Lorma linux 4.0 is the first distribution to be based on Fedora Core, outside of Redhat, that is. It is one of those new breed of single-CD distros that try to include only the best-of-breed applications.It is primarily a desktop distro and does not include any of the software for setting up http/ftp/mail and other kind of servers. Though the matter of choice vs simplicity is a debatable issue, if you want 5 text editors in addition to OO.org and Koffice, this distro is not for you.
Lorma linux tries to offer what Fedora left out in its release. Redhat users are all too familiar with the process of installing lots of packages after installing the main OS. Its kinda like what you do on Windows only on a smaller scale. But not so with Lorma. Here you get everything that you wish Fedora had included. Don’t get me wrong on this one. I respect the stand taken by Redhat concerning legal issues surrounding mp3 plug-ins and DVD content (un)scrambling systems and other things. But looking at it from an end-user’s perspective, it’s a bit of inconvenience. And that’s exactly what Lorma Linux promises to relieve us from.
I have been using Redhat linux since version 7.1 and my main OS for day-to-day work is Redhat linux 9. I have not used Fedora Core 1 and I don’t plan to do so either. I would definitely be using Fedora Core 2 though. That said; let’s see if how does Lorma linux fare in comparison to Redhat Linux.
Install: The install process is identical to that of standard Redhat linux, except one thing. It gives you a choice of 5 package groups, what it calls “Installation Classes’. Different pre-defined package groups will be installed based on what installation class you choose. This approach has its own good and bad points. It’s very good for people who are new to Linux as it saves them the trouble of choosing from thousands of packages. But on the other hand, ‘office workstation’ installation class does not include development tools and the ‘classroom workstation’ installation class includes games!! It should be noted that the users can either accept these pre-defined package groups as it is or they can make changes as they wish by selecting/deselecting packages. Very handy feature. Anyway, the good old custom mode is present too. As any regular reader of OSnews would have guessed that’s what I chose. Install went smoothly, except for one small hiccup which I describe in the support section.
Multimedia: This is one of the biggest selling points of this distro. The phrase doesn’t make much sense when you consider that this distro is free but anyway. It comes pre-installed with mp3 plug-in for xmms. Though why they don’t include equalizer presets is beyond me. In fact, none of the distros that I have seen so far include these. It’s a very simple thing to import the presets from winamp and I wish this distro had done so. Maybe in the next version!
Mplayer comes with divX and OpenDivX plug-ins pre-installed to watch DVDs ripped in divX format. Among CD writers, k3b has been included which I believe is the best CD burning application in the Linux land.
Internet: Mozilla comes with the Modern theme as the default, which looks beautiful compared to that crappy Classic theme and it comes with Flash plug-in pre-installed. These are small things but these are what give the users a better experience. Version 3.1 of Lorma Linux had java pre-installed but it was removed in release 4.0 because of space constraints. I wish they had retained it and removed some other application instead. One candidate for removal could have been Scribus, used for desktop publishing. It is a very specialized application and there are very few people who would be using it in production environment.
Lorma Linux comes with Yahoo messenger pre-loaded for instant messaging. With recent issues regarding gaim and MSN chat rooms access, who knows if Yahoo would also block access to gaim users. I find it very reassuring to have Yahoo messenger ported to Linux as all my friends are not Linux users and most of them use Yahoo messenger anyway.
For enjoying streaming audio and video, RealPlayer is present. It is the freeware version and it forces you to register it when you launch it for the first time. I wonder why it does that. I just gave it a dummy mail-id and off I went.
Support: Lorma Linux is a project of an educational institution in Philippines. It is not a commercial distro in the true sense. So the basic source of support is the user forums. While I was installing it using VMware, the installer was hanging after installing a few packages. I tried to install it 2 more times but each time it would hang on one package or the other. I posted my problem in the user forum and I had the answer within 5 minutes (I guess it was from one of the developers). Turned out that VMware was using SCSI emulation for the virtual harddisk by default. I changed it to IDE as suggested in the answer to my problem and the install went smoothly. This kind of response is very rare in the freeware world. And I should mention that even I didn’t know at the time of posting the question that I would be doing a review of this distro. So there is no question of favorable treatment or any such thing.
Office/productivity: All too familiar OOffice.org is present, version 1.1. Keeping in with the philosophy of single-CD distros, KOffice has not been included, neither is abiWord.
