Featured Comments: Week of 2011 February 27

I was scared again that this post wouldn't happen this week, but thankfully I was able to write 2 posts that ended up getting a handful of comments.

Review: AUSTRUMI 2.2.9

Interestingly enough, all the commenters on this post have been anonymous.
One reader asked, "Am I blind or there is not even 1 (one!) link to the AUSTRUMI web site? What kind of review is this?" Yeah, sorry, I'm not in the habit of doing that. I'll try to do it from now on, though.
Another commenter said, "If you push the tab button at the boot-splash and type in lang_en as a boot parameter you will find the desktop is in English and will stay that way"
Another reader had this to say: "Were you able to get connected wirelessly? I have tried the last 10 releases, and none connect wirelessly for me. Also, did you try to open a thumbdrive? Have not been able to do that either. This is a great looking and very fast distro and I would love to be able to use it. P.S. I tried posting in the unofficial English Austrumi forum, and even though the moderator answers quickly, concise answers seem unobtainable. Thannks for the review."
Another commenter was a bit more flattering: "I´ve been using wifi with an intel 3945, a Ralink 2500 and a RT8187, but I do recall it failed on other laptops (none with Broadcom 43xx). Still, since it can work from RAM, it frees the CD drive, which is VERY usefull booting laptops with faulty Windows installations. Plus, it absolutely flies on an old 1000 Mhz PIII Dell, which is now out of the garage and working very well in a Charity Org. Now it´s using Opera and LibreOffice I must check out the latest ISO. Cheers to the Austrumi devs!"

Revisited: Pardus 2011

Reader tharanitharan had this to say: "tried it skype does work.. but i reverted back to linux mint..not much packages ti play around with in pardus 2011"

Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's posts. I should be a lot less busy this coming week, but I don't actually have a whole lot planned. Well, scratch that: openSUSE 11.4 is coming out this week, so I plan to review that when that happens. Remember, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Review: AUSTRUMI 2.2.9

Main Screen

Unless you're from Latvia, there's a good chance that this is the first time you are seeing either the name AUSTRUMI or a review of it. So what is it?
AUSTRUMI is a Latvian Slackware-based distribution that uses FVWM as the window manager. So why am I reviewing it? Well, a couple days ago I saw on DistroWatch's ticker feed of updated distributions that the AUSTRUMI developers have released version 2.2.9. Yet DistroWatch's page for this distribution shows the last listed update to be version 1.5.0 and the last notable review to be from 2009 August of version 1.9.3 on Desktop Linux Reviews. I read that review before; it praised AUSTRUMI for its light weight as well as its numerous programs stuffed in but knocked it hard for including Minefield, Mozilla Firefox's unstable developmental branch, as its default browser. I became curious about this and wanted to see what has changed since then, so I decided to check it out. The AUSTRUMI website is quite friendly and well-done; although the distribution is Latvian, the page displays by default in English. It has a list of included programs, some history, and a link to the Slackware Latvia forums. That's certainly helpful (no sarcasm intended).
I tested this on a live USB made with MultiSystem. I only tested the live session, for which it was designed, although it is technically installable as well. Follow the jump to see what it's like.