TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

I was directed to this distribution from LinuxForums. It claims to have been created to "make the installation and maintenance of Slackware easier." This I was interested to see.

When reading through the site for Absolute, one line stood out. When describing the purpose of the distribution, the author states: "The system is built to do what I want it to do. Nothing less but nothing more." He actually does a fairly good job explaining who might and might not like his distribution. I can't say I wasn't warned.

Install:

It's worth noting that the ISO comes as a tar.gz archive that includes a set of HTML instructions (with screenshots) on setting up the distro. This is more than Slackware comes with, so I have to give the maintainer props for that.

Just for grins I read through the several-page document. It's surprisingly well-written. I'm not sure how well a complete novice would do running through it, but it wouldn't take a lot of knowledge to follow the step-by-step instructions.

The screenshots spell out pretty clearly which options to choose and what to type in the prompts. This is definitely more help than Slackware gives you by itself.

The installer starts with a text prompt telling you to configure your partitions using cfdisk. Instructions for this are in the documentation.

I set my swap and root partitions and pointed the install program to the install disc. Again, this is identical to what I would do in Slackware proper. At this point I was waiting for these supposed improvements to the installer.

The first difference came when it started installing things. You get no choice in what's installed. Also different was the selection of packages it threw on. I'll get into that more in the next section.

The documentation goes into a fair amount of detail about the post-install configurations like network settings, X and mouse settings. I was surprised to find that after your initial reboot, the documentation ends abruptly.

It would have been nice if there was one more page outlining how to go about creating a regular user account and booting into X Windows for the first time. As is, a novice user would assume all was well and just run as root user indefinitely.

At the text logon prompt after reboot you're given colored instructions such as "Type 'startx' to begin." This would help a new user. So far the improvements over vanilla Slackware have been subtle, but welcome.

Auto-mount for CDs was not active. I had to manually mount everything I inserted. This is decidedly *not* newbie-friendly.

MP3, WMV8, and MPG movie playback were all present. This is on par with Slack 12, and expected from a Slackware derivative. It's ironic that most major distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu) have such difficulty *cough* no balls *cough* when including such basic functionality.

I clicked on the "Getting Started" icon on the desktop just on a whim and immediately realized why the install tutorial stopped so abruptly.

All the post-reboot tutorials are included in the actual install. Topics covered auto-mount, user accounts, USB, audio and movie configurations and playing CDs. Color me fairly impressed.

Unfortunately, even though the tutorial claimed auto-mount was on by default, I received the same cryptic error I got in Slack 12.

The screen shots for the in-desktop tutorial were out of date. There wasn't, for instance, a "Configuration" menu in my "System Tools" folder.

There was no scanner software, and although SANE was installed, it could not detect my scanner. No comics on this distro.

I had no issues installing the Nvidia 3D drivers, so in theory at least I should be able to play my games.

Software Selection:

No GNOME or KDE is installed. Instead you get Icewm with Rox Filer. This is a good choice for people with older machines and limited RAM. It just wasn't particularly attractive to me. At least it was fast.

Java 1.6 was included, much like Slackware 12. I am still always happy when this is thrown in. Firefox, Pidgin and GIMP are included, but OpenOffice was supplanted by AbiWord. I suppose this goes along with the "use less resources" idea.

The games included are all X-specific (rather than Gnome or KDE specific), since including KBounce or Gnometris would have required their respective libraries to be loaded, thus more system resources. I particularly enjoyed "Spooky Shooter," a 2D sprite-based shooter game that reminded me of "Chiller" on the old gray NES.

Other programs of interest include QT Designer, which I found odd considering the KDE libraries were not included. Nevertheless, it's a decent C/C++ IDE.

Who's it best for?

Absolute is a solid, lightweight distribution that will probably work on just about anyone's hardware. It doesn't include any of the usual graphical suspects (Gnome or KDE) or any of their usual programs (K apps or G apps), but it has included decent alternatives that don't use the resources of either of these desktop environments.

The addition of the fairly robust documentation both before and after install is a welcome one, and something I would like to see more distributions include. It allows the user to get the help they need out of the box, without an internet connection.

The look of the distro is pretty sparse, but it's functional where it counts. The automount issue would need to be rectified, but in theory I could do as much work on this distro as Slackware 12. All in all, not bad.