Many companies tried to create a truly easy-to-use Linux distribution, but as they say in Greece “they reached the well, but weren’t able to drink water“. Corel, Mandrake, Lindows, Xandros, Stormix and many other distros tried or are still trying to bring Linux closer to Windows’ ease of use and the millions of the desktop-oriented users. One of the new distributions that has many people impressed so far, is Lycoris (formerly known as ‘Redmond Linux’). OSNews tested the latest Lycoris Desktop/LX and here is what we experienced.
Installation
Lycoris employs a custom version of Caldera’s Lizard application as the installation program. The version the Lycoris folks sent me for the review is the Desktop/LX version, which includes a single bootable CD in a DVD case with a 28-pages manual. Installation was easy and speedy. Installation on our dual PIII 450 Mhz seemed to go well and I could play a Solitaire game while waiting for the installation to complete in the background. Except for the usernames, geographic location and partitioning, there was not much more that I had to do for the installation, which was fairly quick and automatic. Lycoris currently uses ext3 as the file system of choice. However, I hope that future versions of Lycoris will use a file automatically for their swap space instead of a real partition – in addition to the / partition. This will greatly simplify the installation process for many users and won’t fragment their hard drives.
After the installation is over, Lycoris does not reset (cold boot) the PC, but loads the distribution from the hard drive. Speaking from my experience on many OSes, this is not generally the right way of doing things, as a lot of devices failed to initialize correctly. My second CPU was not working and the audio baffled out completely after opening a second application that required access to the audio device. Rebooting “for real” fixed these issues for me. All my hardware (CD, CD-R, sound, video, TVCard, network card, peripherals) was correctly recognized and configured by the Lycoris installation routine.
Lycoris Experience, Part I
Booting could have been faster for Lycoris as there are no services loading with the system. No Apache, no mySQL or any other server software that you find on many distributions. Some traditional Unix commands, such as ‘locate’, are not present either. Lycoris is promoted as a desktop environment and no such software is is to be found either on the CD or on the booting sequence. While booting is pretty fast, for some reason the FAT32 mounting is very slow (the OS mounts every supported partition on boot by default). It took 2 minutes to mount two FAT32 partitions (9 and 18 GB respectively), while the rest of the OS loading did not take more than 40 seconds. A shame really – I hope this (inconvenience mostly) will be fixed or altered to a faster algorithm.
Lycoris, being a desktop-centric distribution, loads into graphical mode automatically. The KDE login manager will present you with a dialog asking you to insert your login and password as created previously in the installation phase. There is also a handy drop-down menu option to restart the X Server and another option to reboot or shutdown the computer.
Seconds later, KDE 2.2.2 is loaded and you are presented with a nice WindowsXP-like nature background image and some good looking XP-like desktop icons, as the screenshots show. This is basically a KDE installation with a bunch of good-looking icons and a lightly tweaked Konqueror to show the local and remote drives and networks in a friendly manner. Having everything mounted by default really helps the desktop user make immediate use of the machine, instead of battling with the ‘mount’ command on a Terminal (no, there is no ‘linuxconf’ included). The KDE menu is loaded with useful applications, but it is not as “bloated” as with many other distros which try to include everything under the sun. Everything has sensible software category names on the Kmenu and it is easy to navigate around it. Lycoris includes only one application for each type of application a desktop user needs. One spreadsheet application, one word processor (only some of the KOffice packages are included), one text editor (kedit), one mp3 player (XMMS), one scanner app (Kooka), one graphics app (GIMP), one graphics viewer etc. Among others, there is Java 1.3 included, KFax, Real Player 8, Flash, CD burning software, KMail etc. For DVD and mpeg, XINE is included. I found XINE to have problems though and be very unstable on my dual PC. Also, the other media player included, NotATun, did not work for me at all. GTK+ libraries are installed, so you can run GTK+ applications, but there is no GNOME or other window managers. There is only one of each kind, because a desktop OS should be easy to understand and administer. Simplicity is important, at all levels, so the inclusion only of KDE is a logical step and a well thought out decision.
For system configuration, Lycoris includes both the standard KDE Control Center (with additional modules to
add/edit/remove users and the ability to load device drivers directly from the GUI and configure networking) and another panel called “kXconfig” where you can change your video card information, monitor, keyboard, mouse, screen res etc. On my PC, the only device that it did not have a visual way of configuring (/etc/modules.conf text editing was the last resort) was my TV Card. In fact, my PCI WinTV Hauppauge Bt878 was the way to go if I wanted to… lock my system. While the system detected and configured the TV Card correcly, if I loaded XawTV, the system would lock up. From what I understood of the kind of artifacts I got just before the crash, I think the tv card requested some kind of hardware acceleration or overlay and my Voodoo3 did not react well on that request (Lycoris ships with the fairly old XFree 4.01, which may be the culprit). It seems that I am not the only one with the exact same problems with a Bt8x8/Voodoo3 combination. Editing the /etc/modules.conf and taking out some Bt8x8 configuration listed there, I could launch the app, and it would still crash X, but at least it would not freeze the whole machine.
