Wolvix 1.1 Hunter Review

Fast and elegant
Today I am trying Wolvix Hunder Live CD. Wolvix was a remastered SLAX CD, but currently they have changed there base to good old slackware. The live CD provides plenty of cheat codes, available here. Wolvix uses XFCE as its desktop environment.

Test Machine
So today I am using my old test machine, AMD athlon 2600+ XP, 1 Gig RAM, 64 Meg ATI 7200 with 15" LCD capable of 1024x768@75Hz

Booting
Booting is really fast and boasts of a grey theme. I likes the theme as it makes me remember the old days when computer monitors used to be black & while. The root password is toor and not mentioned anywhere on the login screen. I tried the password because I knew thats what slax uses.

Installation
The hard disk installer is currently in testing stage and can not be trusted much. It is located inside Wolvix control panel and there is no shortcut on the desktop. There are two installation methods, full and furgal. I tried out the full installation.

The installer is least intrusive and most helpful, it gives you an option to run gparted to make/resize partions on your hard drive. Six questions are asked by the installer; 1. Boot Device, 2. Root Partition, 3. (Optional) /home, 4. Swap, 5. Filesystem, 6. Install Grub, 7. Install. The installation process is really fast, it took approximately 5 mins to copy all the desired files to selected partion.

Once the installation is complete, it asks couple of questions. GUI Login or text login, Framebuffer required. Wolvix installer also identified other operating systems installed on the machine, but it could not successfully retreive their names. Also odly enough it gives an option by which user can skip the wolvix entry in grub. I think it is bad taste.

Aesthetics
As mentioned earlier, the default theme is grey, and it is a nicely designed theme that does not extert strain on eyes. The menus are all colored and look really great. The whole wolvix theme is one continuous theme and everythings seems to be though over very well.

System utilization is shown on the desktop, blended with the wallpaper. This display can also be turned on an off selectively.

Applications
The applications are selected keeping a average desktop user in mind. For normal accessories, catfish, gnome commander, medit, Xpad are really good choices. XFCE does not have a samba viewer, but gnome commander acts as a really good samba viewer, I just wonder why did I not use it till now on XFCE based systems.

Bluefish editor, kompozer, meld diff viewer, scite are available to development realated activities. Some games are also included, along with couple of standard graphics applications. There is huge set of multimedia applications; dvd::rip, vlc media player, kino, mplayer, xine, gtkpod, gpodder podcast client and more.

For internet related applications; firefox, thunderbird, dillo, pidgin, phNeighbourhood, wifi radar are also included. Seeing all the mozilla related stuff I wonder why a lot of distributions leave out sunbird; its a calendar application from mozilla and really a good one. Open Office is installed for application with all the variants. I remember someone lately blogged that open office is not equivalent to M$ Office as it does not include an equivalent of M$ Access. But I feel its not his fault as a lot of distributions leave out Open Office Base; which is included in the default installation.

Multimedia
Wolvix comes preloaded with all the codecs. MPlayer is the default application used for MP3 and windows media files. DVD also played flawlessly.

Eye Candy
Wolvix does not come with any eye candy. And I think it goes well with the distro priorities. In my opinion wolvix is meant for older computer to provide excelent user interface.

Conclusion

According to the project website "Wolvix is a LiveDistro built from Slackware and the Linux-Live scripts. It's a desktop and multimedia oriented Linux distribution designed to suit the needs of regular to advanced desktop users."

I am not sure how will it work out for advanced desktop users, as lot of them will have preferences regarding KDE and GNOME. But for an average desktop perspective it is really great distro which runs really well on older computer.