Decent|OS 3.0 Alpha 2 Review: Good but can be better

Yesterday I reviewed Pinguy and Zorin, and today I booted up another similar distro - Decent|OS 3.0, which is a Ubuntu derivative with Mate desktop. The 930 MB ISO can be downloaded from here. It is a 32-bit image & 64 bit is not available yet. It is still in Alpha 2 stage and should not be used for production purposes.

Booting in a VirtualBox

On booting, the familiar Ubuntu boot up screens are visible. Possibly the developers will take care of it in the final release.

Desktop
The desktop interface is decent and attractive. There is no Unity and possibly it would give relief to a lot of hardcore Linux users!

Applications


The developers have taken care to provide a lot of out-of-the-box support for apps which we use regularly but absent in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, like VLC, GIMP, Docky, etc. Transparent look of the Guake Terminal is really cool. Rest of the apps provided are the same as in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Apps collection is good, if not impressive. One missing element I see is Adobe Flash support. But, it can be downloaded from the Ubuntu Software Repo.

CPU & RAM Usage

This is one area where Decent OS scores over Pinguy or Zorin. The RAM usage (without any other app running) is significantly lower (220 MB). Definitely a lot of hard work went in to make it usable in low resource netbooks (mostly with 1-2 GB of RAM).

Overall

Overall, I liked Decent OS, it is comparatively lighter than counterparts like Zorin or Pinguy but offering almost similar collection of applications. However, developers should make certain cosmetic changes, especially in the booting screen. For more screenshots, please visit my Flickr album.

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Review: BackBox linux 2.05 - the ethical hacking tool

From distrowatch I found about this Ubuntu derivative and a little bit of research actually tempted me to download and test the distro. I know it won't be a fair review from my side as I am no where even close to ethical hacking business. But, it may interest the readers of this blog - hence, a review.

Look and feel-wise, it is similar to Xubuntu, as both share the XFCE window manager. 

Software repository is almost similar except for the "ethical hacking" part. However, it is based on Ubuntu 11.04, Linux kernel 2.6.38 and Xfce 4.8.0. Xubuntu 11.04 would be the fair comparison for it. 

The most tempting part is the Auditing and servicing part which has cool tools for "Hacking". You can see the tools in the picture below.

On booting from pen-drive, CPU usage is 9% and RAM usage 182 MiB. I am writing this blog from the BackBox only.

It has cool black & blue interface and the OS works really smooth in my system. I hardly feel that it is not actually installed in my system, rather running from a 4 GB pen-drive.

Ethical hacking tool-wise I am not an expert. But given the diagram above, it seems to have it all what hackers actually need. Based on user point of view, it works really smooth with in-built flash support, Sun java installed and typical Xubuntu 11.04 softwares loaded. Truly, a smart distro to use.

However, one concern I have is - from Oct'12 there won't be any support for Ubuntu 11.04 or Natty. So, won't the support for this distro end there as well? Possibly the developers might be able to answer, if they provide continued support for it even after Ubuntu support is over.

You can download the image from:


http://www.backbox.org/downloads

It has both Intel i386 and amd-64 versions. You can download the iso directly if you have fast internet, else you can download via torrent. 

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