Lycoris uses Mozilla 0.9.7 as its main browser. I installed the latest Mozilla 0.9.9 binary and it worked fine too. Other Internet software included with Lycoris are ICQ and AIM clients, a (GTK+) FTP client, an IRC client etc. This setup seemed to work well for the every day needs of a desktop user.
Lycoris Experience, Part II
I think the biggest problem in the whole experience was the installation of new software. As I said, there are no developer tools to be found on the $29 Desktop/LX. You need to purchase the $39 version in order to get 3 more CDs, which include the dev tools, the source and one more CD with applications. So, while there is Perl and Python installed, there is no gcc, make or php. That would not normally be a problem for a desktop system, but in this Linux case, things are a bit different. Downloading RPMs from the web did not work well as almost all serious applications needed a version of the libstdc++ library, which was not installed by default, or they needed Freetype 2.x etc. So, on one hand you can only install via RPMs, but on the other hand these RPMs need libraries that are normally installed with the developer tools or libraries that are way too common and used everywhere, but surprisingly they were not pre-installed with Lycoris. I managed to install only a handfull of applications that were statically linked, because the dependancy problems for the rest of the apps was already a headache (Lycoris seemed to have more dependency problems than the ones you find in the other “bloated” distros). There is a web link to the main launch menu to download Lycoris RPM compiled software (which seemed like the right step), but that link was… dead (it was linking to the old Redmond Linux web site), so no joy.
Lycoris includes an “Update” application where it fetches data from a web location and downloads critical updates for the system. The idea is similar to “Windows Update” or the MacOSX Update utilities. At the time I tried the utility, there were no available downloads to be done, so I do not know of its capabilities. I hope that it can replace a stock kernel (Lycoris comes with 2.4.12) with a newer one without needing any extra configuration from the user, or to be able to update libraries.
What is a desktop system without games, right? There are about 6-7 2D games installed by default with Lycoris. These are some of the “brain” or board games that come by default with KDE. But there was time to test the OpenGL 3D implementation. I (naturally) downloaded some RPMs of some well known OpenGL open source games. Again, I had dependancy problems mostly with SDL_* (no SDL libraries installed whatsoever) or specific versions of libqt.so or other things like OpenAL etc. While downloading all the dependancies was this time more feasible than try to install C++ applications, I did not spend my whole afternoon with it hunting down these dependancies. A desktop user, the kind of user who expects things to just work, would not have done so either.
After some searching on the Lycoris.org forum site, I saw mentions of a “GamePack” CD offered by Lycoris. Installing this pack, quite possibly would fix some of the issues I mentioned above (nVidia users are still advised to upgrade their drivers, I hear), however I did not find any place where I can download it (it could not be found on the download or update utility, so, quite possibly is part of the third Lycoris CD). If this gamepack comes indeed with the £40 package (called “Desktop/LX Deluxe”), I suggest that consumers go for the £40 Lycoris product and forget altogether the problematic £30 Desktop/LX one.
A good point of the distro is the inclusion of a WINE release. While I could only run correctly simple applications like notepad.exe and the Windows calculator, it is a nice addition. All the .exe programs are marked with the WINE icon and if you doubleclick them, WINE will try to load them.
One thing that I found unprofessional is the inclusion of the Redmond Linux logos and mentions of it everywhere in the distro. The version I was sent was not updated with the new logos and name (while the actual CD media and DVD cover had been updated). I hope the new version has this issue addressed, mostly because I love the flowery new logo better than the old one and because I like consistency in general. And speaking about consistency in a desktop environment, I would also welcome the addition of a GTK+ theme that looks identical to the main Qt/KDE theme, so at least Gnome and KDE applications would look the same. This will allow apps like Gnumeric or Abiword or even Evolution to look “Lycoris native”.
The CD has almost 150 MB of free space. I believe that there are some utilities or applications missing, like a Font Installer (desktop users mostly browse the web, therefore having the standardised Web Fonts is a must – Update:There is a font installer under /rl/extra/RPMS/ directory on the CD), maybe a personal database program, maybe some nicely designed applications from TheKompany, or even the inclusion of Star Office as standard. Other users may prefer to fill this space with the nessesary developer tools (which can prove a life saver on a Unix environment) or the must-have libraries that are missing. In any case, I believe that Lycoris should offer more software to solve some of the problems discussed in this review, and there is quite some space left in the CD, so there is no excuse not to do so.
Conclusion
I started with a Greek saying and I will finish with another one: “The old sins of the parents, can still trouble the children.” What do I mean by this? Well, trying to make a desktop/clean/easy to use distribution out of the dependency and instability chaos of many of the graphic applications in today’s open source world, is not an easy feat. I would hate to give a negative review to Lycoris for bugs or design decisions that were not theirs, but on the other hand, they sell this desktop-oriented product to customers. The (very kind and helpful) Lycoris folks are on a noble and honest effort. Too bad that the all-around Linux development is not quite ready for the desktop. While Lycoris is a good effort, you still can’t “squeeze milk out of a bird“.
