[wellylug] White Box Linux - First impressions

Sam Cannell sam at plaz.net.nz
Wed Mar 3 09:24:39 NZDT 2004


Having found myself with little to do yesterday evening, I decided to
have a look at White Box Linux, mentioned yesterday by Jonathan.  Just
thought I'd make a few notes for you all about it.

First off, I should note I was installing inside a VMWare session, and
one or two of the problems I came across were most likely caused by
this.  I intend to try installing on my laptop in the next couple of
days to see if it resolves these issues.

First off, the installer couldn't start Anaconda, so I had to run
through the setup in text mode.  This wasn't a big issue, and I suspect
that this was something to do with VMWare.

The text mode setup was very straight-forward, and only took about 10
minutes until I was ready to reboot.

On the first boot, I was prompted to configure the resolution and
refresh rate for my monitor.  Once I'd done this, X started with no
hassles.

The only thing that didn't work straight away was the network, but I
suspect this was to do with incorrect VMWare settings.  After a bit of
fiddling in the VM config it started working.

The standard workstation installation included Gnome, OpenOffice,
Evolution, Mozilla and all the standard desktop games and toys.

Over the next half hour after installing, I did the following:

* Installed and configured Samba:
   - Created a samba user
   - Created a couple of shares
   - Browsed the Samba shares from my Windows PC
   - Browsed the windows network from Nautilus
   - Copied files between the two

* Enabled remote XDMCP, connected and logged in from my X terminal

* Changed between DHCP and a static IP for the network card

* Changed the system hostname

* Changed the screen resolution and refresh rate

* Added a printer (HP JetDirect) and printed to it - both a testpage
  printer configuration tool and a test document from within OpenOffice

* Added and removed packages

In doing all of the above, not once did I need to open a terminal window
or know a single Linux command.  All functions that require root access
prompt for the root password in a graphical sudo-like utility which
appears to remember the root password for a few minutes.

Keep in mind that over the last few years, Debian is the only
distribution I've really used, so spending an hour or so tweaking
configuration files after an installation feels normal to me.

The add / remove packages tool is very well laid out - all the packages
have adequate descriptions and are well categorised.

If I absolutely had to find fault with it, the only thing that I didn't
think was well done was that when I adding a bunch of packages, it
doesn't seem to copy them all to the hard disk before installing - I
needed to insert each cd a few times as it satisfied dependancies.

All in all, however, I couldn't be more impressed.  Up until now, I
didn't really think that Linux was ready to become a mainstream desktop
OS.  I'm having second thoughts about that now. :)

As I said yesterday, I can make copies of the ISOs available for anyone
who is interested at the March 8 meeting.

Cheers,

Sam
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