Recently, I got my hands on version 0.2 of Cobind, a Linux lite desktop, based on Red Hat/Fedora Core 1, from a software company in Pittsburgh. Not yet in general release, Cobind is a one disc wonder.
I tested Cobind 0.2 on what I can only describe as a leftover machine: a Gateway PII, 128 megs RAM, 10 gig hard drive, 3.5 1.44 mg floppy, Ethernet 10 Base TX, and an EV700 Gateway Monitor. It also has a CS4235 sound card, although I never did get it to work. That problem notwithstanding, it was this underpowered machine that convinced me Cobind has a future; it not only worked on this machine, it worked very well.
Every distribution has an intended audience. At present, most Linux distributions are targeted at the geeknoscenti. Cobind is different.
The target user of Cobind is the Linux newcomer, particularly one moving away from Windows. This is a computer user of some sophistication, but not looking to make a career of using a new operating system.
He or she owns, at home, a Windows-based machine that no longer has enough horsepower to run the latest applications. He or she is very, very tired of Microsoft viruses.
Because this target user audience is hoping to get one more cycle of use from an older computer, we can assume that no one wants to spend any more money than necessary. Cobind goes for just $10 (plus shipping).
In addition to home use, Cobind 0.2 is also appropriate for lighter business use. I’ll get to just what’s in the package below.
Cobind has another wrinkle. Dave Watson, CEO of the company, explained in a previous interview that the design concept of Cobind Desktop is based on the excellent “Paradox of Choice,” by Swarthmore professor Barry Schwartz.
Schwartz writes of a trip to the grocery store, “In the pharmaceutical aisles, I found 61 varieties of suntan oil and sunblock, and 80 different pain relievers — aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen; 350 milligrams or 500 milligrams; caplets, capsules, and tablets; coated or uncoated. There were 40 options for toothpaste, 150 lipsticks, 75 eyeliners, and 90 colors of nail polish from one brand alone.”
“Unlike supermarket products, those in the electronics store don’t get used up so fast. If we make a mistake, we either have to live with it or return it and go through the difficult choice process all over again. Also, we really can’t rely on habit to simplify our decision, because we don’t buy stereo systems every couple of weeks and because technology changes so rapidly that chances are our last model won’t exist when we go out to replace it. At these prices, choices begin to have serious consequences.”
Cobind is based on the notion that Linux — a reflected in most of today’s distributions — just doesn’t have to be so ridiculously wasteful of your brain’s CPU cycles.
What I like
There are many things I like about Cobind.
First among them is the window manager. XFce 4 has a crispness and elegance that reminds me of the Macintosh’s OS X. XFce’s most visible element is the panel, which does resemble the OS X dock. It isn’t identical, however. For instance, adding and removing things isn’t just a matter of dragging an icon on and off. You have to right-click, then interpret the options. Generally, that’s not too hard. The panel can be hidden, or dragged around the screen.
XFce is clearly snappier than Gnome or KDE. It uses fewer system resources. More to the point, XFce is what you get — there are no other choices.
Whether you are a Windows, a Mac, or a Linux user accustomed to Gnome or KDE, you’ll find that XFce is perfectly obvious.
It took about 40 minutes to run through the installation process on my older machine. (A new HP got it up and running in 10.) The installation program in 0.1 and 0.2 is a non-graphical version of anaconda. (I believe this will be changed in the final version.) I counted the installation steps.There are about 13 prompts, depending upon some branching choices. The questions revolve around the typical Fedora/Red Hat choices for language, keyboard layout, partitioning, time zone, and network connection. Frankly, this could be whittled further. But it’s perhaps more important to note what Cobind doesn’t ask:
* It doesn’t ask you to switch CDs. There’s only one.
* It doesn’t ask you what packages you want. You get what you get.
And that is? The XFce panel includes three tools for using the Internet:
*web browser – Firefox 0.8.
*email – Thunderbird 0.6
*instant messaging – GAIM .78-1.FC
It presents three tools for office work:
* word processing – Abiword 2.0.1
* spreadsheet – Gnumeric 1.2.1
* managing your money – GnuCash 1.8.8
It offers three tools for multimedia:
* Video player – Mplayer 0.9
* Music Player – xmms 1.2.10
* CD Burner – K3b 0.11.9
It offers three system tools:
* Window settings – XFce settings manager
* Software Manager – Cobind’s own “yumi,” a graphical front-end to yum, Fedora Core 1’s tool for installing and removing software, as well as handling dependencies.
