In the meantime, vote or propose distributions for the third review (poll in the sidebar, propose by posting a comment here).

Happy holidays!

Update: I’m still here, but at the moment I don’t have time to write the review. I’m afraid you need to wait a few more days. Sorry. (December 28)

Fluxbuntu was created for the user who wishes to utilize the massively popular and versatile Ubuntu distribution base while minimizing the impact on their system’s resources. To this end, we firmly believe that Fluxbuntu is the wisest choice for anyone seeking a low profile operating system — from performance enthusiasts to people who need a lightweight operating system to breathe new life into an old computer.

Long story short: Fluxbuntu is a distributions based on Ubuntu which aims to provide a lightweight, productive, agile, and efficient system. It uses the Fluxbox windowmanager. If you now start thinking “And what’s the difference between Fluxbuntu and Ubuntu with Fluxbuntu?”, the FAQ gives a pretty good answer:

Contrary to popular opinion, the Flux in fluxbuntu does not signify Fluxbox. The choice of window manager is coincidental. Fluxbuntu attempts to make sane application selection and daemon removal as well as providing a series of useful setup configurations and scripts. This includes items such as automounting, a resolution changing applet, and a few other additions to make your Fluxbuntu usage easier.

Tested version

The tested version is Fluxbuntu 7.10 Release Candidate, which is based on Ubuntu Gutsy. As you can see, it is not a final version, altough Ubuntu Gutsy was released a while ago. Anyway, I haven’t encountered any major problem. Maybe I’m just lucky Anyway, I got assured on the IRC channel that there is going to be a 7.10 final version. By the way, the ISO image is pretty small, only 300 MB.

Minimum Specs?

Fluxbuntu uses 35-46mb of ram. If you have 64MB of ram we would definitely recommend having adequate swap space.

Installation

Unlike the previous Dapper-based version I tested a while ago, this release is not using a live-cd based installer, it is using the Debian installer, which is based on ncurses. I find this a better choice, as Fluxbuntu targets old computers. Old computers + live OS -> poor performance.

Now, I must say that I like the simple, clean design of the boot menu.

The installation processes is pretty straightforward, and if you have some Linux background, you shouldn’t encounter any problem. If you don’t have, search some documentation about installing Debian. The first few pages from “The perfect desktop - Debian Etch” should help.

First impression

I really like this neat design. Have a look at the login screen (slim is the login manager) and at the desktop. I think this is the best look I’ve ever seen at Fluxbox.

We can see that ROX is used. It adds support for desktop icons and background images. It is also used as a file manager.

There are 5 shortcuts on the desktop: Home (ROX filemanager), the good old Console (uxterm), Editor (Leafpad), Browser (Kazehakase) and Chat (Pidgin).

In-depth analysis

As you may have noticed, Fluxbuntu isn’t using the common programs for a specific task (eg. Firefox as a browser), because the developers tried to find lighter alternatives without losing too much functionality. And in my opinion, they did found good applications. Of course that if you are a web developer you’ll probably want Firefox instead of Kazehakase, BUT you can install it easily with apt-get or synaptic.

Remaining in the field of browsers, as web browsing is one of the thing you’ll probably want to do with an old computer, you may ask yourself what is and how good is Kazehakase working. It is a simple browser, using the gecko engine, with support for tabbed browsing and RSS feeds. It renders web pages exactly like Firefox. Better yet, it uses mostly the same keyboard shortcuts, and (update) it supports Flash.

