Review: Moon OS 2.0 (Page 1 of 1)
Written by
Steve Lake
Posted on: Apr 03, 2009 at 11:36am
Section:
Reviews
Printer Friendly Version
Legacy URL
MoonOS is one of those elegant distros, where it focuses a lot on eyecandy and looking good. And it definitely has a lot of good things to look at. Sorta like something that comes by and catches your eye in a way that nothing else can. But good looks don't mean that what's underneath is all that great. But sometimes the good looks are only the beginning of the greatness hidden beneath that flashy exterior. So which is it for MoonOS? Let's find out.
LiveCD
MoonOS comes with a LiveCD that loads up amazingly fast. In fact, I was surprised how quickly it got to the desktop. It was “Boom!” and loaded the basic OS, and then “BOOM!” and it loaded the desktop. Then you started clicking around and BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! things just happened, and happened fast.
In an odd way my first few minutes playing around with MoonOS made me feel like Emeril a little bit. MoonOS has to easily be in the top 25% for fastest LiveCD's among the more recent stock of distros. On top of that, it's doing all that amazing speed with it's eyecandy in full swing.
The desktop is built upon the Enlightenment E17 window manager, and it also includes some amazing tools from other projects, including a quick launch toolbar on the right side that includes it's own fair bit of eye candy.
What's also interesting is the mixture of tools and applications available in the LiveCD. There's a number of your favorite standbys, such as Firefox, Pidgin, Open Office and more. But then there's also a selection of them from Gnome, XFCE and KDE as well.
MoonOS is built upon Ubuntu, but appears to try and diverge from it's parent in many ways, making a unique name for itself and being unique in many ways in and of itself. The base theme for MoonOS has a very oriental feel, with lots of green, and stylized plants and trees on the wallpaper.
And overall I like this LiveCD so far, save for a few instabilities I detected, one of them being chiefly with Exaile media player. It may not have been the only crash, but it was certainly the chief offender.
Configuration options are easily accessible from the application menu and are quite extensive, especially for an E17 install. As far as hardware goes, everything was perfect. Of course, given that it's built on Ubuntu, this is not surprising in the slighest.
Multimedia, other than the few quirky crashes I saw, was perfect as well. No DVD support to speak of, but standard audio and video stuff works fine.
InstallAfter all the quick snap response time of the LiveCD and it's applications, I was surprised to find that the install was a bit slow in coming up. It was also painfully slow in doing it's job. Then again, MoonOS appears to be using the stock Ubuntu installer with very little, if any, modification.
The system itself takes well over an hour to install, and seems to just crawl along throughout the entire process. A sad statement to an otherwise lightning fast LiveCD. But other than the issues with speed of the process, the install is relatively standard and textbook, with little more needed from the user than to click next, choose a partition setup, and primary user login info. The rest of the questions are ones that most users can just click through without any user intervention.
OverviewFirst boot was pretty quick. Interestingly though, it wasn't much faster than the LiveCD in total boot time, which typically isn't the case, as the installed system tends to boot considerably faster than the LiveCD. But not here.
What sucks though is that I had a lot of problems logging into the system from this window. In fact, I couldn't get in. Period. So I have no idea what the installed desktop looks like, how it performs, or anything. I tried going back and doing things over, but with zero change.
So somewhere along the line, there's still something important broken here. Given the inability to login to the installed system, I did some digging and found some rather ugly hardware detection issues. Everything worked flawlessly on the LiveCD, but it wouldn't see my keyboard in the installed system.
On top of that there were other visual clues that all was not right in Kansas. One part was the keyboard, another was screen artifacts, missing screen elements, and other things. I'm not sure why that was the case, since this worked perfectly in the LiveCD. But when it came to the installed system, nothing worked right at all.
And I can guarantee it's not the test hardware, since it works just fine with other distros, and works just fine with the MoonOS LiveCD. So this is a huge show stopper for me.
ConclusionMoonOS is an interesting distro. It's very beautiful and has a lot of potential. But it's also got some bugs, at least one of which is a huge show stopper, and thus will not find it's way onto my recommended list. I feel that this distro needs to grow a bit more before I can say it's ready for any kind of mainstream use.
But given that things went well with the LiveCD, they at least do have a half thumbs up from me. Now they just need to fix things with the installed system to get the other half.
But either way, they appear to be on the right track to building a very eye catching, and appealing distro.
|
Average vistor rating: 3.5 out of 5 (22 total votes) | |
|
Latest Articles
Upcoming Shows and Cons
Announcements
This is just a reminder to everyone that we're always looking for articles for posting on our site. So if you have a Linux, Open Source or Media related article, review, tutorial, or editorial you want to post, by all means please send it to admin@raiden.net and we'll be glad to post it. Thanks.
Have you ever bought a PC or laptop preloaded with Linux?
Latest Releases
(courtesy of Distrowatch)
More
|