* A manual — a disk version of XFce’s web page manual.
In addition, there’s an icon for gnome terminal, for file management (Nautilus), for the Gedit text editor, for locking the screen, for logging out, and for a system clock.
In general, all of these load and run very quickly. Nor is there much overlap between tools.
At first, it seemed to me that a couple of more monolithic packages– the Mozilla and OpenOffice suites, for instance — would have been simpler yet. But after using the built-in choices for awhile, I’ve changed my mind. Abiword, Firefox, and the others are a good match for the clean interface and speed of XFce. Moreover, they do most of what you really need to do.
That means you might miss some feature important to you. On the other hand, I’ve come to prefer Firefox to Mozilla, and Thunderbird to Mozilla Mail, because of what they add, not what they take away.
It happens that I came to the Linux world via Red Hat, beginning with Red Hat 8.0, and working up to Fedora Core 1 before branching out to other distributions. As Cobind is based on Fedora Core 1, there are many touches that make Cobind familiar. Even though XFce is the window manager, it uses Nautilus and the GTK+ tool kit. There are familiar icons for “home” and “start here” and “trash.” The redhat-config tools are all at hand, too.
Trouble
A few things are a little troublesome in the release.
I haven’t tried to compile anything from source. While loading up the machine with a bunch of other applications is both possible and relatively easy, it also seems against the point. But Fedora’s yum is there, and I tested it on sndconfig, JPilot, and even Openoffice.org. Yum is now very comparable to Debian’s apt. It took just two commands: “yum update” and “yum install openoffice.org”, to pack that complex package onto my computer. I messed with yumi, but found it a little buggy. It was far slower than yum, and crashed twice.
My attempt to launch the manual gave me an error message: “Unable to execute mozilla. Online help is not available.” However, the XFce manuals are easily Googled.
There are legal difficulties around the use of various browser and multimedia plugins. And that’s a problem for the new Linux user. The good news is that what operates out of the box with Linux is always improving. Most things — both new hardware and bundled applications — “just work.” The bad news is, when something doesn’t work, it is a royal pain to fix.
Cobind bundles in Mplayer. Installing plugins for Shockwave, RealPlayer, and Java remains a sudden plunge into complexity — a real issue for Cobind’s intended users.
Neither Red Hat’s sound card detection nor sndconfig (a utility for older cards) could coax a peep out of my equipment. But frankly, on this machine, that’s not an issue for me. For some, it might be.
Games: There aren’t any. This makes it an excellent choice for the young student.
Conclusions
The surprising thing has been just how much of a pleasure Cobind is to use. Most things snap to the screen. The software feels modern and smoothly integrated. I haven’t had this much fun with a new distribution in a long time. For just a second version (with first only a month or two old), Cobind is remarkably stable and polished.
In sum, Cobind has breathed new life into an old machine, turning it into an excellent bedroom computer — ideal for quick browsing, email, or a letter.
Thoreau once wrote, “We become the tools of our tools.” Cobind just might be a step toward a simpler, and happier, life.
About the author:
James LaRue is the director of the Douglas Public Library District, headquartered in Castle Rock, Colorado. He has been using Linux since August of 2002, and is the process of moving his library system to Open Source.
I wonder when they are going to begin using the FC2 core as the base?
I remember the install was basically “Create and format a partition , bunzip2 and untar the archive, run lilo”. There were no choices for software or preferred desktop. It was simple , it was quick and it tended to work very well.
Of course I this was some time ago , I can’t speak for the most recent versions. I hope it’s stayed true to its roots though. Oh , the one difference I see is that Vector is based on Slackware while Cobind is based on Fedora Core. But choice is good I suppose.
Once you’re fed up with that ^^ message above you might want to set the $BROWSER variable (to f.e. ‘firefox’) in order to let Xfce use ‘firefox’ for opening any internal or help-system related urls.
Thanks for your kind review.
