spiralofhope

NOTE: This was an internal release just to hammer out some issues before the alpha is released to the public.

I don’t know how to write this without sounding either cheezy as hell or biased, since I’m on the team.  But.

The Unity Linux alpha I’m working on impresses me.  A lot.

I’m using a pre-release alpha, and I’ve already replaced my main setup with it.  It’s outstanding.

I had been doing quite a lot of distro-hopping over the last couple of months.  I wasn’t very fair to a lot of distros, and I would later learn that I had some serious issues with LILO which was causing most if not all of the problems.  I did end up really liking Foresight Linux, but I ended up with Slackware 12.2.

But just after installing the previous pre-alpha build of Unity, I would learn that a private alpha was released for in-house testing.

I had issues booting the CD.  I think this was because of my impatience, but that aside.. here’s what I tried.

1. Regular bootup, eventually hangs.  I can’t get into textmode.  Maybe I should have been more patient.
2. Video Safe Mode (framebuffer) is the same
3. Safe Boot – drops into the shell after “unable to mount the livecd” and I have a hung keyboard.
4. Console – same as a regular bootup.
5. regular bootup, but with noapic – hangs on probing SCSI.  At this point I was just randomly trying stuff.

6. regular bootup, but with acpi-off

   1. slow probing, but it works.
   2. At “searching for the loop image” I have to give it lots of time.
   3. It begins X, but it puts my monitor to sleep.
   4. I got a locked keyboard, but SysRq-reisub worked to reboot me.

7. Video Safe Mode = VESA

   1. An average/slow boot, fails to start the X server and prompts to reconfigure.
   2. I reconfigured with Xorg|ati, Plug’n Play, automatic 24bpp
   3. It works, it’s very fast, and I did a complete system upgrade with smart, which worked very well
   4. GRUB gave me an option to use 1600x1200x16bpp, but it didn’t actually work.  I’ll have to play around some more, because if Grub can give me my proper textmode (132×60 was the Oldschool version), then I’ll definitely like it a lot more.
   5. With build 3.7, installation would die on Grub, because I would get kicked out of X.  This time it worked just fine.

I booted up into this setup, and it worked just fine.  I played around with the repository, and I have to say that Smart is WAY better than Synaptic, except that Smart doesn’t have categories of software.  Annoying, but not critical for me at my level of awareness of the various packages.

On that note, the amount of stuff in the repo is phenomenal.  There were some apps which I had to compile from source, but the list was surprisingly small from what I would have expected with such a young distro.  Our packagers haven’t been resting at all.

Issues:

• I had to reconfigure Openbox to get it to recognize multiple desktops.  Odd.

• At the console, I can’t type #, and | becomes ~, " becomes @, (?) becomes #.  It’s working fine in an X terminal.

  • 2014-08-02 – not sure about the last one, it got deleted some time ago.

• Is there a command to start smart --gui when logged in as an everyday user?  It should be easy to make if there isn’t one.

Yeah, that’s all the issues I have with it.  Everything else is working like a charm.

I’m still configuring all my preferences, but it’s going very well.  I even got a new webcam working.  I’m so pleased that this alpha has kernel 2.6.30, which supports my webcam directly.

It’s really light and fast too.  I’m going to enjoy carving it up and making it even lighter so that emulators can run at full speed in Oldschool Linux.