5 posts tagged “livecd”
When most users think of Linux... They think of a machine that's dull and lifeless to the eyes. No one really thinks that Linux can be pretty and the "definition" pretty computing would be Apple's OS X or Windows Vista. "Some say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is a classic proverb but in the world of operating system politics... Beauty can make or break your market pool of potential users. It's why Apple evolved from their roots to their current state of visual bliss. It's why Microsoft went from Windows XP's bubbly look was ditched in favor of Vista's cutting edge looks. The mainstream market would never begin to understand the beauty of Linux that the power of choice gives you the power to customize how your system can look. The default environment (depending on distribution) can be pretty or dull depending on the art team that did the concept artwork.
One distribution that has gotten a lot of intrigue has been Elive and the Enlightenment desktop (known as e16 or e17 depending on version). The folks over at the Enlightenment project have composed a unique philosophy. They figured why is eye candy and a pretty desktop only limited to just semi-modern machines... Why can't weaker machines look pretty too? The lowest runnable specifications for the Enlightenment desktop is:
"[...] 100 Mhz CPU, 64 MB of RAM"
quoted from the Enlighenment Development page "About E17" page
The teaser screenshots look great! I had to try it out... The only thing was the Elive slow server was down and being in debt, I can't spare to donate for pull from their fast server. I didn't have much choice but to rely on the users of Linux Tracker and pull the torrent from them. I don't blame the Elive team for wanting to earn a buck or two, but to help spread development, they should have another conduit serving up the ISO freely! So, even if you are curious (at the time being) you can't get a direct download for Elive unless you chip in a couple bucks for developments before you can get it. If you don't happen to like it, then you may feel that your money has been "squandered" and you have funded a project you may not support. If you go the Linux Tracker torrent path, then you're stuck on waiting for the seeder's bandwidth as the time frame before you can burn it to a CD-R yet. A slight disappointment on making it hard to get into the distro by a lack of venues or conduits just to get it. Make it easier to get in and more users will come, Elive team!
Well, after the torrent completed, I would burn and go... On booting the disc, I was greeted by a friendly GRUB screen with configuring boot options. The image is pleasing and soothing, but a bit lacking on the "wow" factor. After that, the next few screens were in a very ugly terminal style prompts to select configuration options. I feel that if that the Elive team could have did the prompts in a pretty GUI format. The few prompts were pretty simple...
The first prompt was what color mode I wished to boot in. This was interesting as I never thought that the Elive art team would give you a choice of what color scheme to boot in. The modes are Elive or Night. Elive is the bright colored theme with lots of gold bling all over and very inviting to the artistically inclined. Night is a theme that's intended to be a little easier on the eyes with a deep and intense experience. I do have screens of both towards the end of the review.
The next prompt was synaptics device detection saying it noticed my touch pad. Not much to get excited over there.
The next prompt was Intel graphics driver testing. I thought I that choosing the i915 module for my graphics was a good choice. After all, I have an Intel 915 graphics chipset it should work... Well, wrong. I'll get into that story. I will give the Elive team great recognition for having widescreen resolution choices built into this utility.
The last prompt is a text file reminding you to log in to the demonstration when the log-in prompt comes, to use the following information to log-in:
ID: eliveuser
Password: elive
This could have been done away with to get the user right into the experience. It's not too appealing for the eye candy fan to be stuck in terminal style prompts that are not pretty.
Remember why my graphics choices was wrong and soon to make my life a living hell? That choice broke X and I was stuck in command line prompts. Not a welcoming experience when that happens to the novice user. Now, I had to reboot the machine and I would end up choosing the "recommended" choice of the Intel i810 module for graphics and things would boot into X. This could be a little scary of an experience for the novice with proprietary graphics... If there was better checking for the proper modules to load, then there's less of a chance of someone breaking X and not logging into Enlightenment. I hope someone polishes this piece a little better.
Once the proper graphics are loaded... there are a few lines of terminal speaking verbose stating what is going on. Once you see "Becoming Entranced: Entrance" that's when you know that Enlightenment loads up. After plugging in the user info, you're dropped into the desktop. The boot sounds are terribly loud and if you're stuck with digital controls for sound, there's not really a way to bind multimedia keys to the operating systems so I personally felt it could have been done away with. Both desktops have animated wallpapers, which I thought was unique. The stars in both the Elive and Night wallpapers do twinkle, which I felt was killer! I was overjoyed to find my wireless worked from the start. No dirty hacks required!