Regards,
Moritz Heiber
There are a lot of people who use their old pc, just for surfing, mail and occasional writing a text and sending it strait to the printer.
Seems Cobind adds a bit more to that, gnucash for instance.
I also hope they keep the concept, integrate it all, don’t ask questions, make it run faster and in less memory. Then I know what to answer next time someone says that they tried linux on an old computer but the gui would not work fast enough.
By the way, A girlfriend of me has an PI with 32M that they use to surf the web with an ISDN modem, would it work with so litle ram?
“By the way, A girlfriend of me has an PI with 32M that they use to surf the web with an ISDN modem, would it work with so litle ram?”
Older PCs are much more likely to have 32 Megs than 128, and it is not easy to find old types of RAM.
There is a real need for a simple distro that would work well in 32 Megs. It would be ideal for the kind of machine that gets given to charities (or dumped).
I find that the setup given with DamnSmallLinux (FluxBox + XTDesk, and others) works very well on machines with only a small amount of RAM. Apart from the “slit”, most don’t find it too un-intuitive either.
Nice to see a distro using XFce by default once in a while, though. And certainly nice to see it using later versions of it… I always found XFce to look a little “clunky”, but the new XFce looks as good as it functions.
Installing a linuxdistro on crap/obsolete hardware will give
most of the time a fustrating experience with Linux.
Recently, I got my hands on version 0.2 of Cobind
Don’t you mean version 0.1? There is no version 0.2 mentioned on the Cobind site, as far as I could see…
“By the way, A girlfriend of me has an PI with 32M that they use to surf the web with an ISDN modem, would it work with so litle ram?”
I know I might get lots of complains but the best thing to do with such old machine would be to install Win98+AVG Free Antivirus & you have a very usable & fast system.
I ment install Win 95
Recently, I got my hands on version 0.2 of Cobind
Don’t you mean version 0.1? There is no version 0.2 mentioned on the Cobind site, as far as I could see…
Yeah, if you have 0.2, send us some download links!
There’ s another option for those old Pentium 1’s w/ 32MB DRAM. Use them as LTSP clients, or, if you want a turnkey system, use the K12LTSP variant (http://www.k12ltsp.org). I have twenty-five such old machines (P-166’s and P-233’s) running as thin clients off of a single K12LTSP server, and these old machines now feel like they’re PIII-900’s with gobs of DRAM. Yes, twenty-five of them. The server to do this cost me just under $2000 to build. Thus, I effectively upgraded twenty-five machines for $2000, and I could easily have done forty for that same amount. Just think about that.
That said, I think it’s great that distros like Cobind and Damn Small Linux exist. For students looking for a cheap computer (say, a US$99 special), like a 128MB PII-333, Cobind sounds like it’d be great, especially for writing papers and such. My one concern would be with printers. As a college student, I of course had to print out many a paper and turn it in. That’s very easy to do with Red Hat’s printconf utility. Does Cobind include something like printconf (say, CUPS), or even the actual printconf itself?
–TP
“Installing a linuxdistro on crap/obsolete hardware will give
most of the time a fustrating experience with Linux.”
But so will the Win95 that is on them already, and Microsoft tend to be difficult about people using Windows on charity machines without buying a new license.
There really does need to be a distro specially tailored for old machines.
> Don’t you mean version 0.1? There is no version 0.2 mentioned on the Cobind site, as far as I could see…
On the following page it shows that you can download version 0.1 (alpha) or version 0.2 (beta).
http://www.cobind.com/download_yumgui.html
“On the following page it shows that you can download version 0.1 (alpha) or version 0.2 (beta).”
Isn’t that the Cobind Software Manager download page (the yum gui front end?)
Here is the download page for the Cobind Desktop and a quick check of a couple of the ftp sites it seems that it is still version 0.1:
http://www.cobind.com/download.html
Win95 becomes a non-option even for an old computer if you’ve got some newer hardware (printers, monitors, network cards, etc) added afterwards. Also the software that works with Win95 is becoming obsolete. In this respect, buying more RAM and installing a light-weight Linux distro, such as Cobind or Vector, can give new life to an old computer.
Cobind has made some interesting decisions, marrying XFCE4 with Nautilus and streamlining the application choices. They have apparently given some thought on what users actually need and this is a refreshing attitude.
