Review: FaunOS 0.5.4 (Page 1 of 1)
Written by
Steve Lake
Posted on: Aug 25, 2008 at 02:34pm
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FaunOS is a light weight Linux distribution based on Arch Linux that is designed specifically for use on USB pen drives. It offers the user a complete KDE desktop experience without being too heavy or too light. But can a distribution such as FaunOS truly be user friendly, light weight and still complete? Yes it can. Let me show you how.
Basic system requirements, as reported by the developers is 512mb of ram, 1gb of storage space (if booting from a pen drive. More if you want to save configs), a 500mhz processor, and 128mb of video memory. Interestingly enough, I've gotten it to boot the live cd, and the installed version on 384mb of ram with only 64mb of video memory. I haven't tried it on a machine slower than 500mhz, but I suspect that it could be loaded onto something as small as 300mhz without issue. For optimum performance though, I highly recommend at least 1gb of ram, a 1ghz processor and at least 4gb of storage on your pen drive (especially if you want to install more applications).
Initial bootup of the livecd offers the end user eight basic bootup features. The first is the default FaunOS session. There is also five specialized boot options, a memory test, and a livecd bypass to boot other OS's or directly from the local hard drive. One of the more interesting things I found on the boot screen was mention of the default logins for the user. By default you won't use these for most things you will and can do, but there are certain times later during use that they will be required, so be sure to remember them. If you want added security, you can change them, and add the ability to force FaunOS to ask you for a login when you boot up.
After detecting hardware, it loads KDE and presents you with a well laid out and beautiful desktop. You're given a large number of tools to work with right out of the box, both on the desktop and the taskbar. It did have a little trouble with detecting the sound card, but that's not a big deal as I suspect that will be fixed soon enough. I'm a bit surprised overall that there are so many shortcuts in the taskbar, as it crowds out any program icons that would normally appear there. I don't quite know what this is trying to emulate, but if you don't like that huge grouping of icons, you can easily remove them for a standard KDE taskbar.
The system uses KDE 3.5.9 and Xorg 7.2, and both of them are almost 100% pure. Sure, there's a few minor tweaks here and there, but nothing that'll ruin or change your KDE experience all that much. In fact, I kind of like the changes they've made.
The livecd contains a very large and impressive list of mainstream and secondary programs, such as Firefox, Thunderbird, Mplayer, K9copy and many more. Speed wise, the system is incredibly fast and responsive (especially for a livecd) and functioned without flaw. Installation is fairly straight forward, and can be done from one of three different installers. There is a basic text based installer (available via the link on the desktop), for installing to a pen drive, another for installing to hard drive (I have a sneaking suspicion this is the same installer, but with two different configurations), and the default Arch Linux installer.
To install to a hard drive or pen drive, the drive will need to be formated in fat32 before hand. If it's not, Gparted (the manage partitions icon on the desktop) is included and accessible via the desktop to help you with that. Installation is fairly quick, and painless for the most part. Upon completion the usb drive can be removed and subsequently ran from any PC that supports booting from a USB device. Booting from the FaunOS installed pen drive is interesting. Load times are only really limited by how fast the pen drive can be read.
If at some point in time you desire to install more applications, FaunOS includes PacTrac to assist you at this. It's an interesting package manager with some amazing information panels and a simplicity that I've only seen in Synaptic. In some ways it might even be better than Synaptic, which is saying a lot. But like Synaptic is a frontend for apt, PacTrac is a frontend for PacMan, the Arch Linux package system. And just like the installer for FaunOS, all applications are installed via a console window, courtesy of PacTrac.
FaunOS is also highly customizable. Certainly KDE is that way on its own, but the developers seem to have added an extra level of customization that allows you to do a wider variety of things you couldn't do with just a raw KDE and/or Linux install.
As far as whether I would recommend FaunOS for a new user, given that it's built on Arch Linux, which is more an experienced user's Linux distro than one for beginners, I would normally say no. But after playing with Faun, I would have to say that it's easy enough for new users to master with little or no trouble.
Overall, I like FaunOS. It's got some growing to do, and while it had some issues (all of which are apparently already known bugs, so I won't mention them here), I think that once it comes of age (aka 1.0 final), it will be a distro of simplicity that will put the most user friendly distributions to shame. If you get a chance to try it, I highly recommend you do. You can find out more information on FaunOS at their homepage.
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Average vistor rating: 4.4 out of 5 (17 total votes) | |
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