In order to understand that my above paragraph is not a kind of a harsh statement, you have to understand who the real competitors of Lycoris are. It is not Red Hat or even Mandrake or SuSE. It is not FreeBSD or Solaris. It may not even be Windows XP yet (10% of the market according to Google’s January stats). The real competitors for Lycoris is Windows98 (49% of the desktop market). This is the desktop that has the biggest market share today. So, Lycoris has to compete with it and create a product that it can be understood and administered by users who have only used some form of Windows. These users, all they know, is to download an executable, double click it, and follow the installation wizard. They have no clue about dependancies, compilations or even permissions. Lycoris has failed in this regard so far, while it got the point on other respects (targetted applications, no bloat, no ‘make’ riddles).
My advice for the problem sounds quite extreme, but I firmly believe that the right way to drive Linux to the desktop is to do what Apple did with BSD. For Lycoris, that would mean that they would only allow installation of applications from pre-built packages specially for Lycoris from a specific web location easily accessible from the KMenu (an action that can help ‘hide’ the dependancy problems), and also to somehow “fork” some applications. Example: Let’s say that XINE 0.9.x is unstable. Decide which version you want for Lycoris, debug it in your labs, and include it on your distro, knowing that you have hammered out most of the bugs. Now, even if XINE 1.0 is released by the original project members, do not include it in your next version of your distro if you do not make the same tests and debugging first as you did for version 0.9.x. In essense, become a meta-maintainer of the applications you want to support. While it will cost more at first to the company, it will pay off later, as it will require less support effort and it will help build a solid product and a good name in the industry. I would like to see the company take more active role on the overall development of all aspects of the product (e.g. tweaking KDE itself and free it from its unnecessary bloated desktop context menu), instead of just bundling lots of free software with nice XP-like icons.
I wish Lycoris good luck. They still have a long way to go, but I recognize and I would like to state that this is indeed by far the most user friendly Linux distro to date. Even if I sounded a bit harsh, my overall satisfaction of the product and the potential it has is shown on the rating below (however my job is to review the product, which means that I have to state any weakness I might find, along with mentioning its feature set). The folks at Lycoris are definitely on the right track though. There is no question about it, so try the product today, help it grow.
Installation: 10/10
Hardware Support: 9/10
Ease of use: 7.5/10
Features: 8/10
Speed: 7.5/10 (UI responsiveness, latency, throughput)
Overall: 8.4 / 10
Lycoris Desktop/LX Review
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Eugenia, I must complement you on your review of this product. I have used it, and I must say it is nice, but it has a lot of shortcomings.
IMHO, this is closer to a “desktop Linux” than any previous distro, but it’s got a long way to go. I’m not entirely sure that it will ever get there. That’s the problem with an OS built by Geeks for Geeks. Only geeks can truly use it and appreciate it. Even the things that supposedly make it easier – like KDE – they are still extremely complicated for a new user.
Can’t someone design a user-friendly desktop operating system thats as easy to use as Windows? Oh, wait… that was the BeOS. Guess we’ll have to wait for OpenBeOS….
if they can get a community arund them, they would be able to perhaps get somthing like BeBits going and perhaps have their own software development industry. as they are a desktop OS, I can see a huge project to repackage and maintain the free software to be staticly linked so that the Desktop User can install it very easy. yes it takes up disk space, but most normal desktop users do not use more than 10% of their drive.
they can start a site called Lycorwarz an that can be the distribution of the repackaged free software in the static binaries. they can also come up with development standards so that companies that want to create software for their distro will have to follow them…mostly just staticly linking and themeing the software.
it will make Linux as easy as the mac. STATICLY LINK THE BINATRIES…FORGET THE SHARED LIB CRAP…we want KISS applied to the User!!!!
How can you say that the Xandros desktop has “tried to create a truly easy-to-use Linux distribution, but as they say in Greece “they reached the well, but weren’t able to drink water”.” when Xandros hasn’t even put out a single version of there desktop? Thats a little unfair.
Reviewers usually get beta software or even beta hardware in advance… Xandros has already released a beta version of their distribution.
The conclusions of the review was almost exactly the same as my own, when I installed the package. Super smooth installation, no problems recognizing hardware. But, when I was about to install other packages, the fun came to an end.
It is very true that many beginners find compiling complicated, but that is no reason to deny the users who want these options the possibility. Yes, you do have the two “extra” discs, but I think that way makes the package more difficult to use for a not-so-newbie Linux user, than Mandrake or SuSE.
So, if you want a predefined Linux package for just the most common daily computer activities, without a need to install other software, I can highly recommend Lycoris. If you want to install other software but still needs an easy system, I would rather recommend Mandrake, SuSE or Redhat.