In general, I like the “BSD approach” where the distribution provides just the basic operating system and offers users an easy way to install additional applications. Linux distros, being more desktop-oriented than *BSDs, might do well in providing users with a basic desktop and giving a GUI that makes it easy to download and install the other applications that users may want to add to their system.
Smart thinking, Cobind!
The target user of Cobind is the Linux newcomer, particularly one moving away from Windows.
Does that means the installation includes the Linux OS option in the Flexboot menu in NT/2K/XP?
Nowadays Linux distros are becoming more and more “FAT”, I remember once when I installed RedHat 9 default packages, loads and loads of software that I will never use!, since then I decided to make my Linux from scratch, building something like an OS, not a desktop environment.
Sorry for the timing glitch, people. I did indeed have version 0.2 — which, according to Cobind, “we expect to have … available within one week, owing to the delay in release to manufacturing (RTM) and mirror propagation.” Frankly, when I sent my article to OS News, I didn’t realize they’d move so fast! Keep an eye on the Cobind website, they’re moving as fast as they can. And the product really is good.
From my own experience, a P133 will run Windows NT4 SP6A, which unlike 95 is still supported for drivers. Disable all unnecessary services and it’ll be reasonably fast.. or BeOS 5, which will run very fast but suffer compatibility problems and a shortage of available software.
The Windows machine would need a firewall and AV though, which adds to the bloat. Win98SE tweaked will run on a P133/32 reasonably well, though, as long as you can live with using Opera 5.12 instead of Internet Explorer (Opera 6 or later is painfully slow in 32mb and Mozilla is out of the question)
I installed Debian with FBPANEL, ROX Desktop, and Metacity.
Right now, all that is installed on the machine aside from that is Firefox and GEdit. I’m hoping I can make a good shell script to download/setup my configuration. After that I want to make a tool that edits FBPANEL’s .default file for as few Icon themes. Right now it’s a gnome look alike, but with the right icons it can look like KDE, Windows, or whatever else I want it to. I also intend to install Xfe along side Rox Filer, since it has a nice Explorer-like interface.
It keeps bloat to a minimal, and provides a very sleek and polished looking desktop.
Adya: I know I might get lots of complains but the best thing to do with such old machine would be to install Win98+AVG Free Antivirus & you have a very usable & fast system. Oops, I meant install Win 95.
For an even more usable and fast system, install Win98SE, ROM IIse or 98lite, and H+BDEV AntiVir.
Win98SE has much better driver support and is more powerful, and can be made to use Win95-level resources with ROM IIse or 98lite (they also get rid of Outlook Express). You should reinstall IE 5.5 if you want to access Windows Update, but since it doesn’t integrate into Windows Explorer it only uses resources when it’s running. If you prefer you can install another less resource-intensive web browser to be the primary.
I’ve found H+BDEV AntiVir to be more stable and less system-intrusive than AVG, and the price is the same, free (see http://www.free-av.com/ ).
On a more on-topic note, I notice on the Cobind site that they are developing a live CD version. It would be very useful to me to have a live-cd Linux that can put its home directory on a USB flash drive but can run on computers with as little as 32-48MB RAM. I really just need the functions listed in this review, plus maybe some network or development tools that I could store on the flash if I need to. Is this possible?
Cobind seems to be quite promising… It seems to do that what it does well… For some people, it can be really good… (No, it is NOT distro for me.)
There are already quite a few “light” distros out there: DSL, Feather and Puppy Linux are among the better known of that type.
But besides configuration heebie-jeebies, many newbies will be put off by an interface that looks uncomfortably “basic” (read: booty) vs the MS look-feel that they’re used to.
A gui interface that looks sharp right out of the box is the best sales tool. Cobind, Vector (based on rock-solid and super-speedy Slackware), and Morphix LG (which also uses XFCE4 out of the box)lead the way for good looking lightweight distros.
I find it amazing/embarrassing tho after many yrs of bashing MS re bloat, that it turns out it’s way faster on old machines than Linux (if X Window is in use). And looks cooler doin’ it, too. Eep.
