Jesters Linux Adventures

YourDigitalJester

YourDigitalJester

Member
Im currently in the process of testing Linux builds for my laptop, as well as my PC tower. Im going to do a semi-detailed write up of everything ive tried so far. Links will come shortly
Laptop Specs
Intel Pentium Dual/core T2330
2GB Ram
120GB HDD

VMware Settings (true amongst all tests below)
2GB Memory
1 Processor
2 cores
20GB Hard Disk (cant change this setting)
Network Adapter NAT
Usb Controller Present
Sound Card Auto Detect
Printer Present
Display Auto Detect

Ubuntu Builds-

Ubuntu 14.04- What was on my laptop, its slightly too intensive for my Acer Aspire 5715Z Laptop, its an amazing OS but i need something a bit lighter. Never tested CPU usage, ill throw it in my VM later on my laptops specs and see what comes up.

Ubuntu 15.10- What im looking to replace, its currently installed on my laptop and is an improvement over 14.04 due to optimizations but is a large file (i have almost filled my HDD with not much else installed). As with 14.04, i love the OS and i would run it any day on a better laptop, but i need something better.

Ubuntu 16.10- I LOVE this build of ubuntu on my PC, it gave me issues at first (well documented issue with the ubuntu sound card drivers and Xonar sound card, though fixed). The optimization of it is fantastic. On my specs (listed below Tails) i get 8.5% CPU usage running youtube, URC, The GEForce website (downloading proper graphics drivers for my PC, the default ones dont give this card its maximum power), and running VMware with two os's running (one of them is downloading itself to VMware too). Cant say enough good things about 16.04.

Tails- Ubuntu 14.10 with extra securities (everything runs through TOR, memory Cache is wiped every time you shut it off), as well as a lighter desktop to decrease CPU usage. I found it idleing to be a very good OS for low powered systems, but TOR is a very intensive browser that lagged horribly when constricted to the settings above. I might put it on my tower in all honesty, the securities are nice and my PC is quite built...
7.8 GB Ram
Intel® Xeon CPU E5506 @ 2.13GHz × 4
GeForce GTS 450 Performance Edition

Bodhi- Another Ubuntu 14.XX based build, made for light-weight needs and sounded perfect in theory! It did indeed use almost zero CPU, and ran smoothly. In all honesty i should use this or Lubnutu but its so dang ugly! The limited settings dont allow it to look pretty at all, and i refuse to work on an ugly OS. If you can get past the looks, or find it pretty then by all means use Bodhi, youll find it very quick (and fast) to use
Lubuntu- Not worth saying much about, its hardly different than Bodhi, i find it uglier. My opinons are the same as Bodhi.

KXStudio- A great OS for someone doing a lot of sound work, preloaded with the best free audio editors that ubuntu supports. Cpu usage in the VM stayed around 5% as with Zorin, but boots slower and seems to stutter under load. It also had a bug where it wouldnt properly shut down, i had to force it.

Zorin- After testing it thoughly on my virtual machine this is what was picked for my laptop! Both on the VM and on my laptop im averaging 5% cpu usage at idle, which for the specs of the laptop is good. This a truly amazing build of ubuntu and one i will forever reccomend. Ill update this if it shows any issues, but nothing seems wrong so far. Preloaded with chrome is always nice, even though ill be installing opera, Chrominium is a great browser.
 
DMGrier

DMGrier

VIP Member
Nice write up, if you are looking for light weight then I recommend Arch Linux using something like xfce. You can build Arch Linux pretty easily using architect linux.
 
DMGrier

DMGrier

VIP Member
YourDigitalJester said:
Didnt think to try Arch, ill look in to it :)
Click to expand...

Keep in mind Arch Linux is a little different then many of the Ubuntu bases you have been testing, if you need help PM me. I will let you know one thing to do after install is setup yaourt and learn to install packages from yaourt. By default you will use pacman (instead of apt) but yaourt will provide you way more packages.
 
DMGrier

DMGrier

VIP Member
So here is a little more info on React OS.

