The INQ takes a dip into open sauce

BROWSING THROUGH the stacks of press releases and statements of seeming miracles by the open saucers, it seems as though we should take a look at some of these offerings. Who knows, we might stumble onto the Next Big Thing©. If even the Vole can see some benefit to open source, we would be crazy not to have a good look ourselves. Crazy is as crazy does, so here goes.

The hardware
Nothing fancy. A DIY whitebox from the local wholesale computer market. Intel Celeron 2.8 Ghz CPU, 512MB RAM, 160GB Hitachi SATA HD, BenQ DVD/R. Sound, video, and 10/100 Ethernet on the MSI mainboard. All hardware known to work on the latest Fedora release.

Open the sauce
Going back a couple of weeks on the DistroWatch site, we spotted 3 likely victims for testing this time around. PC BSD 1.4 Beta, Puppy Linux 2.17, and 64 Studio 2.0. Puppy and 64 Studio are Linux distros, with 64 Studio being a Debian remix. Puppy was designed from the ground up and is not based on another distro. Puppy is also the only "live CD" of the bunch. The others need to be installed on your HD to use them.

The oddball of the bunch is PC BSD. The 1.4 release that we are testing is still in beta. As you should be, we are a little leery of testing beta software (unless it is beta software released by the Vole, marked and marketed as if it were fully tested release software), but this is a solid beta release, nothing to be afraid of.

Nice Puppy
Download the Puppy Linux iso from the main Puppy site, or Google around for alternative download sites. The iso image is not large. Less than 100MB. In fact, after we downloaded the image and toasted it to a CD, the whole thing came out to 82.3MB. That is all of it. Everything from soup to nuts included in less space than some OSs need for the splash screen. A not-so-obvious tip if you do try this distro: leave the CD open after you burn the iso image. Your Puppy can use the extra space to save your settings.

Once you have toasted the iso image, slap the CD into your CD drive, set the BIOS to boot from CD, and away you go! Wait around a bit while your hardware gets probed, answer a few questions (I simply hit return, accepting defaults), and soon enough you get the Puppy desktop:

This little Puppy is not completely house-ready and sofa-safe. It needs a bit of training. Sure, it does load the entire system into RAM, so you can use your CD drive for other things, but it loads into RAM, then unmounts the CD drive, and does not automount if you insert another CD. You have to click on the "Drives" icon and mount a CD manually. That in itself is not too bad, but you can see the icon looks way too much like a USB stick to be a CD drive. The same icon lets you mount USB drives as well, so it sort of makes sense, but it is still a little irritating.

Another minor annoyance is making a network connection. You have to click on another icon, and go through several steps to get it working, even if you are connected by "always on" cable with DHCP. Oh, don't forget to click the "test this connection" button in the wizard. It will not work without this step.

Once you get it all figured out and set-up, it does work very well. Opening MS Word documents is a snap with Abiword, it works fine with popular music formats, and even plays movie files.

You can find a list of all the applications included with Puppy Linux on the site here. You can also find install options for Puppy Linux from USB drive, floppy drive, or directly from your hard drive.

Small warning: Puppy Linux is not a live CD rescue distro. Use Knoppix or something similar if you need to do that.

Good
Small. Really small, yet still a good set of features.

Bad
Needs some messing about to get it working, but your settings can be saved on the CD to make the next use a snap.

Ugly
The part about saving settings to the CD comes up later, after you have likely already toasted your CD. Leave the CD open after you burn the iso image, and you could make it into a live CD that even your brother-in-law can use.

Make your own Area 51 with 64 Studio
From the Studio 64 website comes this exhilarating blurb: "64 Studio is a GNU/Linux distribution tailor-made for digital content creation, including audio, video, graphics and publishing tools. A remix of Debian, it comes in both AMD64/Intel64 and 32-bit flavours, to run on nearly all PC hardware."

