Fluxbuntu 7.10 RC review

What is Fluxbuntu?

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

Tags: alternative, fluxbuntu, lightweight