Yes, i am aware of this beta. But you cant look at a half finished peice of art and Judge it as a finla work.
One question: Why is “easy to use” synonymous with “look like Windows” for all those Linux distributions? I never found Windows an example of ease of use. Can’t they think of something new and better?
A nice review. Too high final ratings.
I miss some performance descriptions, like a Konqueror torture test, filemanaging speeds, overall speeds, resources use, drag&drop behaviour, and TTfonts rendering. Besides that, all in all I think I got a fair review of the product.
After reading it I thought: well I still couldn’t care less about Lycoris whereas I’m waiting since past September for the Xandros Linux release, and nowadays I’d rather use Mandrake Linux if I look for ease of use in Linux (otherwise Slackware). Agree with B on the Negative Foreshadowing. I may buy a Xandros copy, I won’t even mind with Lycoris.
Noble effort indeed, troubled children they are, but they can’t skip final judgement. Not Prepared for the Desktop.
There is another saying that says “If everybody’s responsible, nobody is. — Paul Greenberg”.
was windows 3.x
man, eveything was an Icon, no stupid menues to search through, and settings could be made in the .ini files if you realy wanted to get control.
not to mention that the interface was not in your way of getting stuf done…..I hated it when we moved to win2k on the server from NT 3.5.1 Explorer was just in the way of what I wanted to do.
While Lycoris is a good effort, you still can’t “squeeze milk out of a bird”.
In Alabama they say, “You can’t make silk from a sow’s ear.”
> a Konqueror torture test, filemanaging speeds, overall speeds,
Expect what you would expect for any other ext3-based with a stock kernel distro. Nothing exceptionally different about this distro to mention. KDE and C++ still has the LD problems, therefore KDE is as slow as in any other distro or installation that is not object prelinked.
> resources use,
Check the screenshot, I have “top” running.
> drag&drop behaviour
This is just a KDE thing. As long an application is 100% based on Kparts and the KDE tech, expect the D&D to work fine. Don’t expect it to work between Gnome and KDE apps, as they based on different toolkits.
Things like that is one of the reasons I advise Lycoris to take active development role as meta-maintainers of their software.
> and TTfonts rendering
Lycoris uses the stock TTF rendering as done on XFree 4.01. Pretty badly done overall, it has bad AA quality (the “b” in the menu font misses pixels etc). In the screenshots I include, the fonts are rendering much better than the standard X/Lycoris, because I manually installed the http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=760“>Xft .
I think many people are missing the point here. If we all agree that Linux as a whole isn’t really ready for the desktop, then using that as a starting point, Lycoris is an immense success. My belief is that it’s the best desktop Linux out there – surpassing the excellent Mandrake release, the very professional Red Hat flavor, and the often bleeding edge SuSE counterpart. Lycoris, in summary, can be said to accomplish one major goal: it takes Linux A LOT closer to its eventual goal: desktop OS. A LOT closer.
When the computer locked with the first test, did you try connecting to it with another computer? I have found that a lot of problems of that nature are hardware related, and thus one can telnet or ssh into the box despite inability to use the console; thus, you can perform a safe shutdown remotely if need be. Probably ineffectual, as Lycoris is a destop system and probably doesn’t have telnetd or sshd.
Thank you for the article, I’m going to get it now 🙂
>When the computer locked with the first test, did you try connecting to it with another computer?
No, we put networking on our home JUST last Saturday (we installed AT&T cable modem JUST last week, as we have just moved to this apartment with my husband).
And I do not expect a home user to either telnet or SSH in the box from another machine and type arcane commands to kill and reload X or battle and mess with the serial cable and debug the kernel using GDB and a bit of assembly too. Please…
I would do that if the distro I reviewed was Red Hat or TurboLinux, which aim to the server market. But Lycoris should not expect users to do such things.
..it’s the Caldera Lizard!
If you want a Linux distro that has some chance of being friendly but of good quality, look at Caldera eDesktop.
“Don’t expect it to work between Gnome and KDE apps, as they based on different toolkits.”
GTK and QT adhere to the XDND protocol which means that you can eg. drag a file from Konq into a Nautilus window.
I believe the reference was to cut and paste, not just drag and drop when working between Gnome and KDE. And cut and paste sucks when mixing apps between those two environments.
Yes, right Big Al, when I asked I had in mind drag&drop as well as copy and paste, thinking of the known Linux issues about them.
Thanks for anwsering my questions Eugenia. It has been a very pleasant to read review, I’m waiting for a Xandros Linux review from you now (I know, whenever they let you do it, beta or final).
Next contender: Lindows
Let’s see what you guys have to offer.
BTW, I’m not knocking Lycoris. I’m still excited about running this distro. I’m just predicting that the next meeting of the bug-eyed flock will take place at Lindows.com.
Also, I’ve been thinking about trying to put together a distro that’s the complete opposite of this one. I want one that looks as far from windows as possible. I figured I’d use Windowmaker(without Gnome) and through together an ala carte office suite(or just stop being silly and install OpenOffice). Stuff like that. Who else is feeling antsy?!