The mechanism of the desktop is interesting. There is a application launcher on the bottom of the screen a simple click and it launches. I just wish they had something like a text to mention what the name of the icon was... On the bottom corner was a thermometer applet telling me how hot my processor is running and also a battery applet telling me how much battery power was left. The beauty of the desktop is that it's a wide open space and you're free to add other applets to your choosing to monitor other statistical data. The top right corner is your workspace switcher. It's nice as the other workspace fades out and you slip into the new workspace. A very showy effect! The oddest thing is that when you minimize applications, they iconify and show up on the desktop. On left clicking you get a main menu of applications, a window locator, a lost window locator (to find windows that have not been iconified but don't show up), standard shutdown and restarting of X commands. Alt-tabbing through applications became a bit unique... A menu pops up of which applications you can switch to. The ones that do have windows have an indicator in the alt-tab list and the mouse pointer shifts its position directly over the application. Iconified applications simply pop up if you alt-tab for them. This I found to be a bit snappy and to my liking. Restoring applications was a cinch! Just a simple click and the window returns! The windows use a GTK themer, but some of the windows look so dull while others look spectacular. A right click brings up an application menu to let you launch applications. Some apps, due to the lack of a Gnome tray notification area close when you hit the [x] to minimize them, which is a little thing to get used to. The right and left click menu almost reminds me of XFCE... but prettier, much more prettier and pleasing to the eye.
Software... It had quite a variety. Few games, lots of music and video apps, office productivity, and tech demos. The browser of choice was Iceweasel, but ironically, the icon is a Firefox icon... a bit of a mismatch there. XMMS has a sweet looking skin which makes it plenty cool. The tech demo's I want to touch over briefly on... They do have a QEmu demo so you can run a session of Elive within Elive, a cool idea but it makes little sense to run the same operating system twice in one instance while sharing the same LiveCD. It amazingly ran and with all the eye candy as well. That surprised and impressed me. There was also an Enlightenment embedded device demo, but after booting, it comes into a blank display and you can't do anything. A real disappointment and a buzz-kill. The last was just a demonstration of pure class. The multi-video out demonstration was wicked. It launches 5 mPlayer windows, one big window and 4 smaller ones by each corner. The video it was playing was the IBM commercial where various people are teaching a young boy many things and ends with an interesting set of lines:
So... What's his name?
His name is... Linux.
Then the commercial cuts out to the IBM logo. The reason this demo is remarkable to me is that all the videos were playing back in perfect synchronization. Not a single frame was behind. I remember in Windows I couldn't even do that as one application would flip out saying "The video is playing from another app!" A seriously cool demonstration right there.
My gripes with Elive are the configuration modules and the ease of adding or removing applications for the average user. The configuration modules bring up an odd techno-panel that makes more noise launching and closing than really needed. Not only that, they are a bit... Limited in scope. I really wished that the categories were a little more encompassing for the discriminating power users. If you want more applications, you have to navigate Synaptic Package manager to do any adding from the software repositories. There is also the option of using pre-packed .DEB files, but sadly, it's not simple like Ubuntu's Add/Remove menu or the Gentoo Portage system.
I like Elive but it does need a lot more work. They picked a good foundation to build it on Debian and Morphix, but to call it "Elive Gem, Luxury Linux" and a "Stable Release" is really stretching the truth a bit too far. "Luxury Linux" would be something that you aren't scouring around Synaptic for applications. The same goes for the words "Stable release" and clicking the "About Enlightenment" icon to see a note saying "This IS NOT STABLE!" in the disclaimer. Open up the gates, get everyone a chance to have fun and develop and Elive could really make a name for itself as one of the prettiest distributions without requiring hardware that would probably break the wallets of average consumers. Definitely a distribution to keep an eye out for and watch the evolution of the operating system to grow... IF they can open up distribution with hosting on their slow server or network the image to sponsored hosts rather than imposing a donation or having users circumvent things by hopping on a "non official" torrent as one Elive developer commented on the Linux Tracker posting of Elive Gem 1.0's torrent.
I am waiting on my Elive Gem 1.0 torrent to finish, so it'll be the next OS on the review block. The requirements are apparently very minimal but on faster and stronger machines, the beauty really shows from what many say. The screenshots look very appealing and show great promise, so I look forward to the download completion. The build and theory looks good on paper, but I am curious on two things which will determine whether my ride is gonna be bumpy or smooth for my review.
- Compatibility with my Intel Wireless Pro 2200 WLAN chipset
Internet being important, because I'd like to be able to access the web for patches, updates and fixes.
- Widescreen support
Nothing like a 1024 x 768 pixel resolution stretched on a 1200 x 800 screen to give a review a bad bias. I don't have a desktop to do a review from standard resolutions anymore.
I hope for the best and to do a comprehensive review.
From fighting with Zenwalk I'm at my limits... The drivers tricks don't seem to cut it for me and the lack of network connectivity via wireless is preventing me from installing the Intel 915 resolution packages. I really want to have Zenwalk work to do a comprehensive review on it, but it just doesn't seem like it's happening. I am somewhat at a loss as my parent's wireless router is not in the most accessible place where I can do a direct connect via LAN cable.
From booting the LiveCD, it's a pretty quick process. Though unfortunately, it is plagued with the log-in prompt on booting to the GDM Log-in manager.
