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Lycoris Desktop/LX Review
JigSaw writes: "Lycoris Desktop/LX (formerly known as 'Redmond Linux') is viewed by many as the new big distribution in the "Linux on the Desktop" arena. OSNews features an extensive review of the latest Lycoris and outlines the good and the bad things of the distro. In short, Lycoris seems to suffer from the general GNU/Linux situation to not be ready to power a true desktop-oriented, easy to use distribution yet."
. In short, Lycoris seems to suffer from the general GNU/Linux situation to not be ready to power a true desktop-oriented, easy to use distribution yet
Just making another distro isn't enough to be "Linux's answer to the desktop." It'll require more products, more "wizbangs", easier installation, and general "user friendliness" on all aspects. I'd concentrate on more products, ensuring you can go seamlessly between Windows and Linux flawlessly (Word docs as a minor example), before making a distro to be the "answer."
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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.
..Uh, but there are far better native apps available for free.. Why would you ever want to run windows notepad or calculator? I understand the eventual goal of WINE to run all those exe's seamlessly, but why is WINE a nice addition in this distribution if it just runs simple programs that already have better native versions?
air and light and time and space
I'm not sure if I read it correctly, but did it read that the basic LX install did NOT include the source code? So are they shipping a version that violates the GPL? I did see that the upgraded more expensive version includes 3 additional CD's, with one of them being marked as the source code disk. Could someone clear this up for me?
Personally, this is the most uninformed and uneducated review of a linux distribution I have ever read.
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.
What is that supposed to mean?
Am I out of the loop or does linux support swap files (as opposed to partitions) now?
How much 'simpler' would it really make it anyway. It doensn't fragment the disk, put the swap at the end and be done with it.
It get's better:
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.
I don't know what's wrong with the mounting issue, but what kind of faster algorithm is he talking about here?
</rant>
Pointer
[%- PROCESS life -%]
Try this distribution, try Mandrake 8.2 (even the RC release), and you'll understand that Lycoris is not a big deal. In my humble opinion of course.
I have gotten used to using StarOffice, Mozilla, Licq, and several other applications that have almost taken the need to boot into Windows away completely. The only times I find myself booting into Windows is to play video games or watch media files that I can't find Linux players for (.wmv--mostly pr0n).
Since Linux can be configured well enough for my far-from-computer-geek girlfriend to use, and the only reason I boot into Windows is to surf for pr0n and play video games, I think that it would actually make a better solution in the working environment. All the productivity, none of the vices...
Just my two cents...
that every "easy to use" Linux distro is actually only an easy install for the user?
Real work needs to be done in helping the user in case an application fails.
Also, every one of the distros seems to be very superficial; they simply include some nice skins and applications that resemble those in windows, but many of these applications are hardly as functional as their "hard to use" counterparts.
Shouldnt these companies put more of their money behind making powerful products easier to use?
I know I'll probably come off as a pro-Linux zealot for this.. but..
I am a first year compsci student. Before this year, all of my attempts to try to use Linux failed horribly.. but in January this year, I installed Redhat, and immediately fell in love. I've slowly been learning how to take advantage of all of Linux's more advanced features, and I've lately been able to fix problems based on intuition, rather than long searches on Google.
Whenever any of my friends come over, they see my computer, and they gasp. They love the way KDE looks, they love the Liquid theme, they love transparent menu's, they love the functionality of the command prompt, they ENVY the fact I can leave it on for days.. even weeks without having to so much as log out. (probably not the safest thing to be doing.. but it makes me feel big, lol)
The only things which prevent people from installing Linux on their own computers are the following
1. Lack of MSN messenger (Kmerlin) built in. They would not know where to look, if they were going to find it.. and it seems to be the most popular messenger at my university.
