Ferrix
9/9/05 12:44:25 PM
Overlord
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Total control is lovely, to be sure. Yet lately I've been tired of configuring all these little things that need to be done to turn a fresh installation into comfortable home, so I started looking at distros that come pre-configured out of the box, yeah, including all plugins and codecs, US laws and their lawyers be damned! I look at this as an act of civil disobedience, which I consider to be a duty of any good citizen... anyhow, I've been playing with two such distros: aLinux 12.5 http://www.alinux.org and Ultima 4, http://ultima-inet.kicks-ass.org . aLinux used to be called Peanut, and it has been around for quite a while. Ultima is brand new - well, apparently there was an earlier version, but this is the first one that gets a wide public release. They are both small, highly individual one-person projects; inevitably they will not suit everyone's tastes. But that is one of the things that attract me to distros like these.
Installation
Well, I have to say, neither of them shines in this regard. I consider the installer used by aLinux to be one of the worst I've ever used, confusing and odd - I've installed a great many distros over the years, yet this one presents a challenge for me. BTW, it gives an option of formatting your partitions as reiserfs4 - do yourself a favour, don't try it. It won't work! Still, I battled through it, and got it done. Naturally, I had to tweak xorg.conf by hand to get proper refresh rates and scroll wheel... As for Ultima, it is based very closely on Slackware, and the installation closely follows Slackware as well. Ultima made no effort to configure xorg.conf at all, leaving me to modify the sample file - I had to change refresh rates, of course, add ZaxisMapping entry for the mouse, and to change drivers from default vesa to nv... New user would be very confused at this point!
In use
I was grumbling a bit during the installation of both, but things got better from that point on. Peanut used to be notable for using Enlightenment as their desktop of choice, but alinux now uses KDE. It is KDE loaded to the gills with all sorts of candy; *loads* of fonts are available, there are pretty pictures of iconified apps in the pager, colourful backgrounds... you'll either love it, or run screaming! But it certainly makes change from the default KDE configuration.
Ultima sticks to the more conventional Slackware ethos of not messing with upstream packages, except for adding one odd combination: KDE + Enlightenment as window manager. Martin, the creator of Ultima, seems very fond of it but I must admit it isn't my cup of tea - I tried it, but I quickly switched to plain KDE. Ultima also provides Enlightenment (e16), Fluxbox, Xfce and Windowmaker, if you prefer. Firefox and Thunderbird are there on Ultima, while aLinux sticks to Mozilla only - another of its little idiosyncracies. Another one is aLinux use of Xitami web/ftp server rather than more common Apache. And speaking of services, aLinux turns the whole lot on: Xitami, mldonkey, MySQL... they are all running, and turning them off requires hunting through config files because there is no central point to manage services either (it doesn't have to be pretty GUI - something like 'services' command found on Red Hat based systems would suit me just fine) Ultima, like Slackware, is a lot more restrained in this regard: if you don't turn it on, it isn't running!
Ultima is delightfully old fashioned, or maybe it's just the side-effect of sticking to Slackware closely - but it uses kernel 2.4.31, no Alsa, and remember when you had to append scsi emulation in your Lilo to make cd burning happen? Well, with Ultima, you still do! alinux uses more modern 2.6.x series of kernels, matched with Alsa. Still, I don't care that much what provides my sound, as long as it works! It did, in both... once I turned the mixers up. (What is it with making mute the default setting?!?) Flash - check. Java - check. Mplayer plugin - check, on aLinux. Open Office - on Ultima yes, aLinux uses KOffice. Martin seems to like Tex, so there is a lot of that stuff available on Ultima. He also claims Ultima has 'excellent wireless support' - something I can't verify because I'm still stuck with wires :)
Finally, Ultima provides development packages out of the box, while on aLinux they have to be downloaded separately. And you'd want to, even if you're not planning on doing any compiling, because tools for setting time zone are a part of gcc suite! Alinux uses Synaptic/rpm combo; Ultima follows Slackware in this regard, though it offers its own toool called ulupdate which will update the system. But as far as I can see it can not be used to install or remove packages, so it is not a complete package management solution in the sense Synaptic is.
(Non conclusive) Conclusion
Well, both do provide a fairly complete desktops out of the box - once you get them to install! Ultima, being so closely based on Slackware, appears to be rock-solid. alinux on the other hand is a really odd bird indeed, as it always has been. In a way, there is a lot wrong with it, yet I must admit I like it very much all the same... As always, it's the case of seeing whether they fit your needs - but even if you don't use them, it's nice to know they are there.
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Linux - I'm only in it for the chicks.
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