DreamLinux 2.2 ME Test Review

Already evoked in our columns in last July, DreamLinux is a Linux distribution developed by a Brazilian team. Its originality is in particular at the level of its graphic interface which presents several similarities with that of Mac OS X, the operating system of Apple.

This distribution derived from Debian evolved particularly well these last months and slightly changed Christian name besides. From now on proposed in version 2.2, DreamLinux is made from now on call “DreamLinux 2.2 ME” for DreamLinux 2.2 Multi-media Edition. Delivered with the office automation environment XFCE, this grinding exploits from now on the core Linux 2.6.18.1 and is accompanied by much office automation applications/multimedia among which one can quote:

OpenOffice
Storm (diary)
Evince (PDF file reader)
aMSN (instantaneous transport)
Icedove (customer email)
Firefox (navigator Web - delivered with its plugins Java, Flash, audio/video)
Gogh, Gsumi and Gimpshop (applications of final improvement of image)
Inkscape
Scribus (creation of book, magazine or newspapers)
XMMS/Gxine/Mplayer (multi-media reader of files)
Audacity (edition of audio file)
Grip (extraction of track CD towards MP3)
Gnomebaker (software of engraving)
Kino
AviDemus (video editor)
XdvdShrink (DVD transcoder)
Bittornado (remote loading Peer To Peer or P2P)

One can also quote the presence of X.Org 7.1 for the detection of the material and the possibility of downloading and of installing automatically pilots for charts NVIDIA or ATI via the presence of scripts out of standard. DreamLinux 2.2 ME is appeared as Live CD which it is enough to insert into the starting of its PC to benefit from the system. A module of installation on hard disk nevertheless is proposed.

It should be noted that a version beta with the office 3D Beryl AIXGL is also proposed in remote loading via a BitTorrent file on this same page.

Installation of DreamLinux

The boot process in DreamLinux has remained basically the same and based on Morphix. The boot splash, advanced options, and procedure haven't changed. Inside Live CD mode, we opened Firefox. The home page shown was file:///usr/local/share/html/index.html. It covers MKDISTRO tool, installation and configuration. As per guide we did fired System->Dreamlinux Install.

It launched Installer, called Morphix Installer. Wizzard of DreamLinux installation is very easy to fallow. In our case we created new partition of type ext3. Selected newly created partition as installer. Now in next step, the installer quit abruptly. We suspected the issue in identifying newly created partition, hence restarted the system again on Live CD. This time it worked. Installer recognized my other linux installations such Arch Linux and Symphony OS properly. They were added in grub menu. Installation took just 12 minutes in our legacy system.

DreamLinux & Applications

One of the great things about Dreamlinux is the default applications selection. Most of applications we love are available by default. In list of those applications we can mention Firefox 1.5.0.1, Thunderbird, MPlayer, GNumeric, etc.

Great Synaptic is available for application installation. apt-get also works seamlessly. Apart from these for proprietary closed source applications Adobe Reader, Google Picasa, Opera, Skype, Google Earth are available through easy-install application.

Our DreamLinux Conclusions

Our final conclusions: Dreamlinux is nice with a lot of eye candies, quite stable, fast and most important usable for everybody, even a newbie in computer, and this version has also a lot of thing to improve. Engage is nice, but when you have a screen cover it, you cannot see what you want to lunch by pointing your mouse to an icon (especially that some icon are similar).