Installed packages (exactly as in the menu):

• Editors - AbiWord (Word processor), Leafpad (graphical text editor), Nano (console text editor)
• Graphics - Dia (This is one of the cool programs I’m really excited to discover. It is a nice diagram creator. This means less time lost when creating the diagrams for my physics homework. Huray!)
• Net - Claws Mail (Another alternative, this one for Evolution or Thunderbird. It has lots of features and it is fast. I’m considering replacing Thunderbird with it.), Kazehakase (already discussed), network-config (graphical interface for configuring the network cards), Telnet, w3m (console web browser)
• Programming - Python
• Shells - Bash, Dash, Sh
• Sound - Alsamixergui (graphical mixer for Alsa), wmxmms (not working), xmms (Light GTK1 music player. Considered obsolete by many, but… well, it works.)
• System - Admin - alsaconf (ALSA setup), pppconfig (ncurses PPP setup tool)
• System - Aptitude (ncurses package manager), gvidm (tool for changing X11 resolution without restarting the server), DSL/PPPoE configuration tool, pstree (running processes tree), ROX Filer (file manager, same as Home from
• Desktop), Synaptic (package manager), tasksel (ncurses tool to install “software collections”, such as “LAMP server”), Top (console tool for displaying running tasks)
• Tools - different fluxbox configuration utilities, Xarchiver (lightweight archive manager)
• Viewers - ImageMagick (image viewer), VLC (media player), Xpdf (PDF viewer), zxgv (another image viewer)

One of the things I like about Fluxbuntu is that it integrates console applications in the menu. I also like that it asks for you password when you try to shutdown or reboot it. Now that I’m in this area, it supports standby and hibernate out of the box.

Conclusion

It’s Linux. It’s lightweight. You have access to Ubuntu repositories. Good choice of default applications. –> it’s a very good choice for old computers. I’m going to install it on my parent’s computer (P2 @ 400 MHz, 128 MB RAM). As they use it for internet browsing, Fluxbuntu seems almost the perfect choice.

Also, some of the programs included with Fluxbuntu may be better, in some cases, than “classic” applications that do the same thing (Claws Mail vs Thunderbird or Evolution, AbiWord vs OpenOffice.org), on any distribution,.

Links

Home page: fluxbuntu.org

Support: wiki.fluxbuntu.org/index.php?title=Help

Distrowatch homepage: distrowatch.com/fluxbuntu

This time I’m planing to write a full-length, proper review.

Also, because I don’t think it is fair for some distributions to have cumulated votes over a long period and others just for a few days, I’m going to try to respect the following self imposed rules:

• when I start testing the distribution which has most votes, I’ll create a new poll with the same options (except the already chosen distribution)
• if two distributions have the same number of votes, both get reviewed, probably one per week
• new distributions are going to be added only when a new poll is created

Don’t forget to vote again

Now, what do you think? Do you have any suggestion?

About openSUSE

The openSUSE project is a community program sponsored by Novell. Promoting the use of Linux everywhere, this program provides free, easy access to openSUSE, a complete Linux distribution. The openSUSE project has three main goals: make openSUSE the easiest Linux for anyone to obtain and the most widely used Linux distribution; leverage open source collaboration to make openSUSE the world’s most usable Linux distribution and desktop environment for new and experienced Linux users; dramatically simplify and open the development and packaging processes to make openSUSE the platform of choice for Linux developers and software vendors.

About this development release

Stephan Kulow has announced the availability of the first development release of openSUSE 11.0: “We’d like to kick start the development of openSUSE 11.0 with releasing the current state of Factory as Alpha0 release. Since the release of 10.3, we checked in 2,187 packages including such fundamental package updates as GCC 4.3.0, Linux kernel 2.6.24-rc4, X.Org 7.3, KDE 3.5.8 and 4.0 RC1, CUPS 1.3.4, ALSA 1.0.15, GIMP 2.4 and YaST 2.16. The change between 10.3 and Alpha0 is big, but it still works pretty nicely. So please join the openSUSE 11.0 development in downloading, testing and using Alpha0 or daily updated Factory distribution. So far there are some glitches in the installation process that are mostly harmless. But the new kernel in particular can cause some regressions we would love to hear about those through Bugzilla.” See the release announcement for more information.

Via DistroWatch.com

The installation

openSUSE uses the YaST installer, which is quite similar to Anaconda, the installer used by RHEL, Fedora Core and CentOS. Unlike the tendency to use live cd based installers, like ubiquity, the Ubuntu installer, the openSUSE CD is just a plain installation CD, which provides a graphical interface by running YaST in a kernel framebuffer.

