at once: fundraising openly for Linux Mint, and releasing the personal developer tools and workflows I have quietly relied on throughout those ten years. Tools I built to solve real problems on a real Linux Mint machine — not packaged and polished until now because there was never a good reason to share them. The anniversary is that reason.
The tools here are the genuine article: things I use daily. The fundraiser is straightforward: encourage people who use and value Linux Mint to put money behind it. Everything on this site can be verified — the tools are source-available, the sponsorship history is on the Linux Mint forums, and the donation links point to linuxmint.com and nowhere else.
Ten years of monthly Linux Mint sponsorship. Going until the end.
Verify before you donate
Fundraisers tied to beloved FOSS projects attract imitators. Someone claiming to run a "Linux Mint sponsorship drive" or a "FOSS tools fundraiser" on your behalf is doing exactly the kind of thing bad actors copy. Before trusting anyone making similar claims — including me — verify the details independently.
My sponsor history and any fundraiser announcements are posted and verifiable at forums.linuxmint.com. A real, long-term sponsor has a thread history, a profile with years of posts, and references from other community members. Accounts with no history and urgent donation requests do not.
The only legitimate destination for Linux Mint donations is linuxmint.com/donors.php or the PayPal and bank links listed there directly. If anyone sends you a donation link to a third-party page, a crypto address, or anything not traceable to the official Mint site — do not use it. When in doubt, donate directly through the Mint website with no intermediary.
Every project on this site has public source code. The Amber Linux projects are all on GitHub under the Amber Linux organisation. If someone claims to have "improved" or "forked" these tools and is asking for payment or access fees, treat that as a red flag. The originals are free and always will be.
$ uname -a
Linux darkstar 1.2.8 #1 Mon Apr 3 20:34:21 CDT 1995
i486 unknown
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used
/dev/hda1 170M 168M [barely breathing]
$ startx
Fatal server error: no screens found
[VGA CARD TEMPERATURE: CRITICAL]
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused
[this will be fine]
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name"
model name : Intel 486 DX2 @ 66MHz
$ free -m
total used free
Mem: 1 1 0 [good luck] It started with Slackware and a prayer
My first Linux distribution was Slackware — a stack of 3.5″
floppy disks, a 150-page printed manual, and the quiet, creeping dread of the
pkgtool installer. The year was somewhere around 1995. The machine
was a home-built 486 DX2 with 1 MB of RAM and a VGA card
that had done nothing to deserve what I was about to put it through.
Getting X11 running on Slackware meant hand-editing XF86Config:
monitor horizontal sync range, vertical refresh, dot clock. Get it wrong and
your CRT whines at a frequency only dogs should hear. I got it wrong. Several
times. The VGA card's heatsink got warm enough that I could smell it. I got the
thing running at 800×600 eventually, by which point I had learned more about
video signal timing than any reasonable person should know.
That machine ran Slackware for two years before I moved on. I never did burn out the card — but it was close. Thirty years later I am still on Linux, just with a theme that looks like the amber phosphor monitor I spent all that time staring at.