Dreamlinux 3.5 Review – Desktop Emphasis

Introduction

I have been distro hopping a lot in recent times, ever since I got VMware, and dedicated about half my system resources to it. I was testing a lot of the less known Linuxes but never came across one that had no big problem.

Of course, Dreamlinux is not one of the myriad of unknowns. It’s a fairly popular Linux distro, particularly in its home (Brazil), though the default language is English.

What got me interested was not that it had some whopping new feature, or some remarkable trick up its sleeve. What impressed me was the high amount of polish that had gone into whatever the distribution had to offer.

System

For some time, my test system has been the VMware Workstation 6.5 running with 1024MB RAM, and dual processors. I install VMware tools, and run the distributions in full screen mode, or perhaps in Unity mode. This lets me test distros before graduating them to my proper hard disk partitions. My actual system is a 2.4GHz AMD X2 Turion 64 laptop, 2GB RAM, 256MB ATI Radeon 1650. I assign a combined 20GB worth of partitions to Linux, while the rest, obviously, is Windows.

What this means is that following review is a merger of the two experiences: Virtual Machine, and actual hardware.

Live Boot – First impressions

The Live boot is a little messy. You get to see a lot of console text scrolling down during the boot – and not only for the kernel, but right to the end before the login manager takes over, and you get a graphical screen.

That however, is the last you see of anything unpolished. The desktop is beautiful to look at, while it’s clearly inspired by the Mac, it stops short of completely replicating that. You get a clean, simple, and easy workspace, and a lot of eye-candy. On my hardware, Compiz worked out of the box, which does not happen as often as I would want it to. Applications for most regular tasks are pre-installed, though it clearly doesn’t hoard up on them. In fact, the impressions were exactly what the word Dreamlinux might conjure up: not bold, not beautiful, but very elegant, precise and polished.

I hate clones (as I did with gOS), but this is perhaps a subjective exception, because it maintains what I want – usability.

Deeper in

And talking about usability, it scores high too. It is based on Debian, which means that the whole Debian repositories are for you to peruse. The front end for Apt-get is Synaptic.

It employs the XFCE desktop interface, which I never really liked. Dreamlinux would be an exception once again: the dock is employed very effectively, and the theming of XFCE makes it look like something far more advanced.

One of the glitches is that once a windows is maximizes, the dock bar at the bottom is not covered. That makes for a very, very bad display. However, unless you are in the habit of maximizing your windows all the time, this should not bother you much.

Multimedia on Dreamlinux is, well, a dream. It has the best set of pre-installed codecs I have yet seen in a Linux distro. Best working would perhaps be closer to the mark – many distros exhibit installed codecs, but here, they reallyo trulyo work.

Hardware is more of a problem. I did not really have trouble configuring my LAN, or my sound volumes, or display, but much of that is not obvious. Perhaps it is meant to be so – to keep prying desktop users away from the system vitals, but I found it a pain to dig around in the Control Panel. I find the Control Panel itself to be very nice indeed – but what runs behind it is certainly not. And the problem in labeling is a very obvious problem – the button ‘XFCE settings’ or ‘Alsa config’ will never specify much to the average Linux newbie, or user.

The default software selection seems to be the standard one for a medium level distro: OpenOffice, GIMP, Totem, etc. But the Debian repositories mean the massive world of software is open to you. In other words, Dreamlinux is a fully fledged distro.

One of the points that one notices about this is that Dreamlinux is designed for mass adoption, or easy distribution. It packs, by default, a distro remastering tool, a disk burner, OEM installers and so on. This makes it very easy to turn Dreamlinux into a custom distro that you can share amongst particular groups of people.

On my hardware install, it also picked my wireless drivers easily. There seems to be some option that provides for installing Windows drivers inside Dreamlinux, perhaps a front end to Ndiswrapper, but I never needed to use it. My bluetooth, however, did not work. SUSE, so far, is the only distro where it works properly.

There is also something known as Easy Install – that installs advanced drivers (for Nvidia), some Google programs and such automatically. These programs are not found on the installation disk, thus I could not follow up on this feature (because of a poor internet connection).

One of the best things is that Dreamlinux keeps maintaining the changes you make to it while Live. If you finally install it, you actually keep all those configuration changes. One of the nice touches.

Installation

In the final part, I decided to install it. The installer is one of the larger puzzles of this distro. It features a pretty much uncustomizable one window installer, that just allows you to choose partitions (not make them), install GRUB, and make user passwords.

While this is a fairly unique, and simple, approach, it will not win hearts amongst the techier (read: geekier) users of the distro who would like to be able to customize their installation.

Nevertheless, the installation works perfectly. It takes a bit of time, and does not show the progress too well, but gets the job done.