2. Once and awhile the Xserver bombs, and deletes the 'fixed fonts'.. which requires some knowledge to fix.
3. Decent CD burning software
4. A file sharing program which does not bomb all the time.
5. Better media support - Built in Divx support... easy to install quicktime support.. easy to find realplayer (it takes awhile to find realplayer if you don't know where to look)
The last thing it needs is to be pre-installed on a few computers.. but this article shows why that isn't likely to happen.
In preparation for Ballmer meeting with a Dell executive to talk about the computer maker's support of Linux, a confidential Microsoft briefing e-mail notes as a talking point that "it's untenable for a 'premier partner' of Windows 2000 to be doing aggressive marketing development for another operating system."
"This little drama ends" later that year, Kuney said, with Dell abandoning its Linux efforts with the head of the program being reassigned.
Overall, I think Linux is pretty much ready for the desktop. Everyone here is always bitching about stuff like document support.. which for the desktop, IMO, is pretty irrelevant. The majority of people out there transfer documents by copying and pasting to emails.
I don't know what's wrong with the mounting issue, but what kind of faster algorithm is he talking about here?
:) But then again, I only reboot when upgrading kernels so...
:)
He is a she, and like all (ex-)BeOS users, Eugenia is obsessed with bootup speed, because BeOS booted in about 12 seconds on most machines (it actually booted in 8 seconds on my BeBox during the DR days). A small amount of tweaking got me a 15 second bootup time in Linux (from the GRUB prompt to my X session manager, xdm), and that includes SCSI initialization. The main rule is of course is to avoid anything that starts with a K!
However, in all my Linux years I have never ever waited *2 minutes* for a partition to mount. So either Eugenia's box is terribly slow, or something is very wrong with that Linux distro, or she's lying
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
I think both you and the reviewer are applying a fallacy I often see in online reviews and evaluations -- especially on Slashdot. I call it the Me Fallacy. This fallacy is the assumption that your own needs are the needs of the product's target audience. So you applaud and criticize when the product succeeds and fails to meet your needs -- even if that's not what the product is trying to do.
I see this in the review (which does make some good points) when it criticizes Lycoris for not providing development apps. This is an end user distro, for Pet's sake! Of course, a developer might want it anyway (I'm going to try it in the hope that it will integrate with my company's IPX network better than the others), but such a user is perfectly capable of downloading apps -- and is more interested in how well the distro accomodates third-party packages than what specific packages the distro provides.
>However, in all my Linux years I have never ever
:)
:)
>waited *2 minutes* for a partition to mount. So
>either Eugenia's box is terribly slow,
Dual PIII 450 Mhz, 512 MB of RAM. Lycoris is installed on a *fast* SCSI drive, while both the FAT32 partitions are on an also modern IDE drive.
> or something is very wrong with that Linux distro,
I read somewhere that their FAT32 code is still alpha. I am sure there is A LOT of room for improvement.
> or she's lying
You are very welcome to come and see it yourself if you are living in the Bay Area. You are warmly invited to our house and experience it yourself.
Anybody attempting to design a truly user-friendly Linux distro needs to start by making IceWM the default window manager. IceWM gives the average users What They Want: a simple clean desktop. The taskbar isn't filled with junk (well, maybe a little, but the distro should default it out), just a set of simple buttons. Yes, it looks a lot like Windows, but that's not necessarily bad. What's important is that it's a clean interface that users can understand right away. The desktop war is won or lost in the first minute that the user looks at the screen and decides if s/he understands what's going on.
Miko O'Sullivan
I could be completely off my rocker here but wasn't it ALWAYS possible to use swap files instead of partitions?
... /swap
/etc/fstab like:
/swap
Now I don't necessarily mean swap files directly supported by the kernel, but if you _really_ wanted to use a swap file instead couldn't you create a file, format it as a linux swap and then mount it as a loopback device?
Something like:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap
# mkswap
Then put an entry in
/swapfile swap swap defaults,loop 0 0
And finally:
# swapon
I just tried this on slackware 8.0 with kernel 2.4.18 and it works. I don't know if this is a "new feature" or anything but I'm pretty sure that as long as your kernel supports loopback devices then this would work.