Good review, except for the numbers you gave them for support. There is a 60 day promise, but, in reality, there is no support. Oh well, this release is the right concept, just not very good execution. Maybe the Lycoris people moved this out before they were really ready to support it?
If they was to add Mosfet to their line-up… then they would have an awesome looking GUI. As soon as Mosfet is KDE 3 compliant, I may finally slam Yellow Dog Linux on my Ti-Book!
http://www.mosfet.org/liquid.html
>http://www.mosfet.org/liquid.html
While I admire Mosfet’s efforts, this thing looks like crap. Overloaded, lots of unessesary transparencies, horrible tabs and buttons etc. These screenshots look like a travesti full of make up and “look at me” widgets. Not all of it is Mosfet’s fault though. KDE developers are far from creating nice and logical UIs for their apps, while the bad widget spacing and griding is QT’s fault.
The only thing I like about it is the bold font on the Kemu with its icons on the left being on the right 16×16 size.
Overall, not a real alternative to MacOSX UI or even XP’s. It is not just Mosfet who has to fix things. KDE devs and TrollTech needs to fix things to have a nice UI. And the problem is that all of these people are working independandly, therefore there is no consisestency.
I was more impressed with color and the fonts, this is the first one I have seen with really clean and consistent fonts. They have overdone the Aqua thing alittle, but over all it is the nicest shots I have seen thus far from a KDE GUI screenshot!
me (poster), I share your taste for that, a polished WindowMaker-centric distro would be great.
http://www.icepack-linux.com/“>Icepack 1.0 used WindowMaker as the default window manager, it looked very nice, with a pretty bar at the bottom. Problem for me is that the system was unusable, outrageously unstable. But it was a nice beginning. I haven’t tried their latest versions (from 1.1 to version 2)
It isn’t just Lycoris, it’s the whole KDE design that I don’t like much. Putting some XP icons theme there as default makes things even worse: ‘I’m getting outta here fast’ (I won’t even care to change it). The laughs I’ve had with those XP icons and http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/23830.html“>a , perfect match!
I like a lot how WindowMaker looks, the icons, all the UI concept. What filemanager would you use? GFM? I don’t know if WM has any project for it’s own filemanager.
Eugenia,
You know i could care less about linux, but i read the artical anyways. Why? Because of all those wonderfull quotes, I actaully think i am gona search back though all the OS News articals and start a Eugenia greek quote page .. or maybe just set my Sig to drop in a random one ever now and then…
Oh, and good review, as always. See ya
Back a few years ago, I believe it was RH 5.x; I really thought Linux was going somewhere. But I was VERY NOT impressed with RH default WM (fvwm . . . OMG how horrid).
I then downloaded ICEWM. Damn it was fast. It wasn’t “easy” to configure, that is unless you could read. I found all its config files and spent nearly 10 whole minutes tweaking it to my likes (theirs GUI tools for that now). But I didn’t care for xfm too well, which was *the* X file manager, I always just opened a term and used MC. But I still wanted good GUI file manager that would drag ‘n drop, cut n’ paste.
Then I found DFM. DFM added almost everything Naughtylust adds to GNOME except its not as pretty, but its 10x faster.
If somebody took the code from ICEWM and DFM, combined the two and added a couple GUI config tools and mime type file recoginion on par with BeOS’s . . . then KDE and Gnome would soon be forgotten. IMO.
Of course I haven’t use ICEWM in a long time (since BeOS 4.5), and I don’t even think DFM is around anymore 🙁
Shared object support was added for a VERY good reason- it’s because static linkage produces a lot of redundancy and BLOAT as you end up duplicating LOADS of code for no good reason other than you want it to consistently work (which may/may not be the case- the kernel interfaces might just change on you and break that statically linked binary). If you don’t understand the background of something, how can you comment intelligently either way?
Caldera has a nice installer, but mandrakes is nice too (btw calder is now openlinux not eDesktop). Plus mandrake is a ton faster (comparing mandrake 8.1 vs. caldera openlinux 3.1), it supports pppoe right from the get go (I couldn’t get it to work on caldera at all). The only advantages caldera has is the fact wine is integrated (in mandrake you have to integrate it yourself and speaking as a linux newb I had no idea how to do it, actually mandrake didn’t even integrate the unzipper properly (at least for me) so their integration sucks :0) and the fact you get links to any non-linux partitions on your desktop along with a link to your cdrom drive (mounting by terminal is a major hassle if your used to windows).
Disk space set aside for swap is just that, set aside for swap, whether in the filesystem or not. If you put it in the filesystem that just makes it slower, and makes it _more_ likely to have fragmented space. With swap on it’s own partition you assure it’s set aside from the rest of your data and ordinary data will not have to be split and placed on either side of the swap file.
