Tuesday, August 29, 2006

easys Linux (formally Pocket Linux) Review

I have recently tried easys, and found it usable, but lacking in ways.

easys is meant to be light weight, simple to use, and unconfusing with a policy of one application per task. Does it succeed? Well, maybe.

It is light-weight while still looking attractive with a custom KDE Light desktop (Openbox instead od kwin, etc.), and I must complement them on having only one application per task. But the terminal choice makes no sense (qt based, Konsole is installed, but they use aterm?!), the menu is impossible to edit without going all 1337, and they don't have enough tasks. For example, easys comes with networking preconfigured, but no dialup program, and it has xchat for connecting to chat servers, but no IM program like GAIM.

Software installation is a pain with slackware's slackpkg (although I grant that the update function worked like a dream), which involves either 1) Using the tiny slackware repository, 2)downloading packages at linuxpackages.net, or 3) Compiling programs yourself. Considering that slackpkg doesn't handle dependencies, non of these options are very user-friendly, even if the desired program is in the slackware repository.

Configuration is a nightmare in easys. Well, a nightmare if you aren't a huge geek. The installer is decent enough, but it didn't let me add a user, so I spent the next ten minutes fumbling around looking for the GUI tool that wasn't there. Finally I just looked up the command line tool, adduser, which worked fine. Also, the sound never did work. It did find my sound card, but no sound would ever be played. Finally, it used VESA on me. I had a GeForce 2 video card, which should work fine with nv, but no. It used VESA.

I can't say it was all bad, however. It was lightweight, slick, and professional. The theme was quite presentable, and Firefox would actually download plugins by itself, which is something that was broken in Xubuntu 6.06 and SUSE 10.0. I also have to say that the login screen was nice and matched the theme nicely (unlike KateOS).

All in all, this is a nice alternative to Slackware (Easier to use), but I wouldn't want to use it if I was a newbie, or if I wanted it to just work without fiddling. Yet somehow, despite all of it's flaws, I can't help but like it.

Ease-of-use: 3/5
Hardware detection: 1/5
appearance: 4/5
Stability: -Still testing- 3.5/5
Tilt: 5/5
Overall: 3/5

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