Yesterday I downloaded the Bittorrent ISO image for ZevenOS 1.0, a new take on the Ubuntu range.It was purported to mix BeOS with Ubuntu.

Today I ran it in a KVM on my main machine. Liking it's clean looks and smooth function, I installed it on an ancient laptop - Compaq Presario 1200 (celeron 700, 192mb, 30GB, 800x600 Passive TFT, Trident cyberblade VGA).

The following is a review of ZevenOS 1.0.

Installation:

On this ancient piece of kit I did not expect much in the way of speed to install, or even if it would. Firstly, upon booting the CD-RW I had written the image onto, I was given a modified Ubuntu CD boot loader, customised for ZevenOS. I tried the direct installation method... it went through the usplash, then screen went black and stayed black. No harddisk activity. Waited for 5 minutes...still nothing. So I tried the live CD mode. This worked, but it was incredibly slow. 40 minutes just to get into the desktop, and another 1.5 hours before installation completed. The installer is the standard Ubiquity installer from all the other Ubuntu variants. It works well. After telling it to shutdown, as the installer finished, the screen went black again, and I guessed it was waiting for the "press Enter now" so I did so, and it restarted.

History:
What prompted me to look at this new distribution was the focus on BeOS. BeOS, for those who don't know, was a new design of operating system that came about in the late 90s. It was attractive and fast, and designed for multimedia usage as well as general desktop. Unfortunately it died, due to MS and prevailing conditions. Read up about it elsewhere...
Anyhow, I loved BeOS, but it was never as capable as Linux is today. So seeing the cross between the two was very exciting.

BeOS Personal Edition 5

ZevenOS 1.0

Operation:
The look and feel of BeOS has been well achieved by the team behind ZevenOS. They have taken the core of Xubuntu 8.04.1, and blended with sawfish window manager, a custom theme, excellent icons and custom applications to replicate the BeOS way of doing things. It really is a very attractive environment, and more responsive than I was expecting on this hardware. I know BeOS would have worked really well on this hardware, but the Ubuntu kernel is much bigger. And many more services are loaded. But obviously you are also able to run current software and services.

The default applications include Firefox for web browsing, Sylpheed for Email, Pidgin for IM, Xchat for IRC, Gimp and GpicView for images, Thunar for filemanager, Abiword for word processing, Gnumeric for spreadsheets, PyNeighborhood for Samba browsing, Geany for programming/text editing( great choice!), and many others.

At first running, the system says that there are 44 upgrades to do. This is before it has even connected to the internet.

I could not connect to the net wirelessly on the old RTL2500 802.11g PCMCIA card I had. The system recognised the card just fine, but the Network Manager was misbehaving, and refused to let me "Unlock" it to input the details to control the card. Although this is a problem with the Ubuntu package, it should not have been left in this state for a default install. I connected with a LAN cable, updated the system totally, then it worked.It would also have worked with CLI altering of the network interfaces, but that's a drag with wireless.

Many of the interface areas are in German, such as default bookmarks in Firefox, and menu setup for the XFCE menus, and Peopleedit. Not an issue for me, but maybe for some.

Sylpheed, an app I had never used before, looked pretty good, and was easy to set up with an email account. However every email that I tried to open that had an attachment crashed Sylpheed totally. Sylpheed doesn't display HTML email either. I know I can rely upon Thunderbird.

PyNeighborhood scanned my network well, but required a lot of extra conditions put into the Preferences area to make it mount in an area my user had privileges to.

The Firefox spell checking is marking most words as wrong as I type this; the spell checker is set to Portugese/Portugal. Huh?

There is an odd little app called MeCol in the Accessories menu. There is no explanation of what it does or why, and I couldn't figure it out.

The Magi2 app on the desktop is an excellent control centre for pretty much everything you could need. It integrates the menu system and the control apps.

The Catfish search app looks great- very easy to use.

All in all, the system is pleasant and a joy to use. It makes this old laptop come to life. It has a few rough edges to be expected from a 1.0 release, but they are easily smoothed out.

Smoothing out:
In Synaptic, add the Third Party repo:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid main restricted universe multiverse
Update the package database.
Upgrade the following packages:
policykit
policykit-gnome
sylpheed
Remove:
language-pack-xx - whatever languages you don't want installed
sylpheed if you prefer Thunderbird
Then remove the tick for the new Repo in the Third Party tab again. this is to avoid killing your system with upgraded packages it is not ready for.( I'm being cautious here not to use Intrepid packages on top of Hardy)

Adding OpenOffice if you wish is simply a matter of choosing it in Synaptic also.

Enjoy your new ZevenOS!!

ZevenOS forums: http://www.zevenos.com/forum/index.php