Today I’d like to look at the newest release from the geniuses down in Brazil who show how to put together a wonderful Linux distribution with everything enabled out of the box in a very lightweight package.

DreamLinux 2.2MMGL uses the Xfce4 window manager, and as the letters MM indicate, this is a Linux distribution (also commonly referred to as a distro) that has multimedia capabilities ready to go, both in the liveCD and in the full install.

I initially tried this out in vmware-server; after about two minutes I knew I had to burn the ISO to disk and install it on my test machine–it is that good.

The installer is very easy to work with; you go to system (top left menu) and click on DreamLinux Installer, and are then greeted with a single large menu that is divided into three sections: the top section is the user, root info, with the added plus of being able to create as many users as you want from the get-go; the central section allows you to specify which partitions you want to install onto, and what file systems you wish to use via a left-click drop down menu, and the bottom section allows you to install GRUB on the MBR, on the boot partition, on an existing GRUB, or not at all–the third option was especially helpful as I already (as noted above) had Wolvix installed on the first partition.

If you are going to dual boot your machine with DreamLinux, then best install the other Linux first, preferably using GParted to partition the whole shebang ahead of time–DreamLinux comes with Qparted and cfdisk, neither of which are very intuitive or easy to use, so spare yourself the hassle and use GParted. And the bit about installing on an existing GRUB is really a boon as well–no editing text files by hand (in this case the grub.conf file).

Since Wolvix comes with GParted as its default disk partitioner, I rebooted into Wolvix and partitioned the sections for DreamLinux, then rebooted into the DreamLinux installer disk; it was all the work of a few minutes, and then I was ready to install. GParted also comes as an ISO disk that you can burn, so if you don’t plan on doing it the way I did, you can always go that route.

The installation was fairly rapid, and then I was rebooting into a nice dark blue Xfce4 window environment; the DreamLinux desktop is really decked out from the get-go, with all the media apps already set up in a virtual clone of the Mac OS X dock, complete with the magnification effect when you mouse over the various items. Very nifty, and for such a slow machine, a nice bit of the shiny. Fluxbox is the other window manager installed.

The test machine I installed it on has a really archaic ATI Radeon card (340M), and normally I just go with the vesa (generic) drivers; snooping around in the DreamLinux control panel (DCP-panel or some such) and I found something labeled displays–by entering the name of my card, and answering a few other questions about Xorg, the keyboard, automatic monitor recognition and the like, I soon had the best graphics I have ever seen this card display–truly amazing.

As it’s built on top of Debian Etch, downloading updates are done through apt-get in the command line, or through the Synaptic Package manager (much the same as in Ubuntu); additionally, there are repository mirrors spread throughout the world, so updating and upgrading are truly minor affairs. After installing the initial system, I started up Synaptic, and while checking out the repositories that are enabled, I noticed that all the non-free ones had been set up–no need to add repositories.

The choice of packages included in the initial install mean that you can set up this for someone who has slow or even no internet connection and it is ready to go right off the bat; this is the multimedia box bar none. The very best apps for playing videos, music, ripping, burning, streaming mp3 server, mixing, it’s all there.

The only tiny complaint I have is that when the boot screen comes up, it hangs for a short moment as it negotiates an internet connection, but considering that I’m likely to leave this machine running with some speakers hooked up to it to serve as my media player, it’s really almost not worth mentioning. (Edit: Another older review, this is still one of the nicest lightweight distros out there–highly recommended)

Wolvix is a lightweight distro based on Slackware and Linux-Live scripts; in actual fact, there are two releases, Wolvix Cub (243M) and Wolvix Hunter (482M). I downloaded the Hunter ISO and burned it to disk, then took it for a spin on my test machine.

Wolvix uses the XFCE4 desktop environment, with an option to switch to Fluxbox if so desired. Naturally you can add KDE or GNOME if you wish, though that makes little sense in such a minimalist distro.

As a liveCD it runs tremendously fast, and once installed it almost literally flies. And it’s not some bare bones install, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

As mentioned above, Wolvix Hunter is an excellent liveCD that can be run from ram, from the CD, or installed to your computer’s hard drive. After trying out the liveCD, I decided to install it to my hard drive.

The installer is located inside the Wolvix control panel, and there are several choices listed there: Full Install, Frugal Install, Install to USB Key, and GRUB install.

On choosing Full Install, one is greeted with a warning that this an experimental option, and installing from a liveCD is still not a finished product (or words to that effect) and the buyer should beware (again, my description).

