OSNews

The installer sucks! For a new install (ie, New PC with nothing on the hard drive) it's ok, bur for those of use with multiple disks, and/or multiple partitions, the install's a real "nail biter"!

Rather than offer the user a chance to pick, and/or format a partition, Ark allows one to either designate an entire drive for Ark, Install to any unused space on the drive, which doesn't provide the ability to choose which drive, or you can choose to install parrelel(SP) to a Windows install.

Unfortunately the parallel install locks up when chosen (at least as of alpha 7), so in order to install, one must delete the partition you want Ark installed on, and then hope that Arks install process catches it. Not a good start to the OS.

The OS itself is unique in that they get around the need for Super Users by making the root account pass-wordless, and assigning rights to each user (arklinux by default). Thus a user with sufficient privileges types "su", and voila, they're root! No password needed.

They seem to think that this "workaround" isn't a security risk since Ark's not running any servers (and yet Distro watch shows mySQL and apache as being components of Ark -I didn't check myself to see if they were there). Either way, I don't like the idea of security compromises, nor do I like the fact that you have to throw away all of your Linux common sense when using Ark.

Their package management was fairly straight forward, and their ISO of "additional apps" installed ok, although both tend to be handled rather poorly (You can't easily install the apps from the CD with your package manager. Instead you must run an install script off the CD and choose from the resulting menu).

KDE 3.1's very nice, but it's available with most distributions now. Nothing special here. Also, it appears that Ark's carried over at least some of Redhats "tweaks" which means that items such as Mosfets Liquid will not run on Ark without some moving of files (At least for me it wouldn't compile straight out of the box).

The installed apps are ok, but they don't make it too clear how to install additional software for the system. Yes, you can compile it (duh!), but they claim that Ark's built off a Redhat 6/7 base. That would indicate that Redhat 7 RPMs should be acceptable for installing, but they don't come out and clarify that.

Also, the Ark website leaves a LOT to be desired. It's very amateurish (not nearly as bad as the Sorcerer Linux site though!). Information's very sparse, and Support/FAQ page is a joke.

I do like the fact that Ark's optimized for modern processors, but in general their take on what the public wants out of Linux is definitely not what I want...

Performance wasn't any better than Mandrake and Redhats latest (both of whom have made changes to the KDE system which breaks many 3rd party apps), and like those two, Ark includes glibc 2.3.2, which breaks many existing apps (Wine being the biggest one for me!).

In short, I see a couple of good ideas with Ark (i686 optimized. woohoo!), but a whole lot of bad ideas and poor implentations. I would also have built my distro off a better implementation of OSS standards. A slackware base ala Vector Linux (Very nice!) or Yoper (Nice distro, but poor management and relations with users!) would be preferable to a pre-bastardized base ala Mandrake/Redhat.
KDE is Ark's strongest point, but it's also available for virtually every other platform.

If you don't mind said customizations, go with Redhat or Mandrake's latest. You'll get equal performance, better support, and a wealth of software already optimized for your system.