TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

I was made aware of this distribution by a reader of the site. Their official site didn't really tell me a lot about it, so I decided to take the plunge and downloaded 2007.4 "Eros." Hold the jokes, please. Apparently they name their releases after mythical gods. I endeavored to see how blessed the distribution really was.

Install:

The installer and default desktop where not the prettiest I've seen, but they did their job. One odd thing I noticed was when I clicked on the button to change my timezone it closed the installer window completely and brought up a terminal window for dkpg-reconfigure. After I chose my timezone the installer window popped back up. It really was a visually jarring experience.

The rest of the install was pretty standard: partitioning, GRUB, users, network setup. I read a bit from the manual while it was installing and found that part of the plan for Sidux is to be compatible with Debian's repositories. This is something Mepis used to do before they changed their base to Ubuntu. The installer finished without incident.

Reboot brought me to basically the same desktop I saw on the LiveCD, which is based on KDE 3.5. It took me a moment to get used to KDE's default single click icons. I also found myself missing sub-pixel smoothing from GNOME. All the fonts looked rather blocky and thin.

I found the Sidux Control Center and played around with some of my display settings. There was a "register fonts" option I tried. I'm not sure what it did, but it took a little while. When it finished, I was asked to restart the X Server. I didn't notice any difference in font appearance. I decided to tweak them using KDE Control Center. That seemed to do the trick.

MP3 support was included, to my surprise. Kaffeine also played my test MPG and MOV files even though when I launched it the program told me it didn't have any Win32 codecs installed. Perhaps it lied.

I ran through the graphical setup to get my wireless card working using NDISWrapper. The Sidux Control Center had a nice set of dialogs for this. I wish I could say the same for my Nvidia card.

Naturally, when you tell it to install Nvidia drivers it tries to download them. That didn't work since I had no net connection, so I attempted to install them manually. That *almost* worked but errored out saying "invalid kernel configuration."

Some helpful Sidux fans suggested I try using another unique Sidux feature: sxmi scripts. They were documented in the manual (quite nicely, I might add). Tragically, they had one fatal flaw: all the solutions required an active internet connection, thus much like the "Restricted Driver Manager" in Ubuntu, this approach didn't work for me.

Let me clarify something in case you're wondering "No internet? Why was he setting up wireless drivers?" I live in a complex that has no reasonable options for internet service due to a deal they made with the local gouger....er.. ISP.

I do occasonally pick up an unsecured signal in my complex but that's the closest I get. This means that one of my primary concerns (as outlined in my ratings) is how a distro performs with no external help.

Software Selection:

I didn't find any version of Java (GNU or otherwise) installed on the system by default, but there was an odd program called "EmbedJS" in the programs menu under Development. I wasn't really sure what it did.

GCC was included, but I wasn't sure about the headers until I tried installing my Nvidia drivers. Turns out that even though the headers were installed, they were not installed in a way that the Nvidia install script liked, thus leaving me with no acceleration without internet.

Debian's "IceWeasel" replaces Firefox. Kopete replaces Pidgin (although not very well). OpenOffice was present, but strangely there was no GIMP. All the rest were typical KDE programs. Their game selection was pretty sparse (Mahjongg, Reversi, Patience and Battleship).

There was one extra menu with Sidux configuration scripts. They offered things like setting up a TV tuner card and wireless using NDISWrapper. This is also where I found the Sidux Control Center. It was a nice addition to otherwise default and sparse collection of menus.

Conclusion:

I didn't run into any stability issues and the inclusion of multimedia support was nice. I also liked that it synced up with the official Debian repositories. MP3 support will rule out any Debian diehards, but I imagine they would just use vanilla Sid instead.

Since I originally published this rant, a reader has corrected me on that last point. Apparently the default install of Debian Etch does include the "libmad0" library, which is an MP1/MP2/MP3 decoder. I guess Debian diehards might not take issue on that point after all.

The lack of Java out of the box was annoying and would force me to install it on my own to do work (I have a dev tools CD for this purpose). It's not a show-stopper, but still an annoyance.

The distro would benefit from some overall visual cleanup, particularly in the menus. There are a lot of redundant menu options from KDE that are covered by Sidux Control Center.