15 August 2013

Netrunner 13.06 "Enigma" Stealth Edition KDE Review : Secure your online privacy and life with Enigma .

My first trial of Netrunner distro was Netrunner Dryland edition  which was based on ubuntu 12.04 LTS version . At that time I just came upon this distro as anews of Bluesystem sponsering kubuntu /linux Mint Kde the same company behind it also has a distro of its own " Netrunner ".I think this was the First unusual kde based distro with combination of kde and gtk based apps started flowering of various cloud based apps , also the name of the distro is netrunner so philosophy of having cloud based apps was already rooted in them to give a out-of- box experience to user at that time till now it can be seen easily just by using it .Also decided to look in this distro security spin what privacy   enhncement they had made in this spin as I was looking for privacy based distro .




  I also have used netrunner 12.12 edition but  had one issue after updating couldn't able to login with my default password so moved on from it also when I installed some cloud based apps system crashed  but  they have a new spin so let see how perfectly it works to other brother's  ubuntu based distros.

By using kubuntu, Linux Mint Kde and Netrunner it can be seen that they made a marvellous effort to improve user reliability towards it . Here one thing to note that all three distros lives in one home having separete rooms for operation .The organization behind Netrunner has also sponsored Linux Mint with KDE, and had in past  taken over Kubuntu from Canonical .

Further, I downloaded the 64-bit Netrunner 13.06 for  testing so thought of  writing a review of it Hoping  that this could be the distribution for which I have been searching, I tried the 64-bit edition of Netrunner 13.06 enigma SE as a live USB made using UnetBootin and let see what it's like all about .





ARRIVAL OF DISTRO WITH RELEASE NOTES

 "This version of Netrunner is shipped with privacy and security in mind. This means that you are able to use the Internet more securely and possibly circumvent censorship. You are able to encrypt E-Mail messages with GPG and chat securely with your friends via text, audio or video. You can encrypt files and folders or use an encrypted home partition. Netrunner SE 13.06 is built upon Netrunner 13.06 and comes with the following features and changes: Firefox with pre-configured Tor,  NoScript FoxyProxy and HTTPs Everywhere ; Thunderbird with Enigmail; Vidalia as Tor configuration tool; Pidgin with OTR support for encrypted text chats....


After  booting greeted with black screen which is just common in ubuntu based kde distros . This is not the first time I have seen such an inconsistency during the boot process, and I'm a bit disappointed that this inconsistency seems to be seen through  boot processes of almost all Ubuntu-based distributions .Then actually distro booted  without any problems and greeted with an kde based interface and several icons linking to netrunner online services , including  Runners-ID storage and Web Accounts .


Netrunner 13.06 has KDE 4.10.3 as the default desktop with Linux kernel 3.8.0 and Dolphin 2.2 as the file manager.Installation of Netrunner is similar to Kubuntu /Linux Mint KDE and should not pose any problem even for newbies .



















You can see my computer information as shown below




BEAUTY AND AESTHETIC

You get the KDE looks infused with a slightly Windows-like Aero theme artwork  so new users will definitely appreciate the familiarity.



You double-click  through the desktop, and Dolphin is just beautifully elegant  with big inviting fonts and clear icons .



  Netrunner has quite a few other attractive wallpapers as well pre-installed in the OS. As its kde lot of tweak and customization can be done who enjoy tweaking. I didn't go for it since I was reviewing  Netrunner .





HARWARE INTEGRATION

If your  hardware comes with proprietary drivers, you also get a dedicated utility Driver manager , similar to Linux Mint Philosophy which allows you to install them properly.


Bluetooth ,Wifi , touchpad , sound card ,graphic card etc worked well within my use for week and seems it has been  well configured hardware integration for use and everything work out of box for me .Now how well it recognized my Dell Inspiron laptop brightness keys worked well ,also volume keys outperformed than other distro as with keys was easily able to increase or decrease brightness that sounds great for me.

Netrunner 13.06 is an out of box user experience distro.  The CPU was also noisy  and spiky this is due to the lot of integrated services that Enigma offers out of the box. So you gain functionality, but you will have to compromise on heat and battery life. It consumes around 1gb ram nothing running in the background .






APPLICATIONS


Netrunner comes with an unusual blending  of KDE and gtk based softwares, 

**Office: Calligra Flow, LibreOffice 4.0.2.2 Impress, Calc, Writer
**Internet: Firefox 22.0, Filezilla,  Pidgin IM, Transmission,Vidalia , Jitsi, Thunderbird
**Graphics: GIMP 2.8.4, Gwenview, Kamoso, Krita, Karbon, Ksnapshot, Skanlite
**Multimedia: Record my Desktop, Tomahawk music player, Kdenlive video editor, K3b, Qmmp audio player, VLC 2.0.6, WinFF video converter
**Accessories: KPPP,  Ark archiving tool, KMag, Synaptiks, BlueDevil,Klipper, Knotes, Akregator, Kate text editor, Acetone ISO ,Kalc,  KRDC, Konsole .
**Others: Virtualbox, DOS Box emulator, Runner ID

Application wise it is having healthy list of course firefox browser preinstalled but if u need chromium or other browser  it can be found in repos .Actually netrunner come with it default vlc media player but I use smplayer  which can be found in default repos. Netrunner kde comes  with multimedia and restricted codecs pre-installed as it played songs very well in Qmmp as its  default audio player. look how media plays in default  media player installed.





Jitsi for management of online accounts


Actually in stealth edition web apps is not installed  and that the only difference with stealth edition and non stealth edition I  was really missing web apps here surely and also  with security plugins configured in browsers thats the change I see .Also web apps missed out even a new addition like firefox market place was missing here .


 Also missing was wine and play on linux in this edition .Firefox browsers plugins like Fox proxy basic , https everywhere , no script , proxtube etc to enhance users privacy while being online .




Also there are other plugins It did take a bit of time to open browser due to plugins and customizations .


Like Linux Mint, Netrunner sources some applications its own repos and others from Ubuntu  repositories. Applications can be downloaded from Muon Discover ( Software center), Moun package manager and Synaptic Package Manager. Netrunner has given a fresh new look to Muon software center. But the best software centre I  had used was of Deepin Linux, no software centre matches to it still .



 System setting of netrunner os .A different looking System Settings  in Netrunner from other KDE based distros


By this way you can manage online sources for updating distro stuff .Netrunner also gives option to choose the fastest mirror along with several other customization in Software Sources which make really good for new users .





kde wallet is there but not active thats good .





TIME TO CONCLUSION

With its great artwork , aesthetic and  amazing performance it is nice distro to have al ook at it  has an attractive interface, comes with a whole lot of pre-installed security goodies, offers privacy and security for users which is integrated in KDE and runs efficiently on a 64 bit machine.Why web apps were left off from this edition didn't understand may be off security reason .Netrunner is in fact a better distro than Mint KDE and Kubuntu in my assessment but still it lags  behind in distrowatch ranking may be folks are not aware of it as three of the systems comes under one umbrella organisation Bluesystems .If you want to try Netrunner , definitely this is the distro for you , just go for it and you would fall in love with this kde based distro.


RECOMMENDATION: For begineers / intermediate as well as advanced  users.

U can try it using ,

1.unetbootin
2.imagewriter
3.usb transfer .

NOTE 

If you have any issue just visit their forum you will get answered to all your queries .


you can download both 32bit and 64 bit NETRUNNER ENIGMA from here


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