If you choose to open Konsole you find you're logged in as Arklinux. I had assumed the system had logged me in as root, another Microsoft-like choice some distributions aiming for this market have made in the past. I was happy to see things were a little safer than that. My happiness was short-lived, however: as soon as I typed in "su," the prompt identified me as root. No password required. The wisdom of that choice is a personal judgment call, and the Ark FAQ notes that the Ark team considers it a perfectly fine option for home users. Enabling passwords and setting up new accounts is easily accomplished using the Mission Control-KDE Control Center connection.
Personally, whether it's a security risk or not, I think every user should be made to type in a password before getting root privileges. It reinforces the serious nature of the change in status being root represents. Those converting from Windows could probably use the reminder. Then again, they might not be converting to be told what to do with their computers.
Most of what the typical user will need is in Mission Control in any event. I had no internet connection upon boot, but clicking a few times past the Internet and Networking panel started up DHCP. I ran through the hardware control panels and found that Ark had correctly identified my video card. A quick search at any Linux forum will turn up evidence that getting a fairly recent ATI card configured can be a daunting task in many distributions. Likewise with the Serial ATA drive. It showed up in QTParted as /dev/sda (because the 2.4 kernel sees SATA drives as SCSI), with all the partitions correctly identified, though not mounted.
I had less luck with my USB thumb drive. It caused an icon to pop up on my desktop, but it was a CD icon, and it was quickly followed by a message that the system couldn't mount this new CD writer I'd just hotplugged in. This configuration error resisted casual tinkering. Three days later the icon is still on my desktop, even though the drive is no longer plugged in (I don't have KDE set to display unmounted drives on the dekstop). Odd, but on the plus side, this is much further than I've ever gotten with Slackware and the USB drive.
Ark had an easier time with my Canon camera and printer, as well as my Wacom tablet. The proper icon appeared for the camera, and a single click brought up a Konqueror window. The JPG and AVI files on the camera displayed and played without complaint. The Wacom tablet was a simple plug-and-play experience. Another trip to Mission Control made adding my printer as simple as selecting it from a list.
That was the essential nature of adding software as well. Ark installed 563 packages on my system (by its count), using more than 2 GB of space. To get more programs I went to Mission Control, which brought up Synaptic, a nice front end to apt-get. It connects to the Ark software repository, and offers you several filters and many categories. I installed Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird using this system. It identified and installed a library dependency and added the appropriate entries to my KDE menu.
One piece of software not on the Synaptic menu was Rox, my preferred file manager. I downloaded the Red Hat RPMs from the Rox site to see if they would work. Synaptic didn't seem to offer the option of installing from the hard drive, so I chose the advanced software management option in Mission Control, which brought up KPackage. This installed both RPMs (Rox and the Shared Mime Info), though I was forced to download the Rox RPM again. KPackage complained about the package (didn't note the exact error). I downloaded it again, using a different link, and it worked fine. I don't know if the packages were slightly different despite having the same file name, or if the first had been corrupt.
Having successfully added programs two different ways, I turned to the distribution upgrade. This is also done via Synaptic. Hit the "Upgrade System" icon on the tool bar and Synaptic walks you through listing, queueing and installing all available upgrades. The system identified 157 packages that needed upgrading. That took more than a few minutes, but no user intervention once set in motion. Once that finished I had 569 of the 1579 packages listed by Synaptic. While many upgrades were listed, the only one that seemed a significant upgrade was the GIMP, which was bumped up to 2.0-pre1. That, along with Open Office 1.1, Scribus, Xine and the usual array of KDE applications and makes for a well-rounded system able to handle pretty much any user task.
Because I planned to write this review of the experience, I went a step further and decided to upgrade the kernel via Synaptic. Ark installed kernel 2.4.23-2ark, and it was working smoothly, so most users will simply keep it. Synaptic listed 2.6.1 as an option, so I had it download and install the newer kernel. It booted with some error messages about hotplug files and a failure to get my USB mouse and keyboard to work. I don't have a USB mouse, so I wasn't too surprised when my cursor was stuck in the middle of the screen (it's a candy-apple red cursor, so it's hard to miss). I got around the system using the keyboard enough to prove to myself that the system itself was working, then put the 2.6 kernel upgrade process on the "still alpha" side of Ark's ledger.
The rest of the system seems out of alpha and at least into a later beta. Open Office behaved as expected, as did the K-named programs I tested. There is such a wide array of programs I have only been able to test a couple in each category, but those I did test performed well.
In you read OSNews' last Ark review (from March of 2003), the author noted a couple of problems the Ark team seems to have fixed. Screen redraws are fine, and window-dragging leaves behind no oddities or artifacts. Another complaint was font rendering. The selection of fonts now seems much wider than the average Linux distribution. The two font sources I haven't seen in Linux before are Larabie fonts and Macromedia. It reminded me of my Mac days to see font names such as Chinese Rocks, Goodfish, Chevara and Squealer alongside the more familiar Luxi, Bitstream Vera and Nimbus. Font rendering is uniformly good.
Overall, Ark Linux seems to be a few configuration details away from being solid success. I think the Ark team is being modest calling it an alpha release. Despite a few problems the system is stable and suprisingly fast. I'm not sure it's as snappy as Slackware, but it certainly feels snappier than the last Red Hat 9.0 installation I had on the same machine (though to be fair, I ran Ximian Gnome exclusively on that installation).
To sum up, Ark has a very smooth installer, an excellent control panel set up, an easy software management system and an array of programs that covers all the basic computing needs and a few not-so-basic needs. KDE is well configured, speedy and looks as good as any other KDE I've seen.
The few negatives I encountered -- the sound problem, the misidentified USB drive and the kernel-upgrade mouse failure -- are understandable in an alpha-branded release and would seem to be problems the Ark team could fix before declaring the distribution ready for release. Once those details are fixed I believe Ark will have earned a place in the first rank of the perennially recommended newbie-friendly distributions, Mandrake, Suse and Red Hat (Fedora). I've found it to be speedy, stable and very easy to use.
- "Ark review, Page 1"
- "Ark review, Page 2"