<p>
Now I haven’t seen the installer, and perhaps it asks a question about swap partitions that makes the installation more difficult, but the solution to that is not ask, rather than not make a swap partition. If necessary the user could always add more swap later without re-partitioning by creating a swap file in the filesystem. The only possible problem with swap partitions is that they are difficult to shrink. This is a small price to pay for the performance gain.
I tried this distro (normally use debian sid) in hopes of having an easy to use distro for the rellys but gave up on it due to the lack of some of the more decent apps. If they included abiword,evolution, galeon, gnumeric,gthumb, eroaster, audiogalaxy (with a custom setup script like debian) ogle, and some of the other brilliant gnome apps (they included the gimp and gftp didn’t they ?). They could then setup a qtish theme for them so they don’t look out of place and “POP” a user friendly & USEFULL distro.
Debian SID rocks anyhows
I’m sick of some of these reviews coming from people who have grown up with everything Linux/GNU/BSD/etc have to offer, complaining about a desktop distribution because it is “limited”.
Lycoris are trying to make a distribution that is useful to the end user. The end user is not a power user. If the end user was, they’d use one of the multitude of other distributions out there.
All the end user needs is the equivalent of what you’d find on Windows 9x/2000, with some productivity applications (which would have to be purchased extra in the case of a microsoft platform).
Who cares if the distro doesn’t contain development utilities like GCC. Does the general MS user complain because Visual C++ isn’t installed? No. Updates can be downloaded in binary format and installed with RPM/DEB packages.
What I’d have liked to see is the reviewer sitting down an average joe at the Lycoris system, and asking them if they could perform x/y/z tasks that would they would expect to be able to perform on windows, and observing the result.
Don’t forget the target audience. It’s like a physics professor complaining about a teenage sci-fi novel because it isn’t correct enough to his liking.
Blah.
Nick
Now, during a usual boot of redmondlinux all you see
is a framebuffer screen with a cheery summary of the
boot up status, but on the “boot” after install the usual
messages were displayed in text mode I noticed a bunch of
rather alarming “Warning: dosfsck on fat32 filesystems
is ALPHA” messages whip up the screen. “gee, am I glad I
backed up recently,” I thought. So, they’ve removed the
need for lengthy fsck on ext2 partitions by using ext3 by
default, then added a lengthy fsck on dos drives using
unproven software. That was about the point I relised this
distro might need a little work yet. I also found konqueror
(in file manager mode) crashed rather more often than I’m
used to (I usually run debian unstable). I’m still telling
newbies to use Mandrake for now. (btw, this was using the
build_44 iso’s)
well, if a user was good enough to place a new kernel in and do a custom install, they could install shared libs with the RPMs.
yes you get bloat on the drive, and yes it takes up more memory, but nothing is simpler to install for an end user.
perhaps when every distrobution is LSB complient, it will not be an issue because people will program to the LSB and you will no longer have to worry about missing libs, but untill then…options for simplicity are small.
I’m sick and tired of those who insist on comparing
everything with M$windows as if that was the end-all
of usability.
I am not a geek by any means, but at the moment I’m using Mandrake 8.1 and I find easier to use than any version
of windows that I ever tried.
when you install any version of Linux you know that’s
what you are installing, if you don’t like it by all means go
give mr. Gates a few bucks and quit your bellyaching.
Lycoris does not reset (cold boot) the PC
This is incorrect. A cold boot is when you turn on the PC, so all the devices are unpowered, drivers are not in spin, etc.
A warm boot is what you’re talking about. All the devices are operational so it’s considered warm.
If you want ease of use, get an Amiga. The designers didn’t call the shared library that runs
the GUI system “Intuition” for nothing.
I’ve been playing with Linux for awhile & I must say that the folks at KDE & GNOME are placing
some of Windows 95 & 98 quirkiness into their systems. I hate having to click more than once
to perform a task. Also, who thought it was so smart to add file renaming as a mouse click to
their file managers? If you mistakenly click too fast, you overshoot the file renaming & the GUI
does whatever it’s set for with a double-click (Aaarrgghh!!). So why did this Windoze feature (bug?) end up in Linux? If I want to rename a file on my Amiga, I just select a menu item or
press the equivalent menu key, no having to take care of how my mouse gets clicked. This
is only one example of Linux going the wrong direction (i.e., incorporating Windows Look & feel into their GUIs). Stick with X-windows look & feel (or Solaris).
Play with an Amiga & see how simple & easy to use a GUI should be.
Unfortunately, I’m getting the impression that Amiga Inc. is trying to add Windows garbage to
their latest versions of the Amiga OS (They’ve already started by eating up screen real estate with a TaskBar in OS3.9 — but at least it can ge turned off). Come on folks, just because Microsoft does it does NOT mean that you have to!
49% still using W98, only 10% using XP….WHY?
Because XP got rid of the DOS Box, so you couldn’t use command line anymore, which even MS users wanted!
