TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

As has been the case more often than not lately, BLAG was a distribution I'd never heard of until someone suggested it to me for review. Unfortunately, as is also commonly the case, I found the distribution to be snooze-worthy at best. Stay tuned for more details.

Install:

BLAG uses what looks like a modified version of the Anaconda installer. The pictures chosen for it would be at home in a punk rock venue. The final image of the installer looks something like two red bears sharing a joint. The install went as expected with no particularly notable points. It's a testament to the maturity that most Linux distributions have acheived these days that you can pretty much take for granted it will install without a hitch.

On first boot I was given the Fedora-esque "firstboot" screen that set up my user accounts, time zone and sound card. I was then greeted by an interesting custom logon screen that looks to be borrowed from SuSE, with a pleasant beach scene for a background rather than the usual blue pattern.

I ran into a rather strange bug when I tried to load my media CD (the one that contains all my MP3s and MPGs I use for testing). Although a CDROM icon appeared on the desktop, when I clicked on it I was brought to the "burn a CD" window in Nautilus. I attempted to browse the CD via the terminal but it was not mounted in either the /media/ or /mnt/ directories. I was forced to log in as root and create a /mnt/cdrom directory and manually mount the CDROM myself. This is much more work than should be necessary for a mature Linux distribution.

My MPG and WMV movie files would not load in the default player (MPlayer) due to an error "initializing the video out (-vo) device". MP3 files played fine however. After a bit of digging, I found out that Xine (also installed by default) had no trouble at all playing any of my video files. I'm curious why the maintainers of this distribution would pick the player that *doesn't work* over the one that does for the OS default.

Although the OS detected and mounted by iPod, GTKPod errored out when I tried to browse and play songs off of it. It claimed a file was missing (ItunesDB), which I easily disproved by actually browsing and finding the file through the file manager. There were no other audio programs installed (such as AmaroK) to verify that this was simply a GTKPod problem. I was able to play songs off of my iPod using XMMS, but because of the way the iPod stores songs (seemingly randomly, with odd names), it was pretty much the equivalent of listening to all 265 songs in shuffle mode.

Software Selection:

I seem to remember reading somewhere that BLAG is a multimedia-centric distribution, and their software selections have that area covered. Gimp, Inkscape, and quite a few audio/video playback and editing programs are installed by default. On the office side of the equation, things are pretty light. You get Scribus, Abiword and a couple of miscellaneous things like a spreadsheet program. The usual internet suspects are present (Firefox, GAIM) along with a BitTorrent client and gFTP. GCC was not installed by default.

Most Annoying Feature:

Having to manually mount CDROMs is top on my list. This is a problem I had with Debian Woody and FreeBSD 5 a long time ago, and I would expect a relatively new distribution such as this to have that problem handled. I would expect wrong it seems.

Who's it best for?

Other than the glaring CDROM mounting problem, BLAG is a fairly solid distribution. It includes a lot of multimedia apps by default, including some (Cinelerra, Kino, Scribus) that aren't usually included in other distros. Is it worth using an entirely different distribution just because its default install has a couple of different apps that you can probably download and install relatively easily on another more mainstream distribution? That's up to you to decide. Personally, I don't use any of the multimedia editing applications included in this distribution and I don't like having to manually mount my CDROMs, so I'm going to stay away.