Misc: Wine package which was removed in Redhat 9 because of developer constraints is present in Lorma Linux. Though you should be careful while selecting packages if you want to install it. It is present under ‘gaming packages’ and it is the only thing that is present there. As gaming is not the only thing it is used for, it should be present either under ‘System utilities’ or ‘Miscellaneous’. Making it a part of the base package would also be a good thing.
Cons: There are lot of places where the installer still uses the word ‘Redhat’. For example, while installing, it gives you a message saying ‘Welcome to Redhat Linux’. There are many more places where it refers to itself as Redhat Linux. Not sure what would be Redhat’s stand on such issues but it should be changed as soon as possible.
Synaptic is not present though there is an entry in the start menu. Nothing happens when you click on that. Guess the it got left out during packaging.
Conclusion: This distro has a great potential to become a mainstream player only if it gets its target audience well defined. Single-CD distros just don’t have enough room to please everyone. With Redhat itself going after corporate users, Lorma Linux should concentrate more on home users. That means installation classes like ‘office workstation’ have to go. Second thing is that as of now, it is not doing any value addition other than supplying packages missing in Fedora. It would be good if it did something like what Lycoris does. Install the whole CD as an image. With just one CD, the package selection should not be an issue.
Considering the nature of its origin, Lorma Linux people have done a very good job. It can become a serious contender for desktop by taking care of a few things. With Redhat’s polish and Lorma’s package selection, it just can’t go wrong.
Additional review reading: “Lorma Linux V4 -based on Fedora Core 1“
But what does it really offer over Fedora? Repackaging? I have heard a lot of excuses not to use Linux, like “My applications don’t run on Linux” or “Linux is hard!” or “I don’t want to learn a new OS!”. However none of them is “There’s just too much CDs!”
It won’t sell… thankfully, you’re non-profit.
Interesting read. Looks like Fedora is starting to spawn children.
It looks like an EXCELLENT distro for people who don’t want to screw with figuring out which apps are the best.
-Erwos
Less bloat and it’s optimized for i686 PC’s or faster. I am going to give it try and see if I like it. Hopefully they’ll have plenty of packages setup in their mirrors.
P.S. They seem to based out of the Philippines.
It’s like everyone is scared of the 2.6 kernel. Nobody wants to be the first distribution using 2.6. They don’t want to sell their products.
That’s what I’ve sometimes used Knoppix for – to get a list of the best of apps out there. But sometimes I’ve also wished that Knoppix would be a little more daring and include on the edge twilight apps – such as a full blown Xine w/ DeCSS.
Or maybe they were putting this release together when 2.6 was released and decided to included 2.6 in version 5 instead because it would delay their version 4 release ?
I’m downloading it now. It would be nice to have a one-CD distro that has what I want. Plus, Fedora’s up2date always hangs on me and becomes unresponsive. I thought I read that they were using something different.
The i686 optimization is nice too. Plus, they’ve gotten rid of any server packages.
Why do most (all?) distros seem to favor Mozilla over Firebird … is it because Firebird does not have its own email client? Personally, I think a Firebird/Evolution combo would work great.
And what is up with this senario chooser thing? For God’s sake, just give me a list of apps and let me pick which ones I want to install.
What do you mean no one is using 2.6. SUSE has it in their retail box set (9.1 I think). Of course they dont support it but it is their. I havent looked at other distro’s for the 2.6 kernel, however; slackware is ready from previous readings. I also think gentoo is too (not sure though).
So. Look and ye shall find.
If Fedora is massing functional mp3 and video applications rather than packing it on an entirely different OS why not build a cumlitave package for fedora?
Linux does not need more distros that do some things better and some things worse. Maybe closed source is not the answer but there needs to be more unification than this.
No kiddin! When is someone finally going to release a distro with Firebird (+XFT) as the default browser!?
Uh, Arch, Crux… Firebird’s the default browser…
Uh, Arch, Crux… Firebird’s the default browser…
Of course, these are both distros made for people who don’t really need to depend all that much on defaults either. My original question was more along the lines of “Why don’t more distros use Firebird as the default browser instead of Mozilla?” It boggles my mind why anyone would choose to use the stock version of Mozilla instaed of Firebird, as I have not seen any benefits from it, except that it has a built-in mail client, which itself is not very stellar, IMHO.