Whatever happened to an expert setting up the Linux box as a desk-top so that the user only had to USE it. You buy a car set-up, not in a box to take home and assemble, imagine if you had to install the engine in your car to use it?
Sure you have a DOS Box in Windows XP. And there are new command line programs like tasklist, taskkill, systeminfo etc.
Take a look:
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/windowstips/story/0,24330,336454…
Sure, they all “borrowed” them from the *NIX world, but at least they are finally there.
A couple of people have commented on this already (thanks Stew & Joe Nayares), but please do not think Windows is the most usable system around.
Don’t forget, Windows is the most popular desktop OS in the world and has been for some time. This does not mean that it is the “best way” to do things – it simply means that lots of people have got so used to it that they have developed ways to work around its shortcomings – this level of implicit knowledge is often underestimated.
I have used Redmond Linux and in my opinion it is more usable than Windows for the average home user – new apps are unlikely to be needed because so many are already installed. The operation is simple and straightforward, and like enough to Windows to calm anyone unfamiliar with Linux.
If you really want to look at usability, take a sample of people who have used neither system, and get them to perform a set amount of tasks and compare their performances. Until then, all this guff about usability remains just an opinion.
Example – a friend phoned me asking me how to shut down the computer – I said click on start, then logout and so on which was simple enough, but she said “why would I click on something marked start to stop the damn thing?”. For a moment I thought she was just stupid, but it says a lot about usability – logically, she is absolutely correct to think that, as she didn’t have this “implicit knowledge” that so many of us do.
She had also worked out how to switch off a Mac in a few seconds with no help, and Mac (& Lisa) was based on good usability research – Windows is NOT.
“49% still using W98, only 10% using XP….WHY?
Because XP got rid of the DOS Box, so you couldn’t use command line anymore, which even MS users wanted!
Whatever happened to an expert setting up the Linux box as a desk-top so that the user only had to USE it. You buy a car set-up, not in a box to take home and assemble, imagine if you had to install the engine in your car to use it?”
I nearly choked on my lunch when I read this… the shear stupidity!
It’s absolutely NOTHING to do with the command line. Are you a comedian?
Try the cost, the fact that it’s more difficult to pirate, the fact that you need an uber PC to run it whilst you can use 98 on the computer you bought 4 years ago. Most people haven’t upgraded because they have no reason that warrants the extra expenditure.
I hate it when people talk such shit. The worrying thing is, that it encourages other people to believe it.
One of the reasons for the original dominance of Windows was that it was so easy to pirate. And they were astutely aware of this in Redmond.
I can’t compiling the linux kernel with this Linux. It’s bad!!!
I tried Redmond Linux given as a free release with a recent UK Linux magazine. Installation was attempted on several PCs, to no avail. Other Linux versions including Red Hat and Mandrake were relatively easily installed on these later, using year-old releases from Cheep Linux. Redmond were well advised to change their name to Lycoris, because thousands of people like me got to try a poorly finished release of Redmond, and would not be willing to pay anything for an unfinished project. I don’t know why they give away shoddy releases, as it damages their reputation long-term.
Eugenia, please do some homework before writing a review. There are too many errors in the article, which may easily mislead people.
“However, I hope that future versions of Lycoris will use a file automatically for their swap space instead of a real partition – in addition to the / partition. This will greatly simplify the installation process for many users and won’t fragment their hard drives.”
Having a separate swap partition is one of many reasons why GNU/Linux is faster than Windows. The swap data is kept in one fixed place, where it cannot be mixed (i.e. fragmented) with other data. Swap data is accessed differently from regular data, and keeping it on a separate partition allows it to have a filesystem specially optimised for swap. Why use GNU/Linux if it’s crippled to be like Windows? That would make it no better than Lindows, which tries so hard to be like Windows that it runs everything in superuser (root) mode.
“Lycoris does not reset (cold boot) the PC”
I think you mean “warm boot”. A cold boot is when you cut the power and reinstate it.
“Also, the other media player included, NotATun, did not work for me at all.”
It’s spelt “Noatun”.
“Downloading RPMs from the web did not work well…”
Lycoris is based on Caldera. You need to use Caldera RPMs. Almost all of the RPMs available on the web are made for Red Hat.
“And speaking about consistency in a desktop environment, I would also welcome the addition of a GTK+ theme that looks identical to the main Qt/KDE theme, so at least Gnome and KDE applications would look the same. This will allow apps like Gnumeric or Abiword or even Evolution to look “Lycoris native”.”
Gnumeric and Evolution won’t work in Lycoris because they need GNOME, which Lycoris doesn’t include.
Sorry if I sound a bit harsh, I’m just trying to give some constructive criticism.
I enjoyed the article, felt it was well done. Someone mentioned getting a person who is not a linux user to sit down and use it then write the article. Good Idea. I have been testing several Linux versions for the past 2 years looking for one that will work as a desktop for people who do not wish to “get into” Linux.
