From performance point of view, these days, Openbox is my favorite desktop environment. I found it actually to be more efficient and less resource consuming than either LXDE or XFCE and works very efficiently on low powered P4 machines. Perhaps the most famous distros with Openbox DE are Archbang and Crunchbang. Recently, SparkyLinux came up with their version of Openbox spin. In this article, I review SparkyLinux 2.1 "Ultra" Openbox as well as do a brief comparison with Archbang and Crunchbang.
This assessment is done entirely by me. My assessment is based on installation
on Asus K54C laptop with 2.2 Ghz Core i3 processor and 2 GB RAM and
experience of using it for the last 3 days. I downloaded the 32-bit
ISO (1.4 GB in size) for this testing. Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra”
has an Openbox DE with Linux kernel 3.2.0. PCManFM 0.9.10 is the
default file browser.
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
Appearance
Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” has a slightly customized desktop with a dark colored theme, a dock, a top panel and a good looking Conky to decorate the desktop. The theme looks very good. The dock or wbar is configurable and I could add shortcuts of newly installed applications like Skype. However, the new app icons don't gel with rest of entries in wbar, as you can see in the screenshots posted below. Unless you have customized icons matching the theme of wbar, this issue will surely bother you a bit. On appearance, Sparkylinux gets 8/10.
Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” has a slightly customized desktop with a dark colored theme, a dock, a top panel and a good looking Conky to decorate the desktop. The theme looks very good. The dock or wbar is configurable and I could add shortcuts of newly installed applications like Skype. However, the new app icons don't gel with rest of entries in wbar, as you can see in the screenshots posted below. Unless you have customized icons matching the theme of wbar, this issue will surely bother you a bit. On appearance, Sparkylinux gets 8/10.
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
Menu is visible on right click. For faster loading, it is an iconless menu.
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
Hardware Recognition
Hardware recognition is pretty good in
Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” with Wifi, sound card and touchpad
(vertical scroll) automatically recognized. For single and double tap on touchpad, a bit of manual configuration is required. Things work out of the box more or less, which is great.
I installed via USB live boot. It took about 30 minutes to install with a bit complicated installation process.
Applications
I installed via USB live boot. It took about 30 minutes to install with a bit complicated installation process.
Applications
Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” has most of
the everyday use applications preinstalled like
Multimedia free and non-free codecs are
already provided in the distro along with Adobe flashplugin 11. Even
Java (OpenJDK 7) is inbuilt. It is a really good collection from an
Openbox lightweight distro point of view, most of the apps provided
are quite lightweight and I like it. I feel it has the complete set of
applications required for daily needs and hence Sparkylinux gets 10/10 for applications section.- Office: Document viewer, Abiword, Gnumeric
- Internet: Chromium, Claws Maiil, Liferea, Pidgin chat, Transmission bit torrent client, xChat IRC and gFTP
- Graphics: Camorama webcam viewer, GIMP 2.8 Photo editor, Image Viewer, ImageMagick, Simple Scan, xPDF
- Multimedia: Audacity, Avidemux, DeVeDe, Gnome Mplayer, VLC 2, Record my Desktop, Xfburn
- Accessories: Appfinder, Catfish file search, Leafpad, Parcelete, Root terminal, Screenshot, Xarchiver, Tux commander
- Other: Unetbootin, Wine, USB Creator, Midnight Commander
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
Installation
At a high level, installation seems
really complex compared to any other Debian or Ubuntu based distro.
Installation begins with default system language or locales. The
choices given are file names like “en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8” for English
(US). Simple English (US) would have done better for sure and this
may bother first time users and Linux novices. Fortunately, by
default Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” chooses the standard
international configurations for keyboard and language.
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
Second, the installer doesn't choose a
drive by default but expects the user to choose a drive and format it
using gparted. This is handy to power users but may not excite Linux
novices.
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
Third, on root and user setup,
Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” doesn't accept same root and user
passwords, unlike other Linux distros I have used. Possibly this adds
an extra layer of security, but for those not working for
intelligence agencies, it is a bit cumbersome to remember 2 passwords
for the same machine. Anyway, with proliferation of social networks
and email services, already there are a whole lot of passwords to
remember!