Enough with the the talk, look at the following screenshots and read the comments below them:

The boot screen…

Booting…

YaST is starting…

Media check…

It warns that it is a development version…

License Agreement…

Loading hardware modules…

Choosing installation mode.

Network setup…

I don’t get it, why it can’t install “add-on” software if I have only 256 MB RAM? Hmm, maybe “add-on” products = Compiz Fusion…

Time zone…

Keyboard layout - no Romanian…

Partitioning scheme…

Final system settings…

Waiting for a final confirmation…

Installation started, now you can’t go back…

Installing packages…

Still installing…

Almost done…

Finishing the base installation…

Rebooting…

Settings again - root password…

Hostname…

Network configuration…

Testing internet connection…

Internet connection: working…

Registration failing - why?

Authentication method: if authentification at Windows domains is working out of the box, openSUSE might be good choice for companies who want to gradually migrate from Microsoft solutions to free ones.

New local user. Automatic login was enable by default - I don’t like that.

Release notes…

Installation finally done.

Using it

GDM seems broken - at least for me it is not working.

Good old console. Trying the “startx” command…

And…. working - Hurray!

What? Floppy disk? I don’t have one. What does this button do?

The kernel…

Contents of the home directory. Pretty strange to have public_html in /etc/skel for a desktop installation.

Exploring the menu… It looks good, but it is not an example of good usability. There are just a few apps here. Update: But as Magnus Boman points out, you cand easily add or remove this applications.

Here we find all the apps. But, as I was saying, not the best usability. To open an application that’s not in the first menu, you need to click on “More applications” and that will open this independent launcher, which, in my opinion is also poorly designed. In many cases you also need to scroll a lot or use the left menu to jump to a certain section. But then you can add the certain app to the Applications menu.

Firefox is working OK.

The custom OpenOffice.org splash is pretty nice…

OpenOffice.org Writer is working…

I don’t use F-Spot, but as it was installed, I tried to launch it. Seems OK.

Evolution connected to my IMAP sever.

Tomboy Notes… another useful app, but I almost always forget about it when I want to note something

Now, things that don’t work

Liferea, an RSS reader crashes the first time I try to start it…

When I tried to open the update applet…

Totem offers to install the mp3 plugin…

Opens in Firefox a page from software.opensuse.org…

And when I try to install the package… another error.

YaST2 is working…

But you can’t run any of the modules.

It can’t mount or open the CD drive…

Because I was not running the X session via GDM, I the only option available from the Shutdown menu was Hibernate. Let’s see ii it works…

Nope, it just locked the screen…

Conclusion

This is a development version, so we should suppose that all the bugs I encountered here are going to be removed in the final version. The system itself, and most of the applications that are working are already quite stable. Considering this, openSUSE 11 is going to be a pretty good distribution. It has a big user base, recent versions for packages, some support from Novell, all the components are good integrated, there are nice GUIs for the most common settings, it is supposed to have good interoperability with Microsoft software.

On the other side, from my point of view it is bloated and inflexible. I’m used to edit config files from command line, install individual packages, etc. It may be a good choice for beginners or companies, but not for me.

Still searching for my perfect distro. Have a look at the poll to vote for the next distribution that I should review.

Now, what do I write this blog for? Well, since I started using GNU/Linux I wasn’t able to find a distribution to completely satisfy me. I had tested dozens of different Linux distributions, but everytime there seems to be something that annoys me. Well, I’m a perfectionist. I’m still searching for the perfect distro, but at the moment I’m using Arch Linux. The second reason would be that there are lots of good distros, but they are not known enough. I plan to review weekly a less know Linux distribution, but which seems to has a good potential. I’m probably going to periodically post some polls where you’ll be able to vote. I also plan to review alpha and beta releases of more known distros. I may also post news, but only if I read something really interesting. If news about linux distros is what you’re searching for, subscribe to DistroWatch.

The tests are going to be done in a VMware virtual machine running on my notebook (Dell Inspiron 1501 - Turion 64 MK-36 @ 2 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB Hitachi HDD @ 5400 rpms) unless otherwise expressed.