Raiden's Realm: Review: SymphonyOne 2008

Review: SymphonyOne 2008 (Page 1 of 1)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Dec 19, 2008 at 03:37pm
Section: Reviews
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SymphonyOne is a distribution designed in a way that's uniquely different from other distributions. Its key focus is ease of use and simplicity. This is perfect for kiosks, new users, or technological neophytes who don't use a computer much, or simply don't like complicated interfaces. This distribution would be good for more senior users to choose when picking a Linux distro to give to family members or friends with limited needs or computer skills. Why? Let's have a look.

Install

The load time into the livecd is exceptional. It boots itself to the desktop and gets itself ready to do business very quickly. It's definitely one of the faster distributions to load, and requires surprisingly few resources, making it perfect for older, lower spec machines. This distribution could even run comfortably on an old 800mhz machine if it had to. Once on the desktop you're greeted with a rather unique interface.

There is no taskbar, primary menu, or desktop icons. All you have is four icons, one in each corner, a basic digital clock, and an analog clock that sits as an applet on the desktop. The digital clock at the top of the screen can't be removed, but the analog clock applet can if it becomes a problem for you. The default desktop used by SymphonyOne is a unique application called "Mezzo". It's definitely not your typical Linux window manager.

The four icons in the corner each do a different task for you. The upper left icon gives you access to several basic system configurations, including display, services, login screen, network, date/time, theme manager, and change wallpaper. There's also an option to install or remove applications. The icon in the upper right gives you access to your system drive, cdrom, floppy drive, or common folders.

In the lower left you have a simple program menu, showing you a list of seven applications (by default) that you can launch. This list includes Firefox, Text Editor (Gedit), Pidgin, Terminal, and Gmail. That provides you with all the basic needs for email and internet access, as well as a little multimedia and IM, and text editing needs. In the lower right is your power button. It gives you the ability to log out, shut down, or reboot.

If you want to play with the desktop a bit here, you can, but since the livecd has exactly the same functionality and almost exactly the same layout as the installed system, I'm skipping an overview of the livecd and covering all the details of the general interface later in this review. No point repeating my work if I don't have to.

Anywho, on with the installation. To get started, simply click on the lower right icon, and then select "install". Once the install application begins, walking through the steps is very incredibly intuitive. Just pick your language, drive, time zone, and several other options, tell it to install, go have a drink and then come back. Install takes less than ten minutes and allows you to reboot quickly into the installed desktop. Once you're there, that's when the real fun begins.

Overview

Bootup time of the installed system is just as fast, if not slightly faster than the livecd. Once on the desktop, you can begin using the installed applications with a simple point and click, configure the computer, manage files, or more. But given the limited number of installed applications, a person might feel obliged to add a few.

To do that, you'd need to click on the application list, then the add/remove programs option (top left icon, first option). The package manager used by SymphonyOS (I don't know it's name, but it is a graphical frontend to Apt-Plus) pulls all of it's applications, interestingly enough, from the Ubuntu package archive. Now while SymphonyOS doesn't claim to be from Ubuntu roots, their attachment to Ubuntu through the package system quickly points the finger towards Ubuntu being the parent of this great OS.

The list of applications you can install isn't all that great, but then again, if simplicity is your goal, the list they have included is just perfect. Adding an application is as simple as click and apply. Once you're done, the new items will be visible in the application menu. And even though utter simplicity and internet browsing is the focus of this distro, you can easily beef it out with quite an impressive list of applications.

Some of these include Abiword, Amarok, Open Office, Gimp and more. However, if you feel that the list of available applications isn't long enough, Synaptic is available, and includes a complete list of all applications available through the Ubuntu repositories. Now as for how the distro handles applications, it does a fantastic job.

Load times for them are very good, stability is solid, and other than the lack of a task bar and multiple desktops, it's very easy to be highly productive, despite all the simplicity. Now if you're a bit more of a power user, there is a terminal program available (xterm) for you to use with a basic SH shell

If you want a different desktop for your PC, or even a different theme, it's really easy to change both, as the system menu (upper left corner) gives you a link to change either of these.

On a downside, which with this distro there are few, one of the things that irks me is that the developers decided to leave the system install icon in the application menu, a potential minefield for new users that I've railed against with other distributions as well. The other thing that somewhat bothers me is the lack of at least a pager and multiple desktops. I understand why they didn't include these, but at the same time they're what I would consider a highly valuable addition.

You can add Kpager to the desktop if you really, really want to, but by default it's not there. You can't however, at least from what I saw, add more desktops, so that's definitely a down by itself, but not a total loss given the previously mentioned desire for simplicity.

Conclusion

Overall I liked SymphonyOS. It's a nice distribution with the new user in mind, simple, easy to use, and quite good to boot. I'd easily recommend this to new users who are in need of a very simple distribution to use, possibly install, and even maintain. For more information, check out the SymphonyOne homepage.

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