“Ralph Glanz told me about Redmond Linux around the time that he first became interested in it, just after he and I had written last year’s comparison review about Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, and Libranet. Based on what Ralph told me, I became interested too, and got my own copy just shortly before Ralph’s review was published. Right around that time, the name of the distribution was changed from Redmond Linux to what it is today, Lycoris Desktop/LX.” Read the review at ExtremeTech.
Review: Lycoris is Desktop Dream
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Is that supposed to be a review? That’s what I call a “blurb.” If OSNews published that, we’d be torn apart in the comments sections.
Yeah i would call that more of a blurb but intresting none the less.
It was decribed as a “Desktop Dream” ….
Maybe we can have Eugenia set loose on it.:)
Hang on a minute … he only gives it 7/10; SuSE and Libranet both got 8/10, so even though he doesn’t explain it well, the review is fairer than it first appears – just.
i thought it was a great little blurb…and I totally agree that it’s a desktop dream….
not that I’m biased or anything….. (see name)
I bought (to help them out) the Dev version and was very disappointed w/the KDE 2.2.2. The font rendering is really ugly, I never could get sound to work on it (even though every other distro worked great w/my sound card) and the beauty of their little panels is only skin deep. Notice you always see screenshots of just the Control Panel, how come you never see shots of any of the Control apps? Because they’re just regular KDE ones with a few Lycoris mods.
I also would stay away from them since, like Red Hat, they threaten to sue people for copying their artwork, which, btw is not GPL. If you want easy, go with Xandros. Lycoris is also based on RPM and since no one makes RPMs for it, you’ll have a tough time getting software. There really isn’t very much in the IRIS library, either. Nor could there be since Lycoris doesn’t have that many people.
like Red Hat, they threaten to sue people for copying their artwork
Bullshit.. You can do whatever you want with Bluecurve, after you have removed the red hats. Which is pretty much understandable. You can’t just go arround calling something Red Hat when it’s really Gentoo or something like that.
Check garnome or the gentoo portage.. Bluecurve is in there.. You can get it on mandrake too. (without the trademarked stuff)
they have a right to brand their product. get over the whole icon thing already…sheesh
at least they offer a free download unlike some other distros.
Well, they have the legal right to do so, however I seriously doubt that leaving the trademarked icons in is going to harm them in some way. Same w/Lycoris. They are, after all, just some silly pictures and not worth trying to sue people over.
This is also sort of the same issue w/SuSE not offering ISOs. But theirs is with Yast. It is open source but you may not redistribute it for commercial purposes.
Lycoris is the worst on the icon front. Somebody tried to upload their icons on KDE-Look one day and they were forced to take it off by Lycoris.
The reason I’m complaining is that these episodes seem to be more examples of corporate Linux companies using the open source community. Mandrake doesn’t bother people about using its icons. Do you really think that they are harmed by having this policy? Hardly.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. There is no GPL violation for enforcing trademarks, like Red Hat’s, SuSE’s, or Mandrake’s logo.
Would Mandrake allow me to start a Linux company called “Mandrake Linux” with a yellow and blue star logo? Certainly not, and they would be well within their rights to prevent me from doing so. RH has said that you are free to use and distribute their bluecurve artwork, but you can’t call it “Bluecurve” since that is a trademarked name (it came from a company RH bought). And, under trademark law, if you don’t enforce your marks, you lose them. So, a company *has* to enforce it marks if it wants to keep them.
Get a clue and stop talking about things which you are uninformed.
i’d try lycoris, but i won’t be able to taste IRIS. and i don’t want to pay for rpms, unless it’s shareware or whatever.
as for copying winxp’s theme, i still frown upon that. they could make their own icons and theme.
Build 46 of Lycoris shipped with a bug which fscks fat file-system partions. Of course, this corrupts them (as happened to me). Make sure you alter the fstab config file to change the 1s to 0s for the relavant entries.
so try it then. it’s a free download, and the lycoris.org site has a downloads section where some of the most popular apps are located.
so iris doesn’t have a gazillion packages….it will have more VERY soon. The ones it does contain work great, but again, you can get some of that stuff from the community downloads page.
i would recommend downloading and installing the build 53 beta. it’s called beta, but it’s way more stable than some competing distros final releases.
give it a whirl….
I see absolutely NO credible evidence that ExtremeTEch has even used the product that they’re reviewing, much like their other “reviews” .
>I see absolutely NO credible evidence that ExtremeTEch has even used the product
You did read the whole article by clicking “Next”, right?
Here is the printed page:
http://www.extremetech.com/print_article/0,3998,a=32863,00.asp
Well, after all that reviews of other distributions which was really a review, not just somebody telling he likes a product…. he comes to this?
And what? No critizing the act that GNOME is not in there? I’m suprised!
sure it might be a nice option, but Lycoris’ taget user thinks gnomes belong in gardens. they don’t know or care what wm they use provided it gets the job done.
if lycoris did put gnome in it you’d hear more critisim becasue it would get doe half-a$$ed
they want one of each of the best apps available. it seems that the majority out there believes this is KDE anyway…
Just as an experiment, I took the Lycoris desktop and installed a complete application and desktop scenario. I installed Gnome, Xfce, KDE3.xx WindowMaker, ICEwm, and just about every superfluous app you can think of, starting with a base distribution of Lycoris. All you have to do is a few RPM redirects making sure you get all libraries when you install. FreshRPM and the Gnome site are good for this. Now this isn’t for the faint of heart, I know, but after getting a little experience under the belt and studying a bit, any fledgling Linux Geek could do this too. So, to sum it up, I have now a tailor-made Lycoris install, right alongside my FreeBSD and Debian partitions.
To the doubting Thomas. I assure that all distros reviewed by ExtremeTech are really put to the test. As far as the Lycoris review seeming like a blurb, well, I was accused of that too when I couldn’t find anything that didn’t work in the distro while writing my review. In sum, it simply does what it is supposed to do, what it was advertised to do, much unlike other distros with the possible exceptions of Libranet and Mandrake…, (most of the time). Everything you pay for works. Period. Now if one finds something missing, one should have read the included software list before ordering or downloading.
while this is certainly an enthusiastic review (reviewer?), I must admit to feeling a bit of the same giddiness as the reviewer when I installed Lycoris on my PC. ease of installation, ease of use, blah blah you’ve heard it all before, but it is a nice little distro. isn’t it good to see a mainstream writer go off his head over Linux for a change, rather than defaulting to “it’s too complicated for me (and thus all my readers).”?
> Lycoris is the worst on the icon front. Somebody tried to upload their icons
> on KDE-Look one day and they were forced to take it off by Lycoris.
If that was my artwork, I would sue the jerk for everything he has. Icons may not be wallpaper, but they, too, take time and energy to create. I cannot possibly understand why you think that anyone should be allowed to put anyone else’s artwork on a theme site!
> The reason I’m complaining is that these episodes seem to be more examples of
> corporate Linux companies using the open source community. Mandrake doesn’t
> bother people about using its icons. Do you really think that they are harmed
> by having this policy? Hardly.
Does anyone *want* to copy Mandrake’s artwork? 😛
> as for copying winxp’s theme, i still frown upon that. they could make their
> own icons and theme.
They did.
If you are referring to the fact that the two themes appear similar, you may have a point, but I think that it will help them make a decent Windows substitute for their targeted users.