distros

I've been trying out a few distros to see what they offer.

MEPIS is in some ways like Kubuntu, a single CD debian derivative that uses KDE. It's not too clear from their website what their policy is with free or payed for downloads nor what the difference between SimplyMEPIS, ProMEPIS and other MEPISs is, but I tried the one with the newest timestamp. Graphics at boot is nice, although it's just text on top of a background image. Hopefully Kubuntu will have pretty boot splash breezy. Install is from a live CD environment, and works well although it doesn't ask for keyboard, language or timezone. Neither sound nor networking work as default. It was released in February but still uses XFree 4.3 and there's no HAL. The KDE desktop is cluttered by default and even runs KWeather by default. It uses Nuvola icons which are pretty but unlikely to be favoured in a business setting. Lots of applications are installed by default. MEPIS OS Centre has various configuration tools. Nice but the design is too much like KControl (hard to navigate tree structure) and integration with kcontrol would have been nice. There's a bunch of strange files in home directory by default. It uses Synaptic for the package manager which is understandable. For music playing there's no Juk or Amarok only XMMS. Finally they don't seem to care for legalities, it comes with java, mplayer, flash and a bunch of video codec .dll files in /usr/lib/win32/*. There's no sources available that I could find for their MEPIS OS Centre.

Arklinux didn't want to boot from the CD which is a shame, tried it at a slower speed and the MD5 sums matched. Burning CDs still isn't a prefect science.

SuSE worked quite well. I didn't take notes but I do mind that their k-menu and gnome menu uses the same applications.menu file which mesans gnome ends up with a lot of KDE icons. Good to see SuSE still KDE based :) Comes with flash, but no mp3 except as download. SuSE's live CD expects you to guess the default password. yast is still kinday big and clunky feeling (a technical description if there is one) but it does have printer detection which would be so nice to have built in to kdeprint or cups.

I also tried Linspire and actually liked it a lot more than I suspected I would. It does log you in as root which is daft for security and boot up froze my computer on loading some cpufreq module so I had to play around for ages to work out how to get grub to load with cpufreq=off. KDE and mozilla are rebranded to linspire quite uniformly (Help->About KDE is still there). Everaldo's artwork is really nice. It comes with networkdocklet, a panel applet to configure networking that works well, unfortunately it has no copying licence. It comes with flash, mp3, real and mplayer. It also comes with a bunch of cheesy flash intros to using your computer. First thing it asks you is a click through licence, then to set the volume, no language or keyboard settings (on the live CD). Lsongs is a clone of itunes that didn't work, lphoto is a photo manager which includes a tool labelled "Enhance" (so that's what the use in Holywood), they're both written in pykde and GPLed. It also comes with an AOL dialer which is handy for AOL types.

So on to click and run, Linspire's package manager. It's got a lot right that other package managers like yast and synaptic don't in that it's designed with applications not packages in mind. The Click and Run (CNR) application is a C++ Qt one which uses KHTML to show you this web page. The layout is a bit cluttered around the edges (because it's a web page) but the main part is a lot more easy to browse than with Synaptic or the like. I found the right hand tree of CNR too complex, trees tend to be so (see KControl) and I never quite worked out what the Aisles feature was ment to be but I guess it's for customised lists of applications (e.g. you have a personal aisle, there might also be an aisle taylored to graphical designers or teachers or whatever). Otherwise the software is sorted in much the same way as in the K-Menu. And then you click and it downloads it along with any updated packages you need. It's using some mixture of apt and kioslaves. Once downloaded there are buttons for adding to desktop and running the program. Being able to give a rating is nice, giving full reviews would be cooler. Being a web browser has some problems e.g. it doesn't give an error when there's no network, just keeps you waiting. It has two systray icons which seems a bit excessive, it also takes after Kynaptic in not having a Quit menu entry.