I’ve used Mozilla and Firebird, and Firebird has a whole extra slew of bugs that Mozilla doesn’t. Even just weirdness with the rendering engine. Mucked up fonts, lack of options. Firebird isn’t ready for prime time people. I don’t care HOW fast it is.
The Moz [currently] is still a better browser, despite all the hype IMHO.
it feels good to be a filipino when you hear news like this! way to go Lorma!! hmmmmm…. by the way where is Bayanihan linux now? Well with Lorma Linux, who needs it anyway..
definitely not ms style slow. even though the ‘forces’ of community is devided by kde, gnome. other orgs, teams still eager to do the utmost integration they can for the whole system.
in some way i think kde,gnome desktop community has spend too much time on the underlying technology rather than productivity apps(most notably multimedia software)
later
a ‘os pending’ guy
On Linux being slow. . .
There is overhead to everything. Linux has the overhead of people needing time to agree on things and people needing to get on the same page and such. Commercial software has a lot of the same problems, but also suffers from marketing and the like.
I think that Linux moves pretty quickly. Realistically, you can have open-source stuff as fast as it is developed since it is there for you. It just takes time to get polished to the point where people feel like making it the default. I mean, RedHat isn’t trying to be slow about adopting new things by keeping with Moz, but they are trying to appease users that don’t want the rough edges of certain software or bleeding edge versions.
I like the idea of putting the “best of breed” software on 1 CD and all, but how about some *optional* supplemental CD’s? You could put the “almost best of breed” stuff on CD2, and the “not so great/popular packages (but we like them)” on CD3.
Or create topical CD’s like Games Supplemental, Office Supplemental, and so on.
Seems like a win-win situation to me. People who want the 1 CD install have it, and people who want to get most of their packages from CD (so they don’t have to hunt them down online – espcially newbies or dial-up users) can download the additional, optional CD’s.
Just an idea.
That idea does not require creating a seperate distrobution.
Just think how much time could be saved if the cd’s were created for an _existing_ distro.
I hate fsck’ing with RPM’s built for other version of other distros. If there was one distro that I knew I could find working packages for it would be my default distro. I don’t care how many points it misses in other areas.
I did a study once a little over a year ago and about 70% or the non-packaged RPM’s I tried to install failed to install “out of the box”. This is even with a mild effort to fix dependencies.
70%! that statistic is horible.
I haven’t heard anyone talk about MPEG-21, and it is supposed to solve a lot of the incompatibility problems with video formats and compatibilities with video players. It’s a multimedia framework.
Building from source works well because you can run the ./configure script and it will check for dependencies and in a way it will tell you what environment variables need to be set. It’s probably a superior way to install software, but since you have to run a Makefile and it’s too hard to type ‘make’ and ‘make install’, that system will never work!
lol.
I installed gtkmm recently. I had to sym-link the gtkmm package config file to my package config directory /usr/lib/pkgconfig. I had to set a LD_LIBRARY_PATH so that the gtkmm shared libraries (.so files) could be found, and I also had to set the PK_CONFIG_PATH for /usr/lib/pkgconfig and /usr/local/pkgconfig. It would have been easier if gtkmm came preinstalled or in an .rpm, but if you mess around on Linux as a developer for a year or two, the same library directories -I/usr/include/ or -I/usr/X11R6/include as well as the corresponding /libs/ get used over and over again. It’s not as difficult to figure stuff out but the newbie is totally screwed.
If there was one distro that I knew I could find working packages for it would be my default distro. I don’t care how many points it misses in other areas.
Hmmm… not sure what you mean. I’ve been dual booting back and forth between Fedora Core and Mandrake for the past few weeks basically comparing to see which I liked better (it’s Mandrake for me) … and the packages I’ve downloaded that were specific to the distro have worked for me.
I prefer distro-specific packages when they are available because they usually include the proper information for setting up links for the “start” menu (gnome menu, k menu, launch menu, whatever…) and conform to other conventions that are specific to that distro.
Though what I really prefer is to not have to download packages at all. I really like Mandrake’s package management control center. Most everything I look for is found in there. As far as I know Fedora doesn’t have anything like it “out of the box”. up2date is only for security updates and such. Add/Remove is only for the stuff that’s on the distro CD’s themselves. You can add Synaptic after you setup your system but in my opinion, Synaptic isn’t as good. But it’s better than hunting down packages individually and trying to meet the requirements “by hand” with (rpm -i). Use to take me a half hour or more to install 1 program because the RPM would require some other RPM, which would in turn require 6 or 8 other RPM’s, each of which might have their own requirements. “rpm hell” they call it.