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
Fourth, the grub installation has a
couple of options – MBR of first drive and root partition. It is a
bit confusing, but I tried both the options for testing and both of
them works without fail. So, even if you don't understand what they
are you can safely go ahead – either will work for you. But, this
necessarily complicates the installation process for newbies.
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
Rest of the questions are pretty much
same like location, time-zone, etc.
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
All in all it takes about 20-30 minutes
to install Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra”. For a bit of complicated installation process, Sparkylinux gets 7/10 here.
Post installation upgrade is about 40-50 MB and Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” works out of the box even without the updates and upgrades.
Repository
Post installation upgrade is about 40-50 MB and Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” works out of the box even without the updates and upgrades.
Repository
Synaptic package manager (version
0.75.12) is the default package manager GUI for browsing and
installing packages. Debian wheezy is the default repository.
Synaptic package manager works as expected and I downloaded Firefox
and Thunderbird without any issue. However, addition of Debian
Software Center would have really helped for Linux newbies as it
provides a better view as to the available applications in clearly
defined categories.
Given Debian Wheezy will release this month and there is a freeze, you may not find the very latest applications like LibreOffice 3.6 at the moment. But, once Debian 7 is released, I guess, all the latest versions will be available.
Gdebi is the package manager and using the same, I could install Skype 4.1 without any issue. Skype is not available in Debian repo but can be downloaded from Skype website.
Given Debian Wheezy will release this month and there is a freeze, you may not find the very latest applications like LibreOffice 3.6 at the moment. But, once Debian 7 is released, I guess, all the latest versions will be available.
Gdebi is the package manager and using the same, I could install Skype 4.1 without any issue. Skype is not available in Debian repo but can be downloaded from Skype website.
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
Performance
Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” takes about
1-5% CPU and only 90 MB RAM to load the Openbox desktop with task
manager running. If I compare it to the leading Openbox distros,
Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” is definitely among the top few, perhaps
only bettered by Archbang. It offers absolutely great performance and
is very smooth to use. Further, I found Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra”
to be very stable. On performance, SparkyLinux gets 9/10.
 |
| From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in |
Overall
I really like the Openbox spin of Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” and purely from performance point of view, it is absolutely recommended. It looks good with the dark abstract theme but integrating user installed applications will be a bit tough and will require some customization. Conky definitely adds to the beauty of the distro and I tried using other conkies as well from gnome-look and they mostly work with Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra”. Performance is comparable to any other Openbox distro and added with the richness of Debian repository, Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” seems like an attractive option for low spec machines. Further, Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” is fully loaded with all essential applications and if you can bear with the clumsy installation process, I guess you'll like the distro.
I really like the Openbox spin of Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” and purely from performance point of view, it is absolutely recommended. It looks good with the dark abstract theme but integrating user installed applications will be a bit tough and will require some customization. Conky definitely adds to the beauty of the distro and I tried using other conkies as well from gnome-look and they mostly work with Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra”. Performance is comparable to any other Openbox distro and added with the richness of Debian repository, Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” seems like an attractive option for low spec machines. Further, Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” is fully loaded with all essential applications and if you can bear with the clumsy installation process, I guess you'll like the distro.
Is it the best Openbox distro I have used? I guess still Archbang and Crunchbang are my favorite Openbox distros but Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” is close. I recommended Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” with a rating of 8/10.
You can download Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” from here. Both 32 and 64 bit versions are available for download.
Thanks for another great review! I really like your approach, especially your consideration whether features are suitable for newbies or for advanced users. My interest in Openbox is growing daily and it is my favourite lighweight desktop environment now. Considering your interest in Openbox you should give Semplice Linux a try. Its implementation of Openbox is a bit more minimalistic than the one from Sparkylinux but i think its prettier and nicer than in Crunch- or Archbang.
ReplyDeleteThanks BaWo, I'll definitely give Semplice a shot!
Deletecan you do ubuntu 12.04.2 lts review?
ReplyDeletei want to know if the kernel issues still exists or not , thank you for great reviews
Sure. I'll review it this week. I am using Ultimate Edition based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS - got the 12.04.2 updates recently, seems to be a lot stable and crashing of the applications in background has stopped completely. But, a comprehensive review of Ubuntu 12.04.2 will give a better perspective.
DeleteAnd thanks for reading my reviews.