Having become a fan of PcLinuxOS after a recent review of their 2007 version, I've followed its development with interest to see where it goes as it grows and develops.  One of the things that has interested me the most lately is not so much the parent distribution, but all the children it has spawned.  One of those is TinyMe, a live cd derivative of PCLOS, that offers you the best of its parent, with the small size common to "lite" distributions or "distros" as they're more commonly called.  One of the first things I discovered with this distribution is that anyone who tries out TinyMe and is a fan or user of PCLOS will likely feel right at home.  This is because TinyMe keeps much of what makes PCLOS so great, including the boot screen and all the preload and bootup features.

While this article is only an overview and not an actual review of TinyMe, especially since TinyMe is still in the middle of considerable development and has a ways to go before it can be considered a ready to use or review distribution (especially since a number of parts are still missing), I do plan to cover a few points about it that I found rather interesting.  The first one that comes to mind is the welcome screen.  I found it rather interesting to be greeted by a famous mock Xray picture of Homer Simpson, giving me the impression that the creator of TinyMe is apparently a Simpsons fan.  One quick tip for those who haven't tried out this live cd is that nowhere does it tell you what the password is to get into the distribution.  The user password for "tiny" is of course "tiny".  I had to make a wild guess at that myself when I first loaded it up and luckily guessed right.  But since I suspect that several hundred other people have mentioned that to the developers already, I figure it'll get fixed in the next version.  Another interesting thing is, despite this being a slimmed down "lite" distribution, its creator has gone to the extra effort of offering you six different session choices.  That's a lot of choices considering that they're out to create as streamlined a distribution as possible.  But I think part of that is achieved through the use of the light weight OpenBox window manager.

Load times into the desktop were pretty good too, although less than what I'd hoped for.  But again, this is a "test" build and that will likely get ironed out later.  Once on the desktop I found that applications where scarce, and some tried and true old standbys weren't there (such as firefox and xmms), but that's ok.  Opera is there to the rescue, or at least I thought it was.  As much as I'd have liked it to work right away, I had to do some tinkering in the hardware to get it to work.  Again, something that needs to be fixed before the final version, and is likely being taken care of already, so I'll cut them some slack on that.  But overall, other than a few system bugs and the general lack of applications, especially ones that should be considered crucial, if not critical, the whole distro was great.  It also was very fast once fully booted and logged in, it loaded very neatly into memory and hardly ever touched the cdrom drive.

As this distribution grows I'd like to see some more applications made available (IE, firefox instead of Opera, adding XMMS, etc), some more diagnostic tools and eventually a liveUSB version as well.  This derivative version of PCLOS really is a tiny little gem that's slowly, but surely growing into a much bigger diamond.  I look forward to the eventual final release of this distribution in the near future.

If you'd like to try out the test version of this distro, it's available via distrowatch.com