K12Linux is the first.
Previously it was RHL-based, from now on it’s based on Fedora. As far is I know, it has all the stuff like MP3, DVD playing etc. (well, there’s no reason not to have it because it’s perfectly legal here). Nice distro.
I use Firebird (0.7) almost exclusively on SuSE v9 and its fonts are the best. But I gave up using it on Mandrake (9.2) because of bad fonts (like one line running into the line above, etc.). In fact, I gave up using Mandrake itself partly for this reason.
they could use a better website
I use both. However, Firebird can not sort bookmarks at the moment, Mozilla does since 1.4 I believe. Also, I can create multiple profile with Mozilla, each with different settings. On the other hand, Firebird has this nice feature: one click clear all cache, cookies, etc.
It seems that many smaller (disk size)distro use Firebird as the default. Vector Linux for example.
If there was one distro that I knew I could find working packages for it would be my default distro. I don’t care how many points it misses in other areas.
So what you’re looking for is Debian.
Victor.
One CD is perfect, as long as all the packages are what you want. After that, you can just use apt-get and get whatever packages you need. One CD makes the whole process easier. I have downloaded, and if this comes out good, I may use this in all my installs.
“So what you’re looking for is Debian.”
Wrong. I hardly ever see Debian packages offered by anyone except Debian project members or friends. Almost every 3rd party program I use has an RPM up on their web site, but not .deb packages.
Besides, the debian package format doesn’t conform with the LSB.
I havent heard Lorma until it was posted here, I got first heard of filipino distro named Buhawi Linux but theny haven’t have free download for that ( Dont know what’s wrong, it’s based on RH, and later the Bayanihan Linux and now Lorma.
Since Fedora is currently new (not that really new of course!), Well It’s good to hear that they’re the first to release a distro based on Fedora, hope they haved fixed some bugs from fedora into their distro.
keep it up!
I use both. However, Firebird can not sort bookmarks at the moment, Mozilla does since 1.4 I believe.
Personally, I don’t care for the bookmark manager in either browser … that is one thing (IMHO) IE does better.
Also, I can create multiple profile with Mozilla, each with different settings.
I thought you could do this with Firebird via a command line switch (-profile or something) ?
BTW: Using Firebird in Windows, and the fonts are great
The distro is VERY rough around the edges and sacrafices almost all of the polish of Fedora. As difficult as it must be to create a Linux distro, this one looks really thrown together.
It’s a good idea in concept, but the execution is terrible.
That must be why they’re starting the release numbering at 4.0. They really ARE learning from Red Hat!
Morphix Light edition has Firebird as the default browser.
My .02.
Wrong. I hardly ever see Debian packages offered by anyone except Debian project members or friends. Almost every 3rd party program I use has an RPM up on their web site, but not .deb packages.
That’s because Debian’s packages usually aren’t offered “by anyone”; they’re offered by Debian. Just take a look at the Debian unstable repositories, and you’ll see all the software you want.
Victor.
who cares about conformation to the lsb if the distro is better. as far as .deb packages not being available like they are for other linux distros, you’re crazy. i don’t have a problem finding them at all. i’m running bleeding edge libranet (100% debian compatible) and my os is hard as a rock.
you can have conformity, i’ll take choice. you can have dependency hell, i’ll take apt-get.
rope!
Nice idea and well thought out.Too bad their webmaster insists on “Flashing” in my face. I’ll pass.
I thought Lorma was some type of worm, like a hook worm?
As much i love firebird, you have to realise that it’s not even at version 1.0 yet, and as such still has a lot of bugs + issues + mising features.
I dont think anybody should have a beta browser as default (shoudl still be included though), even though firebird kicks ass!
Firebird is okay. It is really the best browser out there, however the default theme is bad and theme bugy cannot be reported.
Mozilla will be split into
Mozilla Mail (Thunderbird)
Mozilla Browser (Firebird)
Mozilla Composer (NVU, sponsored by Lindows)
I would like to see specialized distributions, for instance preconfigured for internet cafés. There is still no real kiosk mode but KDe makes huge progress on this issue. I think KDE 3.2 will have a huge impact on the market.