Lycoris Build 50 is a brand new beta release that has hit the mirrors. There is already a forum for bug reporting, created for this beta release.
Lycoris Build-50b Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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It would be nice if they could get more people working on this. The last beta I tried did not look too different from the one I used about 5 months ago. Fonts still suck, and basically screws up the browsing experience. That alone will turn off a whole lot of users. Also, icons and stuff look somewhat timid and amateurish. Definitely far from solid.
On the positive, the menu system is organised, very friendly, clean and elegant. Mandrake and Redhat should definitely borrow a leaf there. The video setting menu is too complicated though. Too many different options for almost every little thing. Why not consolidate all of those into one video applet? instead of the current four or five? And people are used to it.
Looks like Lycoris still uses a heavily modified version of KDE2. They should start switching to KDE3.
But, is KDE3 faster than KDE2?
> But, is KDE3 faster than KDE2?
One thing is for sure. New computers are faster than last year’s. 😉
KDE 3.1 beta has alpha-blending support. That alone is worth switching from KDE2. KDE3 is based on Qt3.x, which is so much better than Qt2.x.
Lycoris’ *really* big updates are marked by gemstone names. They’re still on Amethyst and I think the next is Beryl? I bet that’s when KDe 3 comes in.
You’re right, Jay.
I can hardly wait until Lycoris starts shipping with KDE3, it’s a LOT better than KDE2. Lycoris is by far the best newbie distro for people migrating from Windows, and it can only get better from here.
i was spoiled too much by kde3, couldn’t go back to the older k3b also. that’s another good reason to upgrade…
I still enjoy using IceWM primarily.
KDE 3.0.2 BETA TEST 2 for Lycoris is available. For those of you who have Lycoris and want to try it out (I haven’t), you can download it here:
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/contrib/texstar/Lyco…
Be sure to read the Installation Instructions before proceding.
Between Lindows and Lycoris: which one is better in installation and overall user experience?
Between Lindows and Lycoris: which one is better in installation and overall user experience?
Lycoris is.
The only negative thing I found while looking at Lycoris was it doesn’t support the dvorak keyboard during setup (it uses Caldera’s Lizard install tool. Caldera also doesn’t support dvorak). This is a non-issues for 99% of the users in the world, but really pisses me off.
Lindows is a company with no direction and a product that has yet to recieve one good review (At least that I’ve seen).
Lycoris is a company dedicated to simplifying Linux on the desktop and furthering overall the success of Linux and various other OSS projects.
While Lindows may throw money around at various projects, and act like a good guy, all they want is money, and it’s pretty obvious.
Lycoris!! <g>
Still having fun with my SuSE 8 … just installing TTF fonts and configuring exclude ranges for anti-aliasing could be a bit easier. I had to do that manually, and it took me hours to figure it out. Mounting Windows shares during boot-up was was really hard to do, too – forgive me, I’m a complete newbie.
Ah, I can’t help but say again how surprised I am by how far the Linux platform has come. KDE3 is a neat desktop, I write my mail in KMail (with PGP 6.5.8 intregration), websites in NEdit, letters in KOffice … I surf the Web using MoZilla and the IRCnet using X-Chat … I can even run critical Windows apps like LightWave and Rhino. I’m very impressed. Looks like I only need XP to play a game once in a while. Ok, and a good graphical FTP client would be nice, too.
Overall, I have a very optimistic feeling. How can people say Linux on the desktop is dead? Because it doesn’t have 10% market share? Well, who cares? I can do almost everything I want to with it – and I’m no IT pro. Just keep developing those applications, because they will sell the system. Also, there’s a highly open, active and intelligent community surrounding Linux. Makes me feel all warm inside. 😉
“Between Lindows and Lycoris: which one is better in installation and overall user experience?”
Xandros
Lick-horse almost passes my usability standards:
A. Everything can be configured from the GUI (It’s 2k2 guys, the console should be a last resort)
B. Installing additonal apps should be a no-brainer (i.e. BeOS software valet, Debian and Windows)
Requirement B is still a problem.. but I don’t blame Lycoris.. blame it on the programmer who says “it installs just fine on my distro” and leaves it at that.
I think Xandros fulfills everything in Herbert Gone’s post. You can configure everything from the gui and it’s debian based.
i didn’t like the overly simple lycoris install. i couldn’t decide what i was installing. i guess they want to take the bad from XP, along with the good, “ease of use.”
i didn’t find the simple installation troubling at all, especially since desktop/lx doesn’t exactly come with many applications anyway
chad, they make it that way on purpose – it’s meant for newbies.
Why Xandros? I didn’t many web sites comparing Lycoris, Lindows and Xandros. any URLs people?
I’m running Lycoris build 46 and KDE3 from Texstar, and it’s a great combination (once you fool around a bit to get things the way you want ’em). It pretty much does everything Lycoris does with KDE2, but so much prettier…
Still, I’m looking forward to Xandros — which supposedly will release on September 30 (according to xandros.org today). I await it because I want to use apt get.
That said, the tweaked version of RPM that Lycoris uses does make installation of Lycoris RPMs a -really- simple task under the proper KDE2 version (not so for uninstallation).
Because from the screen shots I’ve seen, it reminds me on more like using Windows, I haven’t used Xandros so this my general opinion. OSNews posted a screen shot from Xandros. I was quite impressed from what I saw. Nice and clean interface, professional looking, just like Windows. Also, I keep reading the configuration is done in 100% GUI environment, I don’t have any links so I am sorry. I could be wrong about all this so time will tell. I will definitely give Xandros a try. I don’t know about Lycoris or Elx…Xandros’s desktop looks like they are not using KDE at all, well that’s how it looks to me
Looks similar to Windows. Nice, clean and professional.
I tried to get a copy of lycoris, and to be brief Fry’s sucks. Needed an OS that day for a laptop, and my brother wanted to try linux based, so we got red hat 7.3. I have to say, I hate the install, it is anti-intuitive and the graphical install will allow you to skip steps that are critical, i.e. entering usernames and passwords, so I got to install it twice. Also, instructions weren’t especially helpful for the installation. Once it was installed from what little I did use it, I was fairly pleased. In about an hour I had it hooked up to the internet via ethernet, even though my pcmcia ethernet card was not listed in the devices. I also got it connected to red hats download site to update itself, but had to head back home before it finished. From this experience I would say most typical pc users would discard red hat, demand their money back and probably not try linux again. I am hoping that a distrobution exists that is eaiser/has better explanations of how to install, and hopefully a simpler LAN browser. Lycoris is supposed to be ‘easy’ to network to windows and have friendly GUI LAN browser built in. I tried to configure LISA in red hat, but it said something about typing in commands at the boot. Not having used linux ever before, that meant basically nothing to me. I would have tried to fiddle with it, but I didn’t have time then. Can anyone tell me what is the best distrobution as far as networking, with windows PC’s. Also, which is easiest to install on a dual boot system. Red hat isn’t clear to me at all how to do this. I wanted to install it on an unformatted 10GB partition, but I keep getting messages saying my root is under 250Mb after I set it to 2000MB, and it won’t allocate any other partitions after the root, I just get error messages.