moonOS 3 Linux (Makara)
moonOS 3 uses Enlightenment as its desktop environment. If you haven’t used Enlightenment before you’re in for a pleasant surprise. Here’s a bit of background from Wikipedia about it:
Enlightenment, also known simply as E, is a window manager for the X Window System which can be used alone or in conjunction with a desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE. Enlightenment is often used as a substitute for a full desktop environment.
Don’t forget that when you are using moonOS you can right-click the desktop at any time to pull up a list of favorite apps or left-click it to pull up the desktop menu.
One thing that sets moonOS apart is its desktop tools. There are four of them:
moonAssistant
moonAssistant is a small menu that will popup when you first boot into your moonOS desktop. It’ll ask you a few questions to help you configure your system.
moonAssistant will ask you a few questions to help configure your system.
moonControl
moonControl lets you easily change your system’s setting. The menu choices are broken down into Look and Feel, Internet and Network, Hardware, System and Other. Just click the one you are interested in and you can tweak your system to get it the way you want.
The control center for your moonOS system.
moonGrub
You can add themes to Grub via moonGrub.
You can add themes to Grub.
moonSoftware
moonSoftware lets you easily add, remove or search for applications.
Use moonSoftware to add or remove software applications.
Here’s a list of some of the software you’ll find after installing moonOS 3:
Graphics
GIMP
OpenOffice.Org Drawing
Scanner Utility
Image Viewer
Internet
Firefox
Mozilla Thunderbird Mail/News
Pidgin IM
pyNeighborhood
Transmission BitTorrent
XChat IRC
Sun Java 6 Web Start
OpenJDK Java 6 Web Start
Multimedia
Brasero Disc Burner
Exaile Music Player
Movie Player
Office
Dictionary
OpenOffice.org (Database)
OpenOffice.org (Presentation)
OpenOffice.org (Spreadsheet)
OpenOffice.org (Word Processor)
(18 votes, average: 4.06 out of 5)
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(4.83 out of 5)
Wow, Jim, you are reviewing all of the lesser known distros this week! I’ve heard of moonOS before, but I do not remember grabbing a copy; I may do so this time and see if I have any success getting it going with Virtualbox OSE. It certainly is a good looking distro! Maybe I will try the LXDE variation just to be different and see if it also has the same outstanding art work.
Hi Brian,
Yeah, there’s some fun stuff out there that doesn’t get much press. Glad you are enjoying the reviews. moonOS is definitely cool. Let me know how you like the LXDE version if you try it.
I tried out MoonOS 2 recently and was pleased with it. I like the feel of E17. The only problem I had with it involved reading my other hard drives. The live Cd mounted all my drives and parttions with no problems. But I missed a step on the install somewher. The other drives would show in the places gadget and in the MNT folder but I could not get them to mount even as root. I also prefer the itask-ng module over the regular shelf for launching applications.
I think MoonOS is the best of the Enlightenment Distros (OpenGEU, OzOS, Elive, Maryan etc). I’m pretty sure the “Light of Free Operating System” is a translation issue.
Thanks for this review with the nice screenshots. Good to know about this Linux distribution.
But I have one remaining question, why did you use the proprietary software VMware and Parallels, and why not the open source VirtualBox instead ?
The Moon tools look very much like Mint tools – or is it just me?
Albinootje, I have all three available on my computers (Parallels, VMWare and VirtualBox). I float back and forth depending on the distro though I lean toward VMWare solely out of habit. VirtualBox is great too though.
I grabbed moonOS 3, Makara, and I am using the standard E17 Enlightenment version with Virtualbox 3.0.6 on Debian Lenny. It did not take long at all to load and it runs pretty well, and it is indeed very attractive.
The LXDE version, as far as I can tell right now, is limited to Version 2 – I grabbed that and will give it a try as well.
Hi, Jim.
Thanks for your informative review of MoonOS. It looks interesting, and I’m downloading it now to check it out for myself.
By the way, “it’s” (with the apostrophe) means “it is.” I think there were a couple of places in the review where you meant to use “its” (no apostrophe). :)
Thanks again.
Tony
Hi Jim, great review by the way, just one question: do i need glasses because i can’t find the install icon or anything looking like an option to install to the hard drive like in MoonOS 2?
Kind regards
James
P.s I’m opening a new cafe/holistic centre soon and i think i might use MoonOS as the colour scheme! It’s very beautifully zen.