Raiden's Realm: Review: GoblinX 2.7

Review: GoblinX 2.7 (Page 1 of 1)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Dec 29, 2008 at 01:20pm
Section: Reviews
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GoblinX is a LiveCD distribution built around Slackware Linux, and designed for ease of use. The flexibility of GoblinX is worthy of mention, as even its boot options show this ability. But is GoblinX an angel in disguise, or a troll under the bridge? Let's find out.

Booting into GoblinX you're initially greeted by a grub boot screen that offers you a lot of interesting choices. For starters, you get to choose from five different window managers: XFCE, KDE, FluxBox, WindowMaker, or Enlightenment. But that's not all - it also offers a text only mode in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and German. And if you think that's the end of it, there's still more! GoblinX offers a section for Goblin Fresh (a semi-graphical terminal session that allows a command line boot into XFCE), Goblin Copy to Ram, Fastest GoblinX Boot, Uncustomized GoblinX Boot, Change Root Password, and Run Memtest Utility.

Whew! Yes, all of that is contained in just the boot menu. That's quite a lot for one distribution. Each of the different desktops have a different layout, and a different wallpaper (to help you more easily determine which desktop you're in), but a consistent list of programs available to all desktops. I found the overall load times to be reasonable, but I was unimpressed with the hardware support the distribution offered.

XFCE (left) and KDE (right)

GNU Step (Left) and Enlightenment (right)
Feature wise it's a spectacular distribution. Good grief, it's like a Swiss army knife all it's own. But I had some crazy issues with the distribution on the hardware level. They weren't issues that I could directly point a finger at something and say, �Yeah, this is what caused it�, but rather they were little problems that seemed to hide at the fringes.

For example, it would randomly freeze, or I would resize the desktop and the PC would comply, and then die... but then the next time I did it, nothing would happen, not even the resize, and then finally everything would be fine. And I'm not using the beta version by any means, so the instabilities puzzle me. I can verify that it wasn't a bad disk image or disk, or even a PC with a bad part (heck, I had Mint6 on it just the previous day and that ran like gold), so I don't know what to conclude.

But as that random flakiness was the only real issue I had, I'll now begin to touch on the good parts of GoblinX, which are numerous. The first thing to comment on is the application list. It's long enough that you begin to wonder how they managed to pack so much stuff into one single CD, and a CD of only 305 meg at that! GoblinX has a storage footprint that's actually smaller than Knoppix, the most comprehensive, and best Linux LiveCD distribution out there.

As for what's installed, there's lots of small games, including Sudoku, several card, board and strategy games, and some other oddball distributions I've never heard of before. You'll also find also Gimp, Firefox, Kmail, Pidgin, Thunderbird, Amarok, K3b, Mplayer, Abiword, Thunar file manager, and more. And of course if you like what you see, and feel inclined to install GoblinX to your hard drive, you can.

The installer crashed on me a couple times, but when it finally did run, the install went pretty smoothly. That surprised me given the instability I encountered earlier. Of course, lo and behold, I get into the installed system and once again things start blowing up at random. Again, it wasn't many instabilities, but it always seemed to happen at the most inopportune times.

So as I was working with the installed version, I decided that it might not hurt to update things and see if that fixed anything. Well, there's no updater, so that idea is shot out the window. The configuration tools also seem to have a fetish for crashing at random. And not a general protection fault kind of crash, but rather one of those crashes where the app just goes away for no reason whatsoever.

Overall, GoblinX is a *decent* distribution, but not one I'd parade around as being all that great. It's got some nice extra toys, and plenty of applications to go around, but pound for pound against most other mainstream distributions, GoblinX gets its butt treed into the ground. It's nice that they're trying so hard to make a fully featured live cd distribution like they are, but they need to work out a bit more of the bugs before I can recommend it to anyone.

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