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Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Review: Bodhi Linux 2.0.0 Alpha with Enlightenment desktop

Somehow I really like Enlightenment desktop because of it's extremely light but stable feel while using it. I have used MacPup and Puppy Linux earlier but never gave a shot at Bodhi Linux.

Today I downloaded daily build of Bodhi 2.0.0 from http://bodhilinux.com/  to test it from Pen-drive. The installation file is about 540 mb and can be downloaded from Sourceforge. It uses Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin as base.

However, it beats in the minimum specs requirement -  300mhz i386 Processor, 128 MB RAM & 1.5 GB HD Space!

With Start-up disk creator it was 5 min. job to create live-usb and it took about 5 minutes to boot (booting from live-usb takes a bit of time than regular hard-drive boot).

Enlightenment desktop is functional and simplistic. It uses the lightweight PCManFM file manager. The walking, flying & running penguin animations also add to variety on the desktop.



Application-wise, the default install has light-weight Midori browser along with Leafpad text editor, LXTerminal, Archive manager, GDebi Package installer among others. But, no office suite or internet tools are provided by default. However, the Bodhi AppCenter hosts literally all the useful apps that we use / like to use.

Users who like customization can choose their apps of choice from the list provided in the app center.

 However, newbies may like to install either Pratibha or Nikhila application set.

Pratibha Application Set is a trimmed down version of only essential apps and it has lightoffice (abiword, gnumeric, inkscape) for word processing, Claws for email and spreadsheet and pinta as image editor along with VLC player and X-chat.


Nikhila appears to be a complete suite with LibreOffice, Firefox web browser,  Adobe PDF Reader, Openshot video editor, Rhythmbox for music, VLC player, Pidgin for chat, Thunderbird as email client, etc. Pretty much all the things you expect from a complete linux distro. Synaptic manager is also available in case you are more comfortable with it.


By clicking install now button, user can easily download and install the application suites or preferred application without hitting the terminal, just like how we do in Ubuntu Software center.

Since Bodhi uses Ubuntu Precise as base, users can access all their preferred Ubuntu applications from the Bodhi AppCenter.

Further, I am impressed with the speed and multitasking ability here. I checked the CPU & RAM usage with Midori, Terminal and File Manager running, it came to a stunning 7.4% CPU and 133 MB RAM. Note: I am using a P4 single core.

Also, Bodhi is quite customizable. I haven't tried any customization at this stage but the gallery pics are quite impressive to say the least. Link to gallery http://www.bodhilinux.com/gallerydotw.php


Performance-wise it is comparable to Xubuntu & Lubuntu Precise for sure. I am typing this article from Bodhi only and pretty impressed with its performance.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for the write up but it is clear from your screenshots and description that you downloaded and are using our 2.0.0 alpha release - this release is intended for testing only and is not recommended for production machines.

    Our current stable release is based on Ubuntu 10.04 and is version 1.4.0

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    1. Hi Jeff, you're right. Instead of 1.4.0, I downloaded 2.0.0 alpha. I have updated my blog. Thanks for creating such a good distro. I am pretty impressed with 2.0.0 alpha, will wait for the stable release to come out.

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    2. Jeff, one query. I guess 2.0.0 is LTS like Precise, but would you be giving support for 5 years? Please let me know.

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    3. Yep. Bodhi releases get updates until their LTS base runs out of support from Ubuntu.

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