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| Main Screen |
What's aptosid, you ask? I had
reviewed sidux 2010-01 "Hypnos" before, and unfortunately, that review didn't turn out so well; it refused to load after booting in VirtualBox. So why am I bringing up sidux? Well, sidux, due to various legal and financial issues, has changed its name to aptosid (but otherwise continues the release naming/numbering system as well as the fundamental base (Debian's sid (unstable) system)). Let's see if this one works. (
NOTE: I have reverted to allocating 1024 MB of RAM in VirtualBox.)
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| Konqueror |
Boot and startup are very fast. The first thing I see (in terms of non-terminal graphics) is a cool animation of the word "aptosid" appearing on-screen. The theme is the classic sidux KDE 4.X theme, though the wallpaper is more gray than red; I actually kind of like the Grand Theft Auto-style wallpaper (because that is what I am reminded of when I see the wallpaper). KDE here is at version 4.4, so while tabbed windowing is supported, the better-integrated system tray icons are not present. The KDE menu is a KDE 3-style menu, and it integrates nicely with the overall theme; the menu items themselves also don't look cluttered and are well-labeled.
The application selection is fairly sparse. Konqueror is the only web browser available, though it works well. As far as I know, no proprietary codecs are included. Unfortunately, the sound didn't work for a while (as I didn't hear the KDE 4 startup sound), and it took a bit of fiddling in the system settings manager to get sound to work.
As aptosid is based off of Debian (and is tied even more closely to Debian than Ubuntu is), I am rather shocked that for all the odd networking tools included, Synaptic Package Manager is not included; there are 0 GUI tools for installing packages. Given how good Synaptic Package Manager is and given that aptosid is closely tied to Debian, even if this is a distribution meant for more advanced Linux users, I think this omission is inexcusable.
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| System Settings and KMenu |
Well, that's really all there is to aptosid (installation procedure (which I did not test) aside). It's clear from the start that this is a distribution for Linux users with intermediate or high levels of experience, but I still think it's a shame that Synaptic Package Manager is not included.
