If you are new to open source software, then please check here, here, here, and here. Today I'd like to look at Austrumi 1.5.1 a Latvian business card sized distro, much in the vein of Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux. And after using LinuxConsole a bit more since yesterday's review, I have a couple more observations on that front.
When first booting into Austrumi, one is struck by the speed of the start up; in this test (under vmware) I allocated more than enough ram (256M) than is called for by the developers (64M), so that was no real surprise. Also, since it is a Latvian distro, the first thing you will need to do is to switch the language to English.
This is done by choosing the far top left drop menu, going to the fourth item in the list (represented by a small checkerboard) named lsatjumie, then choosing valodas (represented by a green and yellow symbol, near the bottom of the list of items), which brings up a number of flags representing Germany, England, Russia, and one other I forget.
Once you have done this, you need to go to the top far right symbol of two computers (the typical network icon), right-clicking will being up a menu that says 'configure'. An ncurses menu pops up, asking if you are on a static IP address or using dhcp to assign your IP address. Once set, you are immediately connected to the internet.
The desktop is clearly laid out for you, with a number of familiar icons to choose from: Firefox, Email, Terminal, all in the top menu for easy access. Upon choosing Firefox, there was a small delay in its launching, then I was on CNN's home page, voting on the 'commute--right or wrong' poll; a quick trip to youtube went well, confirming that Flash is configured, and a visit to an mp3 site asked what I wanted to do with the file, the default option being to save to disk (declined that--it's Piracy!!!); there were no other clear options, such as launch in mplayer, so points off for having to search for a player for streaming. Never did find one, but undoubtedly the option to play mp3s is ready out of the box, as is Flash.
Nice desktop background, Flash and music ready to go, but no clear way (outside of using Google) to change the languages, light (49M) and speedy--a fine choice if you are from a Eastern European country, but no great shakes when compared to PuppyLinux or Damn Small Linux.
A couple more observations on LinuxConsole: the modular approach that LC uses to load only what is needed into memory the programs that are needed is novel indeed; yesterday I did an install before surfing the net, and was able to check out all the 'out of the box'-ness no problem; later, without installing, none of those things worked. This could turn out to be a nice feature if you are on the road at an internet cafe, or using a friend's computer.
I'm not certain that LinuxConsole was developed with the idea of installing it; it seems to work so well as a liveCD that there really would be no point--and in the case of saving data, you could just plug in a cheap USB device and save it there. After having taken a closer look at LinuxConsole, and comparing it in further detail to Wolvix, I'd have to give it to Wolvix as the best choice for installing to an older computer.
Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 2 is out (Ubuntu Alpha 2), and not really noteworthy at this point; nothing different from Feisty (so far), though that will undoubtedly change when it gets into Beta stage and closer to final release in a month or two. Faster start up time and shut down time were the only significant changes I saw while looking at in vmware.
OpenSuse 10.3 Alpha 5 has also been released, and I expect will be significantly different; I'll look at that in a day or two, as well as DesktopBSD 1.6, another user-friendly graphically installable version of FreeBSD, and Gentoo 2007, which purportedly comes with an installer (??!). Though this is the off-season for distro releases, lots of smaller distributions are constantly releasing new versions, and those are some of the most interesting to check out.
Perhaps the most eagerly awaited development (at least for me) is the release of the Alpha version of a liveCD of PC-BSD 1.4; though it is only the first Alpha release, and there is currently no option to install, it is based on the latest version of FreeBSD (6.2), and if the quality of PC-BSD 1.3 is anything to go by, will be a superb finished product when its final version rolls out later this summer. You can check some of the installables available for PC-BSD at this address; click on the downloaded file, and it launches an install wizard. I know I've already reviewed this, but rest assured that when I get my hands on this new version I will be installing it as soon as possible. I may write about it, too; who knows.