TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

I was recommended this distribution by a user on LinuxForums. Some of my favorite distributions both good and bad have come to me this way.

Although technically an off-shoot of Mepis Linux (which is in itself an offshoot of Debian, then Ubuntu, now Debian again I think) AntiX bears little visual resemblance to its parent.

Install:

I have a confession to make. When I saw the minimalistic desktop for the first time (gkrellm monitor and all) I got a little geeky chill. It reminded me of a simpler time, which for me was in college, when I ran a minimal Gentoo install with the Blackbox window manager and wrote C++ programs day and night.

Minimalist distros have always had a special place in my heart because of that time. AntiX was off to a good start. I perused around the Fluxbox menus and launched the installer, which shows its ties to Mepis quite starkly. I set my partitioning options and I was off. The installer was plain, but intuitive.

I noticed that a few of the informational blurbs that flash by during the install could use some customization. One in particular refers to the presence of OpenOffice and refers to itself as "SimplyMepis."

Install finished rather quickly and I set up the bootloader. I was then brought to a menu that gave me options to enable or disable several types of popular services. I immediately tried to disable PPP and CUPS since I neither dialup nor print, but for some reason I couldn't un-check them.

I clicked around randomly for a few seconds, selected one then the other, collapsed and expanded the tree and then suddenly I could un-check. I'm not sure, but this might be an installer bug. I then set my up my user and root passwords and rebooted.

As you would expect from an OS that uses between 20MB and 40MB of RAM on average, everything ran quite snappily. For those not feeling the Fluxbox love, Icewm is available as an option.

I found the menu system a little confusing when icewm was in use. Perhaps this is due to the way the two disparate window managers handle their configurations, but some apps were visible in the "Applications" menu at the top, and others were available through the "Programs" menu at the bottom.

MP3 playback was included. The Mepis "Network" utility detected my wireless card and allowed me to connect using encryption to my router.

Unfortunately the necessary headers weren't installed so I couldn't install the drivers out of the box. A simple "apt-get install build-essential" did the trick. AntiX links into the Debian repositories. My next hurdle was to get a console session with no X Windows.

There was no obvious way to choose a text-only session from the login screen, so I used a desperation trick: I purposefully broke X by adding some random characters to the beginning of my xorg.conf file. It did the trick, and since the Nvidia drivers overwrite that file anyway nothing was broken for long.

Software Selection:

AbiWord replaces OpenOffice, and given the improvements in AbiWord over the last few years that's not a big deal for me. In the past I preferred the more consistent kerning of OpenOffice versus AbiWord in Linux, but that advantage has since been addressed.

IceWeasel replaces Firefox, but ultra-light Dillo is also available. Pidgin was present, but not named (the menu option said "Messenger"). GCC was installed, but not Java. I suppose sacrifices have to be made somewhere. The games menu was disappointingly sparse, but a couple of X Windows standards survived: XChess and XMahjongg.

I played with apt-get, and it seemed to work just fine. This means that with an internet connection any shortcomings in the default install can be taken care of.

Conclusion:

AntiX isn't quite as small as Damn Small or Puppy, but as far as I can tell it's just as useful, and offers a slightly different look and feel. Will it replace DSL as my ultra-light of choice? Perhaps not, but it does give me another option in the future.

For those who like lightweight operating systems, are tired of KDE and Gnome, or just want to try something different, AntiX is something to consider.

I was impressed by the small memory footprint and solid Debian backing that left things open for me to add in after the fact.