Maybe someone with better kernel knowledge could provide some better insight.
P.S I still don't see why you would want to do this. Espcially considering that in any good install program geared towards end-users they would not have to worry about partitioning (and even if they did it seems to me like paritioning would still be easier than doing what I described above). At least I know that I would still prefer a swap partition as opposed to a file anyway...
--
Garett
I downloaded the .iso and installed Lycocis on two machines the other day. One was a pretty dismal failure, the other was a pretty fair success.
Lycoris did NOT like my dual-processor, no-IDE hard drive main system. While it DID install, it couldn't recognize my LS-120 drive as a floppy drive to make a rescue disk. Red Hat 7.2 does. Lycoris botched the LILO install on my main SCSI drive leaving me with LI and no boot disk. It made no mention of recognizing the second processor and the box has 1 Gb of RAM, which requires a kernel toggle -- I have no idea if it actually did. It also defaults to NOT installing the necessary Xine plugin to play CSS-encrypted DVDs. You've gotta track that down yourself.
However, on the single-processor Athlon, w/768 Mb of RAM and an IDE HD and a normal floppy, it worked fine. Install went smoothe and everything was recognized. It was very similar to Windows, which is the point -- keep the mental transition to a minimum.
Personally, I don't like the wallpaper. I found it to be too garish and distracting. However, that is easily enough fixed. I also don't like the theme that fakes transparency (liquid?), as it chews up too much CPU time and seems to make the machine a little sluggish. Again, easy enough to fix.
Recommendations: Kit, while functional, is a bit spartan for most Windows people's IM. A nice Jabber client or the actual Netscape AIM client would be much better. Install DeCSS by default and the plugin for Xine to play encrypted DVDs. It played everything else, though -- DivX, MPEG, OGG, MP3, etc.
KOffice is nice, if you don't need major compatibility with MS Office. Since they left out Konqueror and used Mozilla, I'd suggest replacing KOffice with OpenOffice.
Finally, work a deal with the Crossover people and include the Crossover plugin installed and a wizard to install Quicktime and Shockwave.
It is actually a real good distro for people who know little to nothing about PCs. For power users, it is something to avoid.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I run lycoris on no fewer than 5 machines inside and outrside of a windows domain. I disagree with the 'not ready' statement and it shows that the person who commented on the article hasnt used the distro.
In all 5 cases (all different machines) it found all hardware and installed seamlessly, the video card on my personal notebook (Dell LS400) was found perfectly, something Mandrake 8 and 8.1 couldnt manage.
the Distro has built in and fully workin Div-xm,DVD, Mp3 and the Koffice suite, Samba configured to acccess windows shares by default and wine.
My home network is a windows XP pro one with a shared internet connection (dont laugh it works 100% perfectly and requires 2 seconds setup) Lycoris found it without config and worked straight away fpr all web funtions, it connects by default with my shares and it does so on windows 200 active directory as well.
In short its a desktop OS for the average user, it doesnt come with advanced features, compilers and dev tools installed but you can download and install them, its a full working simple to use and install linux distro for everyone. I gave it to my mother of all people and she loves it - it does everything she needs, loads fast, looks like fun and she can run her windows stuff.
I have given this OS to about 20 people from technical linux zealots to newbies and all of them have enjoyed using it and the newbies love it - in short its an OS i as an IT manager can roll out on a desktop, it's built on top of redhat and users RPMS which makes it great if you already have redhat servers and use the OS in your environment.
Yes it needs work but what is doesnt need is apache or any other server components, it doesnt need compilers and 10 shells instaled as a default, its a desktop linux and it works and for the first time a user doesnt need to resort to makefiles and consoles to try and get anything working in the OS (Div-x Under redhat anyone ?)
