TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

I've looked at Ubuntu Christian Edition before, but only as a two-for-one with a similar distribution, Ichthux. The purpose of CE, according to their site is "Not to bring Christianity to Linux, but to bring Linux to Christians."

It should go without saying that if you're wont to dance skyclad by the harvest moon or pray toward Mecca, this distribution isn't for you (although there is a distro for that last group).

Install:

Aside from slightly-altered bootsplash graphics, the installer for Ubuntu CE is identical to its parent distribution, so I won't be posting any screenshots on that.

Reboot showed me the usual Ubuntu boot and login screens, with "Christian Edition" pasted in. Once you login you get a window with a random bible verse and a little bit of bible trivia. These are provided by a program called LinBread, which I think should consider renaming their project.

The default desktop is (not surprisingly) a statue of Jesus Christ. I get the message they're trying to convey here, but their picture choice was a bit hardcore for me. I'm not Catholic, and I still find their pervasive use of statues a bit disconcerting.

Sadly, there aren't any other themed desktops available in the default installation. I'm sure there are at least a few graphics artists out there who would be willing to make some elegant and Christian backgrounds for a project like this. Just pulling some off of Gnome-Look.org would suffice until then.

Software Selection:

Aside from the usual Ubuntu choices (Firefox, OpenOffice, GIMP, Pidgin) there are several things unique to CE. One is the inclusion of the DansGuardian firewall, with a GUI tool that was made specifically for Ubuntu CE (at least according to their website).

Calling this screen a GUI is a bit of a stretch in my opinion. Touting it as a unique and specially-made feature for your distro was ill-advised as well. At best, their "GUI" is an ncurses window translated to GTK+.

Also included is WINE. I couldn't decide if it was for the sake of compatibility or irony. Having had spotty luck with it in the past, I didn't delve into it other than to launch the included "Notepad" application. It worked.

There's also a bible reader called eSword, which doesn't come pre-configured. The "System Tools" menu (strange choice) contains a link to an installer for the program that pops up this menu, which isn't the most intuitive.

I realize that there are many translations of the Christian Bible, but I'm sure there's a friendlier way to present the choices. I would think if the CE developers went to the trouble to skin DansGuardian they'd come up with something more user-friendly for eSword.

As soon as I chose a few versions to install (American Standard, King James with Apocrypha) I realized at once why WINE was installed: the version of eSword included with Ubuntu CE is the MS Windows version!

I find this odd, given that the Accessories menu has a native Linux bible study app called Xiphos. Are both programs necessary, and is it really wise to open up users to the instability of the WINE subsystem for a single application?

Sadly, even though Xiphos is a native app, I had issues downloading bible translations from the CrossWire server. It took the better part of forever to connect and install a single King James translation. If this is an issue with Crosswire, they should include a few mirror sites for download.

The WINE installer for eSword errored out (surprise, surprise), leaving me with one nonfunctional and one less-than-impressive choice for bible study software, and neither of them were pre-installed or preconfigured out of the box. I find this amount of after-install work to be insulting.

Conclusion:

The intentions of Ubuntu CE are admirable, but their execution is quite poor. I salute them for at least releasing a version that keeps up with the current Ubuntu release, but if you want to use something like Linux in your church organization you can't expect all your parishioners to be computer-savvy.

The average user would not find the installer windows, slow server response, and general bugginess of the bible study programs to be very inviting, and would likely just download the programs on their Windows boxes instead. This is not the kind of impression one wants to make, that Linux is buggy, slow and unreliable.