The release we tested was the latest one at version 2.0. Electric is the name for this release, and our guess is it replaces the previous releases, 'Handcrank', 'Steam', and 'Gas'. Anyway, it is supposed to be all you need for working with digital images, sound, and movie files.

Download the iso image and burn it to a CD. Oops. Our first surprise. It is slightly larger than the cheap Chinese CDs we are using. At just 69MB too large for safe overburn, you have to toast it to a DVD. Fair enough. Sort of. Surely it could be shrunk just a hair to make it fit on a CD?

This is not Studio-to-go. That is a live CD, also based on Debian. 64 Studio is an install distro. We slapped it in the DVD drive, booted it, and prepared for the worst. It installs in a semi-frightening Debian sort of way. Not for the feint-of-heart Linux noob.

The Debian installer found all the hardware on our test system, and got everything sorted out in a reasonable amount of time. In about 4 beers time the installer finished copying and setting up everything, including the network connection. After a couple of unsettling screen blackouts and flashes, the DVD tray opened. "Remove the install media and the system will reboot" or something reassuring was the final installer message. We did, and it did.

When the system booted up into 64 Studio, we were presented with a Gnome desktop running on Debian. Ah, but this was with a twist! No problem moving the mouse pointer around on the screen, but nothing to click on. Nothing at all. No icons, and right-clicking the mouse brought up more nothing.

After restarting X a couple of time, we finally got the GNU happy foot icon in the bottom menu bar and powered down the computer. Power back up, and all was well.

What do you get for the trouble of installing 64 Studio? Not much. The 64 Studio site does not give a list of apps that come on the distro, but they are not legion. Our guess is that this distro might be an advantage for someone with a 64 bit setup, but that is just a guess from the press releases and mention of special "kernel tweeks."

Good
GNU/Debian, if you like that sort of thing.

Bad
Could be made to fit on a single CD, but it does not.

Ugly
GNU/Debian, if you don't like that sort of thing.

Lose Linux, use Unix
The last victim in this test trio is not a Linux distro. PC BSD is based on Berkeley UNIX and FreeBSD. Click on over to the main PC BSD website for more information.

The version of PC BSD we tested was the 1.4 beta release. If you want to try this non-frightening beta for yourself, be sure to download both iso images. the CD2 image has some useful applications included.

We toasted the iso images to CDs, put CD1 into the drive, and started the test machine. We chose graphical install, and were presented with a nice looking install screen. Choose your locale and language, keyboard layout, and then get ready to format and install. Wait, what's this? The installer wants to know what drive to install to, no problem there, but it also asks what slice to put the system in. What slice?

Indeed. It's a UNIX thing. slices are like partitions, only more fun. Since we like our fun in big slices here, we chose the whole HD as the slice to install to. Nice installer. This thing is slick. For some screenshots of the installer in action, have a look here.

When it gets all done with installation (copying files from both CDs), spits out the last install CD, and reboots, you get a nice KDE 3.5.7 desktop, and a boatload of applications. There are plenty more application packages to be had, and installation of extra apps is truly simple.

PC BSD uses a packaging scheme called PBI (Pc Bsd Installer). PBIs are very simple to install, and include all dependencies. A PBI will install automatically when you download it from one of the PBI sites, or you can just click on the file to start installation if you copy it from some other source. It is a very good packaging system, and it just works. No fuss.

Here is a shot of the PC BSD KDE destop:
Good
Installation is a snap. Additional applications are simple to install.

Bad
You might not find every app you want pre-packaged.

Ugly
If you are stuck on Gnome, you are out of luck for now.

And the winner is...

If you have some older kit laying about and need to setup something for your brother-in-law to use, try Puppy Linux. It should work on very basic hardware.

Give PC BSD a go if you have some newer hardware, want to setup a server, or a rock-solid workstation. It has some minor limitations, but looks and acts very good.

64 Studio is a solution desperately in need of a problem. If you are so bent, just install Debian and get the packages you need from the repos. µ