TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Absolute Linux, according to its website, is an attempt to take Slackware and make it more convenient with a few well-placed scripts. This sort of thing is right up my alley, as my biggest complaint with Slackware has always been the manual nature of it.

As this is more of a point release, there's not much different from Absolute 12.0. You might want to start by reading my rant on that one here. I'll try not to repeat myself too much.

From what I can tell, the whole distro is run by a computer repairman by the name of Paul. He likes Slackware but finds some of the necessary tasks to get it set up to be a bit tedious. He's not alone. Therefore he wrote a few scripts to save time and effort. Good for him. Let's see how they work.

Install:

The installer isn't greatly different from Slackware's ncurses menus. You must partition your own drive before you run it. You choose your swap and root, and tell it to go. It chooses the packages for you.

Slackware users are probably cringing right now asking themselves, "But...but what if I don't want what it installs?" Quit cringing; you're not the target audience.

Much like Ubuntu, I gather that the maintainer of Absolute wants to take some of the guesswork out of this. You pop in the disc, partition the drive and let it go. The purpose (again according to Paul's site) is to give him something he can easily install again and again on his PC and the PCs of his clients.

Another stated purpose is to have an up-to-date OS that doesn't absolutely kill older machines, and that purpose is apparent when looking at the default desktop. This is not an eye-candy distribution. Personally, I don't mind that.

Before you get to that desktop you have to log in as root and type "startx." I was greeted by the sound of the Warner Brothers' Roadrunner. I'm not entirely sure about the legality of that little sound byte. Perhaps it's public domain by now.

As stated on the site, Paul expects the user to log in as root first and get everything configured, then create a user account to do their business in. Thankfully he makes that process much simpler with a small script, which is detailed in the help documentation.

Several other topics are covered as well, including a script to install multimedia codecs. Fair warning is given beforehand for those of us in unlucky countries with odd laws governing such things (sigh).

Given an internet connection (such as I had in the VM) the whole codec-download process took me about 30 minutes, as the dialog suggested. Sadly (since the codecs aren't included on the disc) this means that on Rig 2 I was pretty much out of luck unless I could get the wireless card working.

When I tried to run the Set Screen Size script I got an error. Whoops. I guess Paul missed that one during QA testing.

I logged out of X and tried running "safex," as suggested in the boot messages. This gave me a standard resolution (1024x768) which would work for now.

Software Selection:

Firefox, Pidgin and GIMP were included in the default install. Abiword replaced OpenOffice Writer. The games definitely lean toward the "works on a Pentium 1" category.

If you download the second disc (which is really just an archive of TGZ packages rather than an ISO) you get some more choices. The full list can be found here. The packages I was interested in were the games. Inkscape was good too.

Conclusion:

I like a distribution that makes things easier up front but doesn't take away the ability to dig in deeper. That's precisely what Absolute does. Slackware power-users can still do their command-line voodoo if they like; this just gives them a quicker base from which to work.

Do I honestly think die-hard Slackers will *want* Absolute? Probably not, but it's out there if they do. For other folks perhaps not as keen on manual text file configurations, Absolute is a good option.

Although I do like the clean look and small memory footprint, I expected a little more polish from a full-CD distribution. One step backward from standard Slackware was the lack of MP3 support out of the box. I understand that if Paul lives in the USA, he can't legally distribute this, but it's still an annoyance.

It's promising, but Absolute won't be installed on my desktop any time soon. As a quick starter for Slackware, though, Absolute is quite useful.