First off, this is Alpha software, meaning lots of bugs. Keep that in mind in your testing and I would not expect beta to drop anytime soon as React OS has been in Alpha for a long time and in my testing feels no where close to Beta. This is fine when you think about what they are trying to accomplish as this is a huge undertaking.

If you want to test in a VM you have to download the Boot image, the live image does have a installation option but it is currently not working as per there forums. If you have ever installed Windows XP the installer will be very familiar to you. You must use an ISO image as a bootable USB does not work and by the sounds of it has not worked in years.

Under the hood
According to the documentation React OS is being modeled after Windows Server 2003, this is very apparent throughout the GUI layout. The OS is using NT kernel 5.3 which is a older kernel version, as of Windows Vista, Microsoft has been shipping 6.x series kernels. The file system is using FAT, which yet again is very old as I believe XP even offered (possibly debut) NTFS. Even though being based on a lot of older MS technology there documentation claims they are still keeping in mind newer technology compatibility in the future which I have a theory on how they plan to achieve this which I will cover in a second.

Everything is placed where you would expect to find it in a old Windows operating system. From a administration stand point you do not have powershell, and what they call command prompt is not a real Windows command prompt. It does look like CMD and a lot of commands do work like ipconfig and net start worked fine. However when running something like "tasklist" to see running processes I got an error. Many of the applications are named after the ones you would find in Windows, however when reading the about section you will notice they are all clones which is what I expected due to licensing.

Software Management
React OS offers a package manager GUI similar to what many Linux operation systems offered years ago, software is limited but works. My main question was can I install ".exe" on the OS? So my first test was I tried to install something like notepad++, it worked! Installed with no problems and was up and running in no time. Then I decided to go for something a little more challenging and tried to install Steam, this worked but currently login buttons are not working, though this could be due to possibly running in a VM. So then I tried to install Google Chrome, this did confirm several things for me. One is it does closely resemble Microsoft Windows at the core. Google detects the OS requesting an installer and provides the correct one. I was provided with a .exe which tells me that this operating system is seen as a Windows OS or to be accurate a Windows clone. The Chrome installer fired up right away, problem was shortly after firing the installer failed "due to lack of network connection". Well that is strange as I know I am online, after digging I found out that these .exe are actually installing via WINE.

I was kind of impressed with the implementation of WINE as you don't really know it is there and this is how they plan on keeping up in my opinion with newer software technologies. WINE uses "bottles" which simulate different versions of Windows. So React OS can be based on Windows Server 2003/XP but could run bottles for Windows 7, thus making it possible for newer software applications to run on React OS. Sounds good right? Until a piece of software needs a specific DLL or network connectivity, not to mention you can tweak WINE to provide the missing functionality but this creates licensing nightmare or requires you to have a purchased a version of Windows to be legal. I am hoping that the end goal for React OS is to provide a package management system that can actually install .exe or .msi.

My thoughts....
It is a good operating system and I will be excited to see how it develops over the years. There concept is not really new though, BSD did something very similar. When you look at BSD in the 90's the goal was to have a open source and free as in cost operating system that worked and mimic the old proprietary Unix operating systems. Essentially React OS is doing the same thing, my only concern for that project is licensing. Unix pretty much died in the late 90's thanks to Microsoft and the adoption of Linux in the server space. For these reasons no one is really willing to really go after BSD, I think the last standing Unix OS is owned by Oracle called Solaris. But if you follow news you know this year Oracle laid off a ton of the developers for Solaris and it would cost Oracle more money then it is worth to go after BSD for licensing.

Microsoft on the other hand is a different story, Windows is still the primary used OS in the world on PC, If React gets to close to being able to provide a native application installation experience where it becomes appealing to people then I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft go after them. Even if there is no legal ground for Microsoft to go after them then purely to bankrupt the project like they did to Lindows so long ago.

On the flip side however, there could be a good relationship for Microsoft that would be similar to CentOS and Red Hat. Either way I do say it is worth trying in a VM, if anything for some cosmetic nostalgia.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top