Being American means having freedoms. It is what our country is established on. There are some freedoms which can either hinder or dismiss a persons liberties. This is a simple example of our “simple” freedoms should always be ours. Linux is not about making money. It is about something much more rich and rewarding. The ability to do with our computers, anything we choose. To make it perfect for each person. That’s individuality. Not divisibility.

Linux today is not geared towards the computer geeks of the world. Given that fact, the need for “eyecandy” in a operating system is an issue which needed to be, and has been, more than met with the 3D and graphical options and instruments available with a Linux system. It blows my mind to realize how far Linux has come in the time I have been using it.

Again, please feel free to visit my site. I hope I can open your eyes to what a person can achive when it comes to appreciating and using, the freedoms afforded to us.

Thanks wheresthe colour for your posting.

to @wheresthe colour: it’s not the point. Can you read the review clearly, what the desktop manager the distro used, and how the performance compare the price hardware that being used. And not all people like flashy color thing like you and your precious window do.

Where to start..Absolutes builder is a coding machine. He codes more before breakfast than most will in a life. If he wants it to look plain..more power to him. I don’t find it unattractive. If you want flashy go look around..Linux does flashy too. As far as software functionality goes, it’s easy to make things work when you have a lock on people and hardware markets like Micro$oft…

Keep paying Uncle Bill..He likes you too :) sheeeess..

Linux is supposed to have a community of hundreds of thousands of expert programmers,..and Absolute Linux looks like its something from the days of Windows 3.11,.
drab, dreary,..colourless,..mostly drab grey & shades of grey,..thats all Linux programmers produce.
Software that doesn’t work,..no real plug & play,..drabness abounds
Linux is the ideal Communist style distro,..drab and dreary

As to the text installer, I for one have no problem with these. Sort of makes me nostalgic for the old DOS days. They also tend to perform a bit faster than graphical ones.

Speed is also an advantage of plain looking desktops, but I do agree a better color selection might be in order here. I do know IceWM is capable of better. Still, if that’s all the author required, more power to him.

Now knowing the tricks of how to actually INSTALL, as opposed to running Live or in memory a Virtual instance – it does seem to help to set up a fixed space – installing in an expanding dynamic virtual space seems to take a long time, but it does work. Only the other day I installed Zenwalk 6.2. It’s overall performance was pretty comparable to what I experienced physically installing Absolute Linux 13.0.2 onto Virtualbox OSE. Both install pretty slowly, but run well once installed.

There IS a way to get the Multimedia codecs, Jim, they just are not all installed initially. IF you look at the First Run Info, you will see that there are ways to add additional multimedia codecs, which would probably get the Superman stuff going with libdvdcss2, but Paul says it may take 1/2 hour or so to download, compile, and build.

Absolute Linux 13.0.2 also comes with both the Firefox 3.5.3 and Midori Web browsers. I know that Paul was talking about making Midori the default, but he was soliciting feedback on that and apparently he got the feedback to keep Firefox around. He seems to have Firefox, Midori, and Opera available, three good choices.

I found Absolute Linux to be a snap to install. My thoughts on root proved to be true – Paul confesses to being primarily a root user because he is a software developer and integrator, but he recommends immediately creating user accounts, and neatly describes how to do so in his very good First Run Info guide. He’s written some nice small Python scripts to simplify some of those tasks and he has written a nice guide, not too much info, just enough to do the key things that you are likely to need to do.

All in all, I am sticking with my previous impressions, namely that Absolute Linux is not a broad, general purpose system, but a basic, preconfigured system designed to quickly install, easily configure, and it operates well with modest hardware requirements. It is not fancy at all; it looks like a system built in 2001 or 2002, but it also runs like a system built in that timeframe, that is, it works on old hardware from that day and runs fast on hardware from our current era. All in all, I think it is worth having around, at least for those who like to tinker with more than one system on their hardware.

First of all, Slackware is really flexible. Absolute Linux is not trying to replace Slackware at all, it is attempting to carve a relatively small niche; one, a personal tool for the developer (I believe his name is Paul Sherman, correct me if I have that wrong). He initially created Absolute Linux, just as many others do, by creating tools to build a system that meets his own needs, then he sought to build a small market for others who are interested in similar needs and markets.

I believe that one place he envisioned Absolute Linux is to make it available to families and students, with the following assumptions: 1. There would be at least one somewhat experienced individual, who would be responsible for installing the software, creating accounts, and setting up the environment. 2. Those who were the other consumers of the system would generally be discouraged from messing with it; therefore the division was that the root user would have all of the capabilities, and non-experienced people would have no way to update the system; they’d have to have access to the root account. He figured that would keep the system reasonably under control.

Concerning the artwork, Paul is apparently not much of an artist, and I think he was looking for something that would not be flashy, but quite fast and simple for an experienced administrator to set up (it is easy in that context), with not a lot of options or flexibility to do much with it.

I think he is flexible on what gets implemented; I suspect he’d be open to hearing suggestions. When it comes to artwork and stuff like that, an artist would have to contribute to his community for us to see anything happening there.

I’ve used several releases of Absolute Linux in the past, though I have not yet tried out this particular update. Past releases have always been light, fast, responsive, and generally of good quality. They have not been pretty or cute; we can go to Hannah Montana if we want cute or Mandriva if we want attractive.

I think Paul hits his market pretty well. It is a rather limited market with specific goals and intentions, but at least he accomplishes what he wants to do within the limited boundaries of his one person capability.

In the past, when he’s built something, one very good thing to say is that if there is something wrong with it, he is very quick to correct it and come up with an update. That’s good because I do not think even with the gslapt-get facility, this release does well with updates. You’re better off just installing a new version every so often and keep your private data on its own data partition. That is a pretty limiting use case, but within that use case, this system does at least perform well, it is quick to set up and it does exactly what it is intended to do.

Interest wise, it’s not that interesting. Performance and capability wise, it is in the top tenth in performance and in the top half in capabilities.

Thank you for your suggestion about software installation methods. That kind of feedback is really invaluable to me as sometimes things seem obvious to me and I might not realize that somebody really wanted me to talk more about that a particular aspect of a distro.

I definitely rely on you guys to help me keep improving these reviews. Each time I get a good suggestion I incorporate it into the review template and thus they usually get better.

I look forward to more suggestions and thank you again. Glad to have you as a reader here on DLR.