TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Excelixis is the awkwardly-renamed latest version of what was previously known as Workbench Linux. I liked that distro very much, so I was curious to see what (if any) improvements had been made.

Install:

Excelixis is built off of Xubuntu 8.04. I assume later versions will be based on 8.10. The installer is identical to that of all other Ubuntu flavors.

The first time I went through the installer, I got to the final confirmation screen and hit "Install." The desktop then spontaneously logged out and back in again. Normally I'd just dump the distro at this point, but I decided to try again. The second time through the installer worked. Not a great way to inspire confidence.

After staying at 94% for longer than I felt entirely comfortable, the installer finished and I rebooted. Everything seemed to be in order. I got a boilerplate, black and white boot prompt.

The GRUB menu showed "Ubuntu 8.04.1" as my boot option. Perhaps the devs need to do a bit more customizing. After a pretty plain loading screen, I was brought to a very pleasant login window and then the default desktop. I configured my network and started downloading updates.

Despite a working network, Restricted Drivers was unable to find and download Nvidia drivers. I checked my Software Sources settings and the default repository was one in Greece. I changed it to United States and tried again. That did the trick.

While my updates were downloading I fiddled with the "screenlets" on the sidebar. I left the system monitor, weather, and news feed icons (changing them where applicable to my location instead of the default Athens). The Gmail notifier was less than impressive. It will tell you if you have mail, but it won't launch a browser window for you.

Although this implementation of screenlets is less obtrusive than others I've seen (*cough* Vista) I'm still not sure I'll hold onto it for long once the novelty wears off. I'm just glad to see a distribution that genuinely tries something different rather than repackaging Ubuntu with a new wallpaper and calling it theirs.

The same is true for the dock at the bottom of the screen (Cairo-Dock). It's a neat piece of eye candy and it does allow for slightly easier navigation of the available software, but I'm not sure if it will start to get in the way after a while.

One possible improvement would be if the desktop itself were grayed out when you mouse over a menu. I find the text for the applications hard to read if there's a window open directly behind it.

Once the update was complete, an error was reported with a package called Lazarus. It's a Pascal compiler, and though I'm as nostalgic as the next person I didn't see myself using it any time soon, so I removed it and the repository entry for it. That fixed the error. Still, it would have been nice for the maintainers to check the validity of all their packages before baking them into the ISO.

I also ran into issues with the remastersys repository. I couldn't authenticate against it. I removed it as well and everything went off without a hitch. Unless the purpose of your distribution is to allow people to create their own versions, I see no reason to include remastersys in the default install.

After using it for a while, I was annoyed at some aspects of Excelixis that seem to be hard-coded. The GDM screen seems to want to default to the XFce standard every time I log in. I attempted to change it using the Login Screen control panel, but my changes didn't save for some reason. I even went so far as to remove the XFce screen theme entirely, but that gave me an ugly error on my GDM login.

I finally got my desired GDM login by manually copying all the files for the theme into /usr/share/gdm/themes/xubuntu/. From what I gather, the Login Screen app was not properly copying the files over when I changed settings. I have no idea why this works in Ubuntu but not in Excelixis, but it's highly annoying.

I ran into similar problems with the clock screenlet. It kept coming back regardless of how many times I tried to kill it. Every logon, there it was. I was not amused.

Software Selection:

Excelixis is a 1.5GB DVD image, and you realize why when you open up the menus. There were 21 items in the development menu for everything from C++ and Pascal to Gambas, Mono and PHP, two office suites (Abiword/Gnumeric and OpenOffice) and three graphics editors (GIMP, Inkscape, Ristretto).

The usual complement was also present (Firefox, Pidgin) as well as Thunderbird Email. Audacity and VLC Media Player augmented the default Ubuntu media apps. MPG/WMV/MP3 playback was included.

Conclusion:

Excelixis is both different and the same, simultaneously. It's built on the stable Ubuntu OS platform for updates and such, but the graphical and organizational improvements are unique. Some might be turned off by the very Vista-like appearance, but with some work, the themes can be changed.

With several compilers and source code available out of the box, and a refreshing if sometimes odd graphical interface, Workbench... er.. Excelixis was a useful distribution for me (as long as I didn't try and change too much).

I can't give it a perfect score since I did have to tweak some repositories and remove a lot of software I didn't personally need, not to mention having to fight with the strangely rigid desktop configuration. However, all things considered it's a pretty, solid distribution.

With a little more polish and the ability to change things fixed, I could easily recommend Excelixis to developers who want a little eye candy on their desktops without using a great deal of system resources.

Will Excelixis replace regular Ubuntu on Rig 4? No. There's too much tweaking involved and if I'm going to dig into the system that much, I'd rather start with a standard desktop install and go from there. I would consider this distribution for a second computer such as Rig 2, however, particularly if I had no internet access but needed a dev machine.