Review: Ark Linux H2O 2007.1 (Page 2 of 4)
Written by
Steve Lake
Posted on: Sep 19, 2007 at 01:52pm
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Testing the System
When you first boot the system, you may notice that the initial bootup takes a bit longer than some other distributions do. Not sure why that is, but it may just be final hardware and system setup. Once you're past that point you'll find that you're greeted with the KDE first use wizard. What makes this interesting is that mixed into the settings for this is several options that are apparently specially tailored for Ark. It's quite an interesting surprise. Once on the desktop I went in and looked around a bit and found that Ark uses KDE 3.5.7 for its desktop environment. That's an immediately plus with me. Digging into the OS a bit further I found that everything had been really simplified with few power user options that hadn't been replaced with some kind of simplification tool. One good thing to note though is that the KDE control center is, for the most part, completely untouched. A pure, unadulterated KDE control center. I was very happy to see that. But now you might ask, "Doesn't that defeat the theme of simple put forward by Ark?" Not really. If you still want simple, Ark has included something called "Mission Control" which takes the KDE control center and downsizes it into a very simple and easy to use PC management system. One big downside I did find though is that if you want to do any kind of hardware management, outside of changing resolutions, you'll need to dive into the console in order to do it.
Next I tested peripheral support to see how well it would handle some of the extras items I found listed in the control center. One of those was a digital camera. While I only had a Kodak C330 easy share to test with, it didn't matter. Ark never saw it. Nor did it see the joystick I tried either, even though both of these were listed as items in the control center that Ark supported. Since I've never personally seen either one of these options before, some of these problems may be due to their newness. But at the same time, that may not be entirely the case considering what else I found as I continued to test the system. I found USB support to be shaky at best. I plugged in a pen drive to copy over a few files and ended up fighting Ark to get it to handle the drive properly. At one point during my testing it even zeroed out a few test files on the drive and in another instance it completely wiped the contents of the drive. Not very reassuring in my opinion. It's something the developers will need to work on for the future. I did a little surfing around to see if I was the only one having this issue and was surprised to find that I'm not. Several others who tried Ark encountered the same issues.
Digging further I found that Ark saw both of my cd and dvd drives. The downside to that is Ark thought they were hard drives and couldn't mount them. As a side effect to that, the system couldn't play any audio cd's or dvd's. To further grind the knife in I found that wireless didn't work right at all, and most of the USB devices, including wireless mice (wired mice seemed to be the only USB item that *DID* work), had issues on the system. Some of them pretty severe and show stopping. What's odd about that is that the same wireless mouse that ran fine during the install and during previous testing with another system, failed to work right in Ark and kept having to be unplugged and replugged and even hard rebooted to get it to work. To be sure it wasn't the mouse that had taken a dump I tried it on another system and even booted into Knoppix and found that it worked fine. So it's obviously not the mouse. Also, Ark failed to properly detect several other pieces of hardware on my system as well, including my video and network cards, both of which are mainstream cards that are well supported. Video worked for the most part, but I couldn't do anything 3d. Certainly no Beryl. As for the network card, while I found that it had added the network card, I could do nothing on the network. This card has not failed once in any other distro before or since. If you put a live cd in for another distro such as PCLOS, everything works fine. So the fault here lies entirely with Ark.
But aside from the hardware issues, on a software level, Ark is a very good system. I figure that if the developers sort out the hardware issues, Ark will rival some of the other major distros that are designed for new users in many ways. And speaking of that software, let's have a look at what Ark does offer you in that area.
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Average vistor rating: 4.3 out of 5 (12 total votes) | |