My criteria for this is a gentleman in his late 70’s who has 2 machines and absolutely hates everything Windows stands for but still is forced to use it. He doesn’t want or feel he has the time to go through a learning curve to use a new OS. With this in mind, I tried the R/L distro from his point of view. I downloaded the burn-44 version iso and the game iso. Installation went well on my machine into the 3rd partition of the 2nd drive. There is also a CD-RW and CD-R in the machine. My friend could have installed it with a little assist due to the partitioning of my hard drive. On his machine……no problemo.
Everything Worked! This has NOT been my experience with the other 3 distros on this machine.
The only thing that didn’t work was Samba. I couldn’t connect to my other machines without setting up mount points and some tweaking here and there. Nor could I connect to R/L from another machine without some tweaking. So…..with this one exception the distro looked good.
R/L Linux is based on Caldera Open Linux 3.1, so updates from Caldera will work as will Caldera packaged RPMS. Yes, I also found a dependency problem during install. However I chose to install without the dependency check and the software installed ok, and ran ok.
By the way the games CD also has Apache on it and a few other things that the average Linux person might want…..
With two cd’s in the machine, I was pleasantly surprised when I put the games CD into the 2nd CD and the little icon on the taskbar lit up with a “2” indicating CD2 was being used. It mounted, I opened Konq, clicked on the RPM I wanted and it launched Kpackage. Clicked on Install and clicked off the dependencies. Bang the package installed. Can’t get much simpler than that.
One of the things I didn’t care for was clicking on the Redmond Distro Help and getting taken to either KDE help starter page or a dead page that said there was no help. I would have expected to get specific help about using the distro. Not generic KDE help.
Wine works somewhat, I opened Excell and Word, but it crashed on Access and it worked on Pegasus mail, which I use and a few other things. But Wine while included in many distros has a long way to go to be reliable in any sense. I would recommend Linux Alternatives before relying on Wine.
While I would not use the distro regularly for myself, I would not hesitate to recommend it to someone who has never used Linux, and is not interested in the internal workings or learning how to tweak Linux.
Sorry this is so long… but I wanted to share the experience I have had with R/L Linux.
Ray
After installing Lycoris and testing it one evening I have to agree it’s one of the finest Linux distro’s out there. It not only looks great but installs as well or easier than most MS products. Having a fine OS now installed is not enough for the “common” user. I believe once the many commercial software producers see such a fine OS and a market potential to develope their products for Linux, then it could become a desktop alternative. Hello Adobe, Intuit, Macromedia, Electronic Arts, Symantec, JASC etc. An OS is as good as the software it supports. We need to see Adobe Photoshop 6 for Linux, Paint Shop Pro 7 for Linux. How about Quicken for Linux? We need to have a clean and simple automated install of these titles too. No RPM or dependencies to worry about. Just a simple install. This is why the MAC has held up so long. It’s a fine PC and there are fine commercial apps of quality available that people use. Honestly, I’ve used some of the open source apps, many very good, but yet GIMP doesn’t quite come close to Photoshop. Quicken and Turbotax are hard to beat yet nothing in open source equals their quality. If the commercial developers produced their apps for Linux, I beleive it would further strengthen the open source community and finally bring Linux to the desktop. Borland is brave with Kylix being one of the first “Biggies” to boast cross platform support. The Delphi-Kylix programming community has the best of BOTH worlds. It’s time the end user, homemaker, student, Realtor, small business owner has the choice too. Spread the word about Lycoris, Elix, and possibly Lindows. Show the commerical people that there is money to be made on an open source OS as Linux. Certainly there are users ready for an alternative. I am.
This is the fifth distro I have tried, and while it was the easiest to do, the end result lacks a lot for me, and I suspect for other end users.
I use 98 at home, 2K and Redhat at work and am trying Lycoris on an older P1 150 with 64meg and an 8 gig drive.
Install was sweet. Solitare passed the time and it connected to the net after I turned on DHCP, but I had to hunt that down – not hard, but annoying.
I’m a technical writer so I have to keep cross-platform issues well in mind and this is where Lycoris fails. I need to import and export to others who are using Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Illustrator. I need as good a screen capture tool as Snagit.
Personally I find KDE harder (though pretty good in this version) than Gnome. The KDE word processor can’t export to native .doc format as does OpenOffice, etc.
I understand the desire to have a simple install with functional tools, but Windoze comes with minimal tools and you select the ones you want after-market. I think this is a better model as you can select the software that suits your needs, not what someone else thinks you need.
So the InstallShield/Wise type of install from the Windoze world is the model to look at and this is where all the Linux distros fail for the desktop user.
I do some work for a non-profit and they would like to migrate but it’s still too complex and not compatible enough for me to recommend yet. Lots of the stuff covered in the review is good to know, but doesn’t deal with functioning in an office enviornment and sending documents to users who have Mac’s, PC’s or whatever.
For myself, I’ll stick with the Mandrake 8.2 even though it’s a pain to get the install correct and then clean up afterward.