“a live-cd Linux that can put its home directory on a USB flash drive but can run on computers with as little as 32-48MB RAM”
Nearly impossible. You would need a really slim desktop environment for that (no X server) or a linux swap partition on a HD. SuSE’s live CDs is creating loopback swap files on FAT partitions. On a 32 Meg machine, well it could work (unbelievably slow, though) with swap, but without swap, erm… NO.
I believe he is talking about the home directory, not the entire distro.
another sort of lite 1-disc Distro is Munjoy, I did a quick install, it was painless, nice fonts, nice look, firefox, thunderbird default. Uses KDE 3.2.2, and is Debian based.
You realize how many people have ‘obsolete hardware’? Not everyone has a 3ghz computer with 1gb ram. Many people are still on old computers in the 200-400mhz range. Some seem to forget them, to pretend that they don’t matter. They DO matter. And as software bloats and bloats, adds kitchen sinks and whatnots, someone is needed to fill the gap. I’m glad there are distros out there that haven’ts forgotten this. There are also some of us that prefer this streamlined version instead of the many-disk monster of Linux distro X that fills your HD and ram with uneeded crap. If all you ever do is browse a couple sites online, read and send a few emails, why do you NEED anything as fast as current computers? You don’t. And thankfully, with software like this, you arent’ forced to.
Well said Rho:)
I have such an configuration on my laptop. If you install explorer 5 of 6 it slows down the whole system and remains the only usable component. If you don’t, alternative browsers (e.g opera 7) don’t run on it in a satisfactory way. I presume this hardware is just too weak to be usefull in an internet age.
Hi,
just found the Beta 0.2 Cobind ISO is now available from ibiblo (fttp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/cobind/cobind_desktop_0.2b eta-disc1.iso).
expect more mirrors soon 🙂
OK, mistyped the URL. Try again…
ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/cobind/cobind_desktop_0….
and now here…
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/metalab/distributions/cobind/cobind_desktop…
I thought that the distro might profit also from a couple of other light programs (based on the list of apps from the article):
– Dia, for making diagrams
– XPDF
– Some image viewer/editor for digicam pictures. Gimp might be too featurebloated for this
(- lightweight calendar & addressbook)
A couple of lightweight games might be nice too. E.g.:
– Rocks an’ diamonds
– LBreakout
– LTris / Lmarbles
– GNUchess + XBoard
– Enigma
Also, Matchbox (http://matchbox.handhelds.org/) could be used if somebody wants an even lighter and easier to use (= Palmtop) environment. 🙂
It looks to me like those 2 mirrors have a truncated (or otherwise corrupted) file.
Downloaded file is the same size but does not md5 the same and the size is not a multiple of 2048.
Forced burn results in a bootable CD that cannot find itself to mount when the source of the install is set to be the CD.
A cursory look shows expected files but that is not a guide to where the error lies. The 2 mirrors have identical file copies.
Just a heads up. If I have it wrong I’ll see the answer here, no doubt.
It has been reported here that various mirrors have beta2 ready for download.
At great expense I have done 3 downloads and no .iso checksummed to the value in the .md5 on the same server (they all agree on the content) and none made a CD that I could install from.
Searching the Cobind website I found a link about how to burn CDs from ISOs. It didn’t inspire any confidence as it said that (using Nero) you should ignore the warning about wrong block size. That is bad advice. ISOs should all use 2048 blocksize and should be a multiple of 2048 in size.
Even if the ISO builder is careless the md5 check should agree.
Cobind does neither. I suggest caution until they get their act together. Perhaps they need the $10 sales to do it properly?
sadly…..
so, any available mirror with an functional iso for cobind 0.2 ?????????
anyway, for light desktops my recommandations goes to http://www.morphix.org check it.
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 05:51:06 -0000
From: “davidthewatson” <[email protected]>
Subject: ANNC: Cobind Desktop 0.2 beta released
Hello Eveyone:
We have released Cobind Desktop 0.2 beta today. You can read all about
it here:
http://cobind.com/news/0008.html
We would like to thank the Cobind Desktop Community for working with us to improve Cobind Desktop.
We are still testing a fix for compatibility with 386, 486, and first generation Pentium machines. We will release another version with that fix shortly.
Cheers,
David