After the install, the console commands that you see during Live boot are replaced by a simple, elegant boot loading bar.

Conclusion

It is a distro well done. There are problems here and there, and some unfinished business. But overall, I like th distro. It is not there to take over my favourite openSUSE, which I still find the most complete Linux of all, but it is not bad.

Rating: 8/10

The Junk that is IE8

I have never been much of a fan of the Internet Explorer franchise. Why Microsoft is bent upon forcing IE through is beyond me – they should have simply given after IE6 was drubbed by Firefox 2.0 and onwards.

Nevertheless, we saw the miserable IE7 and now, we have IE8.

I was piqued by press hype, saying that IE8 was good, the new features were excellent, how it was very secure, etcetera etcetera. But I was not expecting much. I had tried the beta, and the beta had been a nightmare. Nothing had worked at all, ranging from the display of the pages, right down to the very interface display.

And now came the final release. I took a deep breath and installed.

Alas, the bad things began immediately. I needed to reboot for the installation to complete. I run three different servers for my university, and rebooting just to install a browser is hard for me to swallow (when did Firefox ever ask me to reboot?). After a lot of deliberating, I did.

Back came my old nightmares. Bad display. The interface looked as if it had been designed for a 640×480 resolution and had been zoomed to meet my 1680×1050 resolution. It was slow, too. It took ages for the Google homepage to load, though that was mainly due to the time it took for IE to properly initiate itself. Pages did load perceptibly faster after that first tank, but only if you call mangling a page ‘loading’. The worst part of the whole affair is that even the Microsoft website had a few rough edges here and there. Not exactly my cup of tea.

I rolled back to IE7. Not that I ever use IE anyway, but at least IE7 worked when it had to.

Safari 4 vs Firefox 3.1 (aka 3.5) – Which will win?

First, the interesting part. As the web watching community knows, what was going to be Firefox 3.1 is now to be Firefox 3.5 as a better “representation of scope”. Of course, that is not what us users have to worry about.

What we have to worry about is that Firefox 3.5 and Apple’s Safari 4 are probably going to be released around the same time. And we have to worry about which is better.

And if we are to listen to the developers, we would have to settle for both. Both are deemed to be “fast”, “secure”, and “powerful”. They are both standards compliant, but both still in beta, so we hardly have much material to work with. As far as I can tell in my tests – they both do their basic job (loading websites) well and fast.

Truth is, one cannot really tell yet. Both have some serious bugs and problems to fix – in particular, stability problems. Safari seems to have introduced plenty of eye-candy, in a particularly useful manner: galleries, top sites, quick dial kind of things. On the other hand, Mozilla seems has been up to a few tricks of it’s own: super-speed, super-security, and a very powerful administration mechanism that makes it completely independent of the host operating system’s settings.

In the end it will come down to whichever is most convenient to use. And that is where, I think, Firefox will take the cake. I am talking about the Firefox Add-Ons. The one true advantage in Firefox. I cannot work my browser without my myriad of addons, such as FireFTP, DownThemAll!, Ubiquity, Fasterfox, and the many personalisations themes and extensions.

I think Firefox will take this round home.

Why Technology is Addictive…

Over the last ten days (in which, my readers may have noticed, there have been no posts), I have been busy as a beaver building a dam.

I have been building working on my university projects, using a Tor and Your-Freedom with OpenVPN to bypass my universities horribly fascist firewalled prock-sy, and testing out new versions of Linux.

Which suddenly brought a point home to me – all my work is in front of a computer. I don’t play video games, I don’t do anything that is classically the definition of fun, but nevertheless, I have been sitting in front of my laptop nearly nonstop.

Some psychologists I know (my parents are doctors) think that technology is addictive. I don’t disagree. But it’s not addictive because it leverages the brain chemistry changes as drugs do, it’s addictive because it’s a different way of thinking.

I’ll leave you to ponder. Think.

Packet Crafting – and how to to go about it

There are many reason one may want to to delve into packet building, i.e. the building of raw data packets to send into a network. Security testing, responsiveness checks, or even special communications, no matter what, you may need them.

Fortunately, there are a few free tools that may help. Each of the tools listed allow packet generation.

The salient point about the ones I have given is that they are all Windows compatible, unlike most of the rest, which are Linux-only tools.

The first two work from commandline, and the other two have GUIs. But be wary: none of them is for the novice. You need to know a god bit about networks to use them – but then again, unless you do, there’s probably no reason you would want to either.

And you will need WinPcap (a free socket tool for Windows) to use the first three.

Note: The links are not given as these tend to vary very rapidly. Google the names.

1. Hping3
2. Nemesis
3. PackEth
4. Colasoft Packet Builder