Review: 64 Studio 2.x (Page 1 of 1)
Written by
Steve Lake
Posted on: Oct 27, 2008 at 11:53am
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64 Studio is a Linux distribution built upon Debian with both 64 bit processors, and the designer in mind. It takes the best of Debian, strips out the unnecessary extras, then rebuilds it as a one stop shop for those doing everything from print to web design.
LiveCD
The LiveCD opens up with a typical Debian boot screen, and then loads into the 64 Studio Desktop, which is powered by Gnome 2.14.3. The interesting thing about this desktop is that it's arranged more like a KDE desktop with the Gnome menu at the bottom, rather than the top. There's also a few of the typical Gnome extras gone as well.
The main menu itself is rather thin on applications, with everything included in the system focused quite heavily on design and creation. The default list of programs includes Gimp, Blender, Scribus, Gaim, IceWeasel, Bluefish, Abiword, amSynth, Hydrogen and many others. As you can see, the list is pretty heavily focused towards design.
Likely because of this rather stripped down and mission specific design, 64 studio is fast. Amazingly fast actually, even for a LiveCD. Load times for all applications is good, even for the more system intensive ones.
From this point on, there really isn't much to say about 64 studio, other than it's a great drop and go live environment for creating a wide variety of multimedia products. However, unlike most live cd's, there is no install option. You actually have to download a separate ISO for that. While that seems a bit silly to me, there appears to have been a logical motive behind that.
IE, this would provide a portable version of 64 studio, and a local installable version. I fail to see why both can't be provided on the same cd, but then again, if they did it this way, there's likely a reason. I just fail to see what that is.
Installation
The installation process is pretty textbook, and text based. It uses the old style graphical text installer to complete it's work. Surprisingly, it only asks you a couple of questions, which are dead easy to understand, before it goes forward and completes it's work. If someone couldn't do this and get it right on their first try, I'd be surprised.
Another interesting thing about the installer is it's ability to guess the proper system settings (ie language, timezone, etc) without any problems. It's like it just knew the right answers and all I had to do was agree to them. From start to finish, total installation time is about twenty five to thirty minutes.
At the end of the install process, it asks you what standard resolution you'd like to run your system at. You can choose anywhere from 1920x1440 all the way down to 640x480. And you can select multiple default resolutions as well.
Installed System
The installed system is very similar in layout and configuration to the LiveCD, however there is a slightly different arrangement of applications, with a few apps that were once available in the LiveCD either missing, or replaced with something else. One of the nice surprise additions was Synaptic. If nothing else, you know that package management, should you have to add anything more than what's provided by default, will be extremely easy.
I can't say that this distribution will be perfect for new users, even though it's very new user friendly, but it can easily be used by someone looking for a good starter desktop who's new to Linux. The reason I can't say that it'd be perfect for new users is because it's setup with the designer in mind. So there are certain things that have been slanted towards that end, making its use as a standard desktop a bit tougher.
Again, you can use this for pretty much anything you want, but with so much being put into design, one of the other desktop centric distributions would work better for someone wanting to use their Linux desktop for something other than design work.
Configuration and funcationality wise, aside from it being Gnome, it runs pretty well. In fact, it has to be one of the best running Gnome setups I've run into so far. I tend to find Gnome to be clunky, cumbersome, slow, and problematic, if not a bit buggy in places. However, Gnome seems to run almost flawlessly on the system, and the somewhat KDE/XFCE'ish slant to the system layout actually makes it a lot easier to use and maintain.
Hardware support on this distro is flawless. I didn't see a single hickup, resolution flaw or anything. It just grabbed everything I had, installed the correct drivers, properly tweaked them and setup everything to function exactly as they should. I have absolutely no issues with any of the hardware.
Multimedia support is also incredibly good. Of course, given that this is a distro designed with multimedia design in mind, that's not entirely surprising at all. In fact, in some way I wouldn't be surprised at all if 64 studio also made a great gaming and media (like mythtv) platform just for that reason.
Conclusion
Overall I like 64 studio. It's certainly got a different way of doing things, but they're things that are done for the good of the graphics and multimedia designer, things that could easily translate back to a normal end user if they wanted to try it, and didn't mind the focus on multimedia design.
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