It works for what it is and its worth $29 or you can download for free.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
I notice Lycoris has made a decision that I really wish more distros would make:
/etc/init.d/ script to set up iptables, I can configure /etc/smb.conf, I can apt-get update from security.debian.org, I can enter some lines into /etc/fstab and /etc/crontab... need I go on, this can all be done... by an experienced sysadmin! Pull some of this stuff together into a system that functions as a unit and you've got something pretty damn amazing that will knock the pants off expee any day of the week. I just wish I had some more spare time and could code better, a handful of people could probably do what I've suggested (not that I think that's all of what Linux needs to be desktop complete, but it's certainly impressive and not hard to do.)
DON'T SHOVEL LOADS OF IDENTICAL SOFTWARE ON!
The K menu on Lycoris is sanely organised and there's one of everything. If you look at your average dist, when a user fires up the brand new desktop they're greeted with a load of disordered crap in the menus, half of which sticks out like a sore thumb (GTK+/Qt mismatch... sigh I really wish we could standardise on one of these. Preferably Qt but then of course it's put out by an Evil Company (TM) nevermind the fact that it's GPL.) and the other half just doesn't work. That's not a great first impression to make. Just by sorting out the defaults on installation Lycoris has taken a huge step forward.
The one thing imho that Linux needs on the desktop is a more homogeneous feel. One desktop environment and one widget set. One administration package. I want to boot into a KDE only desktop, start up KControl and schedule some backups every weekend and select "Automatically install security updates every week", maybe set up some email and web accounts for the kids, set up my firewall to "Allow web server and email traffic", and set up a home LAN and share some files around. If I were an end user doing that I'd think "Holy shit I can't do THIS under Windows!"
Come on fellas, this can be done. I can write an
I briefly had this distro installed on one of my computers, that the family uses, and had it set up to look as much like Windows as possible. I had Office running through Wine (it just worked *shrug*), and I wanted to see if it would trick the family. Long story short, the major difference they noticed was the fact that the interface was incredibly slow. Click on the "Go" button, and you wait two or three seconds to bring it up, even on a 1.7GHz P4.
Windows flies, KDE drags. Linux won't win on the desktop until the interface can actually compete with Windows, for every user.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
It's not so much whether beginners find it initially easier to use, but that once the users learn the basics of how to use the overall system interface, how much can they apply those basics to quickly learning the interface of a new application.
That being said, there's a lot of bad decisions that one can make in interface design that are just plain stupid from a cognitive psychology standpoint and shouldn't be done in any interface on any platform in any circumstance. And microsoft is a frequent practitioner of this stupidity. Windows' Multi-row tabs are a perfect example, because they do not conform to the user expectation about how folder tabs are laid out: in a file cabinet, you do not have one folder tab above another and the visual search you do for a desired tab strictly on a horizontal plane. The even more confusing part about the multi-row tabs were that the widgets (i.e. the tabs) actually switch locations on screen, where the bottom tabs come to the top and vice-versa. Having widgets radically change their location on screen is a big no-no. In all fairness, Microsoft has recently been getting rid of the multi-row tabs, but why did it take them so long?
For years, usability experts have criticized Microsoft's UI shennanigans like multi-row tabs and Window-in-Window MDI, and Microsoft often does not make needed changes until 3-4 years later, if at all. Even if Microsoft gets rid of the bad design, 3rd party Windows application are by no means required to do this, and they often take even longer to purge their applications of Microsoft's bad UI than Microsoft.
There really is a double standard of design in the linux development community. If someone who knows nothing about OS design were to copy into the linux kernel a really stupid microsoft design that seriously compromised security and stability, something that OS development gurus and security experts have said for years should never be done, and do it all in the name of providing windows users with the same Blue Screens of Death and intrusions they're used to, they'd get burned at the stake with all the flames they'd get. If someone in the linux development community who knows almost nothing about interface design (which is really most of the linux development community) copies a microsoft design that seriously compromises usability and has been criticized for years by experts in the UI design field, they'd get a hearty pat by many in the linux community for "easing the migration for windows users".
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!