TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

It's rare these days for me to start up a Linux distribution and be surprised. Most major distributions all look fairly similar, use either KDE or Gnome (or XFce with a theme that resembles one of those), and offer essentially the same set of applications. Linpus, a Chinese distribution that I'd never heard of until a random post about it on a tech blog, is definitely different.

Linpus is quite unique, at least visually. The default way things are presented is almost iPhone-ish. In "easy" mode applications are grouped in tabs: internet, work, learn, play, and settings. It looks like it would be quite at home on an iPhone or (more realistically) one of those new mini-PCs like the ASUS Eee.

The home icon at the bottom left doesn't seem to do anything, but the next icon over ("Switch Desktop") does something interesting. It brings you to a more traditional looking XFce desktop. On a regular PC, the font sizes are a bit wacky for my taste, so I was happy to see they could be adjusted.

On their site, Linpus claims to be useful on older machines or ones with smaller system specs. System Monitor confirmed a very small 76MB footprint when only the desktop itself was running.

Install:

There wasn't an install option on the disc I downloaded. I assume this is so people can test it out without any risk of hosing their host PC. This is what SuSE used to do a while back. Even so, it would have been nice to have an installer on this one. There is a "full" version of Linpus but as of the day I wrote this article it was only available for the previous version, 9.3.

Software Selection:

OpenOffice was present, but sadly only the GCJ version of Java and no GCC were installed. I noticed that MP3, WMV and Flash support and plugins were included. There is a package manager application (Synaptic) but there are no online repositories by default. This means you could (in theory) uninstall things that are installed but not install anything new. I can't necessarily fault them for that since it's a read-only LiveCD.

Conclusion:

I couldn't realistically see myself using Linpus for everyday work, but if I had an ultra-mobile like the OLPC, ASUS Eee or something similar I might use it. It offers out-of-the-box features that most people would need for those kinds of devices, and that's exactly their target audience. I can't fault them for that. I look forward to looking at version 9.4 of their full-sized desktop whenever it gets released.