TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

This distribution was designed by Robert Kennedy College to be used by (surprise, surprise!) college students. The releases, interestingly enough, are named after Star Wars characters, such as darth vader (update: as of April 1, 2001 the newest release is "obi wan"). Their lofty goal is to offer college students an alternative OS to Windoze.

Install:

The install is relatively painless, provided you have pre-partitioned your Windoze hard drive or have a spare separate hard drive to install it to.

The partition creation step in the install never worked for me, but it did try (vainly I might add) to set up LILO to boot both my linux and Windoze XP partitions, at least in theory. The rest was as simple as choosing which hard drive to install it to and off it went, automated if not very pretty.

Package Selection:

As is typical with all "simple to install" distros, this one gives you no choice over what it installs. In their defense, however, the packages they install are useful and there's not a 2.5 GB set of useless junk (see Redhat 8.0 rant) that you have to either bend over and take like a man or get another distro.

Try and remove any of the packages they install with this distro, I dare you. Most have names so archaic that you wouldn't be able to tell what packages they are to begin with, much less uninstall them.

One very nice package this distro comes with preconfigured is LinNeighborhood, which lets you browse Windoze shares quite easily (also included in Lycoris Linux). It also uses the Liquid KDE environment, which makes the buttons and such look a lot nicer than plain vanilla KDE.

Most Annoying Feature:

I couldn't get my USB optical mouse to work at all on this distro. I had to pull an old PS/2 mouse out of mothballs just to be able to log into KDE (which it launches by default at boot).

Who's it best for?

Did I mention college students? Yes, I believe I did. This is a medium-sized and middling pretty distro that will give you some useful tools without a lot of the crap that corporate distros (i.e. Redhat) love to force upon you.