The Full Install screen has dropdown menus where one can choose the swap file, the (optional) home directory, the boot partition, the file system, and a box to check whether you want to install GRUB. There is also a button that says ‘use Gparted?’, which I immediately clicked.

On launching Gparted, a tutorial window opens up, advising you on the various sizes you need to set for the partitions; I kept it open as I unmounted the drive and created them, occasionally checking the helper window.

Once finished in Gparted, I went back to the Full Install window and chose the various places for swap file, home directory, boot partition, and GRUB install, as well as noting the file system I wanted. I then clicked install.

The installation went without a hitch and was finished in around ten minutes. The start up was very fast after installation, from pushing the computer on button to being in the desktop took less than thirty seconds. Quite impressive.

Once in the newly installed system, I went back to the Wolvix Control Panel and added a user (myself), was prompted to add a password and verify it, then changed the root password, the default being ‘toor’, likely not the most secure of passwords.

Still in the control panel, I set the time zone and adjusted the clock, set up the firewall, and then closed it all down, seeing how the new system would run on the internet.

Firefox is included in the full install, as are all the media codecs for that out of the box experience; Open Office suite, Abiword, Gnumeric, Gnucash, several excellent games I’d never seen before (Xgalaga), wifi connection tools, really too numerous to list. This Hunter comes loaded for bear.

Using the lightweight window manager XFCE4 and only requiring 1.5G hard drive space for the full install (and it’s packed with goodies), plus the fact that it’s Slackware based with the Gslapt front end package manager (Ubuntu users know Synaptic, this is very similar) and you can use this on virtually any computer made in the last decade or so, provided you have sufficient ram; my guess would be that 256 would do it, though the Wolvix developers or forums could give you more precise information on that score. (Edit: This was initially written when Wolvix was at RC1 stage–it is now final release.)

At PC-BSD; an excerpt:

BSD has the reputation of being the most geeky OS, simply because it’ s rarely used by average users. The reason is that the average think its too complicated, which IMHO is far from the truth. The only thing with any OS is, that if you want to use all of its power, it takes some learning curve, no exclusions.

Read the whole thing. Link found via Tuxmachines and PC-BSD home page.

There’s a new poll up asking ‘What’s the best Linux distro for new users?’; please take a moment and answer–I’ll try to do a write up on the winner. Cheers!

This sounds disturbing and fascinating at the same time:

Imagine an OS that keeps all its information online, so you can use a live CD as easily as a full installation. When you start up a newly-installed computer, or visit a friend’s house, your whole environment will be waiting for you, with no setup to redo. For the techies, think Stateless Linux Desktop; your files and settings are somewhere else.

Already 100% incorporated in Fedora 8, and much as I enjoyed Fedora 7–didn’t dyne:bolic do this ages ago with their ‘nesting’ to a USB thumb drive? Do we really need to trust all our online information to the following group: “Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Firefox, Salesforce.com, and countless other organizations“? Yikes. But cool.

If anything should ever be GPLv3, then this is it. And Freeware, no less. Oh, the horror.

From commenter (commentator?) EmyrB  (thanks!) there’s this most excellent of links: Thirty Days with PC-BSD.  An interesting look at some of the more technical aspects of a PC-BSD install.

One of the downsides of downloading, burning and trying out various Linux distributions is the high fail rate when making an ISO (installer) disk; sometimes it’s due to choosing too high of a burn speed, other times to faulty media, and on occasion to a bad download. This should not be confused, however, with certain distros not booting properly on your machine–not every single distro will work properly on every box out there–I’ve had a huge problem with Zenwalk and Slax distros getting going on my machines. They run fine in a virtual machine, so the problem is not the ISO file–just a certain configuration of hardware that is not friendly to those two.

The release candidate two (RC2) of KDE version of Mandriva ‘One’ is out; the difference between the ‘One’ and ‘Free’ versions is that the ‘One’ version contains all the proprietary goodies out of the box–things that allow you to play mp3s, watch DVDs, see youtube vids (Flash sites), and so on. It’s a liveCD and an installable CD at the same time. Edit: My bad. This is the same release of several days ago; just saw it new on LinuxTracker (uploaded today), and assumed it was a newer release. Mea Culpa.

This is a seriously fun post on how to install Gutsy Gibbon; a snippet:

1. “First, insert the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 CD into your cup holder.”

2. “Press the power button on your computer, and hold it until it shuts off.”

3. “Good. Now press the power button again.”

4. “We’re going to see some white on black text fly by, please don’t read it to me.”

I wish my installer had speeds like that.