Fluxbuntu – not a bad start, I like it

This distribution deserves more detail here, and it will get it in a later post, but so far Fluxbuntu is looking like a solid candidate for a base to build a Debian/Ubuntu derived distro for the Zonbu.

The installer, which is lifted from the server installer, is text based.  It’s attractive and relatively self explanatory for anyone who is fiddling with different distros on their box.

Some initial observations:

It seems quite speedy.

I *LOVE* that VLC is the default media player.  It should be the default on the Zonbu as well.  It has very wide codec support out of the box, its quite powerful if you want to dig in to it, and is intuitive to use.  I would highly welcome VLC to replace the various bits and pieces on the Zonbu. It was pre-integrated with Firefox for click and play of downloaded web video.

I don’t like the visuals of Fluxbox, but I’m sure they can be customized and skinned etc. The Puppy Linux folks have done lots of work with JWN and others, I wonder if it is portable?

I easily installed Firefox 3.0 alpha from the repo and it works really well, so much so that I’m wondering if its more efficient than the 2.0 branch we use on almost everything else.

Putty also easily installed from the repos via the excellent Synaptic package manger.

Flash was easily installed with literally two mouse clicks, as with regular Ubuntu (and promted and handled from within Firefox I might add).

Rhapdosy.com would not install/play but that was due to my use of Firefox 3.0 not any other issue.

Audio worked fine out of the box, but required alsamixer to turn up the master from the console after initial install.

I need to head to bed for now, but this distribution bears more investigation.  Like all the others, it lacks the polish and cohesiveness of the ZonbuOS, but if I was going to run something else right now, this would probably be the first thing I’d delve in to.

That being said, you’re going to have trouble getting me off the ZonbuOS, everything JUST WORKS.  If they can solve some of the niggly bugs and do things like add VLC as the video platform, I’ll be really happy.  Speaking of which, I did ZERO video fiddling, so I assume I’m running VESA as no other VIA support is “out of the box” native on Ubuntu at the moment.  That being said, I was shocked when I could run full screen video with VLC without jerkiness.

Has anyone else tried Fluxbuntu on their Zonbu yet?

-Mr. Zombu