Type 'one' to log-in
This could have been done away with as it isn't really intuitive to have the machine with a LiveCD to be waiting on the user to log-in. It's somewhat of a showstopper if you have to even log-in. Though in the manual, they say that the passcode of 'ZenLive' is required to do any root level privileges. The weird fact is that if you log in with the ID/password combination of ZenLive/ZenLive... all of the Thunar windows have a warning that you are the root super-user and to take care of what you do in Zenwalk. Maybe it's a personal thing, but I feel that a LiveCD shouldn't require passwords just to do simple things like install software to test out.
i have a fondness to how quick the system is. This is based on the fact that they use XFCE as the desktop environment and in combination with the principle of one-app-per-purpose. There are basic functionality applications installed and the presentation looks great (Zero's note: It would be far better if I could get proper widescreen resolution). It's not hard to see how Zenwalk gets its reputation as a quick but minimal distribution.
My big gripe is the lack of inclusion for the Intel Wireless Pro 2200 chipset for wireless networking. There is a claim saying that it's a proprietary driver that requires firmware to operate, yet there is a Sourceforge project that works and quite possibly implemented in distributions like Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora/Red Hat. If it was something like the inclusion of NDISwrapper, I could understand... but the last I remembered was Intel supported open source development! Maybe there's more to the picture that I don't understand... I hope to get some functionality up to retest out Zenwalk and do a much more substantial review.
If any Zenwalk users could shed some light it'd be appreciated... Searching through the forums for a solution is almost suicidal when my mind is pretty much exhausted.
So I burned a Zenwalk LiveCD earlier this week and I can't seem to get the wireless to connect on... According to Zenwalk wiki page about the Intel Wireless Pro 2200 chipsets (for machines equipped with Pentium Centrinos), the instructions say to extract the files to "/lib/firmware". I have done that, rebooted the X-Server with ctrl+alt+backspace and wi-fi radar still can't connect to my network. I have wi-fi radar set to the SSID of the network and automatic settings as well. What am I doing wrong? A forum post says to do the above and then run in terminal (as root): /sbin/modprobe ipw2200 which I may try another time.
The resolution is botched from the lack of the Intel 915resolution package. How would I go about obtaining this and getting it added to the system? The forums turn out nothing and it's boggling me...
If I can get these two issues out of the way, then I would like to press on and try to do a comprehensive review on Zenwalk LiveCD 4.4.1.
So I decided to go on a bit of a Linux distro testing "spree" this week so to speak... I figured "Why not see what else is out there? Can't be prejudice to the other distros as they all have their merits." I decided to run LiveCD tests as I no longer have a spare machine to randomly install and destroy partitions just for fun and the sake of reviewing. LiveCD's are a great thing... the ability to contain an entire basic frame work of an operating system. This is great for potential converters to test their hardware and make sure that compatibility will not be questioned.
Due to the size of this entry, I have decided to break it into separate posts.
I would use Alice's Sony Vaio to test out the first distro on review.
PCLinuxOS 2007
An American derivation of the French Mandriva project (formerly known as Mandrake Linux) has aims to simplify the Linux experience for the non-tech savvy user. After much refinement, their 2007 release has finally arrived to the general public after much polishing. Naturally, fascination would draw me into the project to see if it was worth keeping in my repertoire of great Linux distros. After a few hours of downloading through http sources, I would burn the ISO and begin testing on Alice's machine.
On boot-up, PCLinuxOS loads up a log-in screen that has the following message on the top left corner:
To me, I feel that this could have been avoided. The point of a great LiveCD is the ability to get into the OS in one shot and begin to play! So I have to dock a bit of my appreciation for PCLinuxOS on that part. I will say that the KDE User Log-in screen is quite well done in a sharp and presentable style. Presentation is always a good as it should appeal to the user. But enough on the log-in screen...To log in as root, use the password: root
To log in as demo, use the password: demo
The next step is internet configuration. This step honestly was not something I was expecting. It's a simple dialog that asks the user "Which method do you use to connect to the internet?" From there, the user picks which one their computer uses. For Alice's machine, she uses a Buffalo WLI-USB-54G adapter which was detected by PCLinuxOS. The only problem was that her adapter used a proprietary driver, but this is where I was impressed the most... PCLinuxOS loads the NDISwrapper module to find the Windows driver for the USB wifi dongle. At the time, I did not have the driver on me, so unfortunately, I could not test this feature... I will definitely revisit this when I get another chance to play on her PC
The KDE splash screen mentioning which modules are loading is actually well thought out. There's a string of text telling you what module is loading, while on the bottom are gray spheres that glow softly in blue as a percentage marker of the loading procedures. The splash screen encompasses the entire screen very well, unlike the default KDE small splash screen just displaying icons of the load procedures. After the processes finish, you are dropped into a very simple but sophisticated looking form of KDE. There aren't too many applications to play with unfortunately, but that may have been due to me lacking an internet connection to really let loose and do downloads or play with the package manager. The system is nice and robust for being unique to try offering a user friendly experience.
I will definitely be revisiting PCLinuxOS 2007, but for now, it has earned its spot in my Linux distro wallet.
