SparkyLinux 3.0 x86_64 LXDE/e17 review : Superb lightweight ,Speedy ,elegant and functional sandwitch lxde/e17 operating system.

 Sparky linux is probably one of the distro I was impressed since looking for an alternative enlightenment distro to bodhi linux something was just really confusing in bodhi was to access file system manager otherwise  overall in sparky  linux it was rather easy as it provides a sandwitch between lxde and e17 .I found the distro to be very good in terms of functionality ,stability and aesthetics. This vanilla remix has become one of my favourite lightweight distro .Sparky linux started it life by providing lxde/e17 vanilla distro . Now they have actually came up with different spins like openbox , mate ,Razor-qt ,Gamover etc.

Sparky linux is probably a new distro just around for one year .Sparky linux is a lightweight, fast and simple Linux distribution designed for both old and new computers featuring customized Enlightenment and LXDE desktops. It has been built on the “testing” branch of Debian GNU/Linux.

 I went to sparky linux website downloaded the sparkylinux 3.0 x86-64 lxde/e17 remix spin which is around (1.5 gb ) in size and created a live usb through imagewriter .
My accessment is based on Dell inspiron laptop 2.2ghz processor and 4gb ram . Here sparky linux 3.0 lxde/e17 comes with linux kernel 3.9.8 and PcManFm 0.9.10 as a default file manager .

The installation is just complex as compared to Debian installer .I wouldn't be explaining installation but u can just look at the respective site just to get more info about installing the distro on your hard drive.

here's the link

http://sparkylinux.org/

http://sparkylinux.org/hard-drive-install/

Actually the installation procedure was just normal but just some stuff was confusing about installation was to choose grub to root/mbr to install , i tested it with root but everything just worked out well for me .surely one thing to say both options just works fines but it will confuse the linux beginners.Also other process of installation just simple where some steps are required actually language,keyboard,geographic location  to install distro alongwith root n user password. It took me around 20 minutes to install it on dell laptop .

sparkylinux background comes with LXPANEL 0.5.10.

 Post installation process is required to keep the distro stuff updated. you can do it through terminal or synaptic package manager is the default as it still lacks behind Rosa and Pclinuxos software centre which are just better in terms of aesthetic and looks. Post installation process is around 10 mbs and works out of box even without  update required .

It comes with installer note

Thank you for choosing SparkyLinux !


"There is absolutely no guarantee that SparkyLinux will be working with no problems.
You are using SparkyLinux on your own risk !
It works as it works."

BEAUTY N AESTHETIC

It comes with default wallpapers to choose .

The desktop of sparky linux is been customized dark coloured with dark sparky wallpaper .It comes with a dock ,slightly top panel mix of e17 and lxde and conky default sparky linux theme enabled . Application launcher is just normal as found in other lxde based distros. Dock and wbar is configurable and icons theme has been improved from previous version but still some work needed .

I didn't had any issue when going through Indian language websites as i could easily read it which i was not able to do it  in Rosa desktop fresh which i had reviewed earlier .

http://gujaratsamachar.com/

 It doesn't have inbuilt cloud application but u can use dropbox ,spideroak ,yandex etc .You will have to download from their sites respectively.


 Hardware integration


wifi , touchpad etc worked well within my use for week and seems it has well configured hardware integration .It offers great performance and stability n smoothness .

Actual performance of cpu while updating distro .

Cpu performance of distro while updating stuff was around 200mb plus.

Just look it detects  cam on my laptop very well . 

When it detects pendrive or external hdd how it looks and recognize it.

 Applications


you can install through terminal or synaptic package manager.

sparky linux 3.0 lxde/e17 comes with a limited set of applications,

• Office: libreoffice, Document Viewer
• Internet: Pidgin IM,Iceweasel ,Uget ,liferea,Transmission
• Graphics: Image viewer, simple scan, camorama webcam viewer, Image magick , gthumb
• Multimedia: Audacity, Gnome Mplayer ,Recordmydesktop , Exaile ,Vlc ,BRasero
• Accessories: XArchiver , calculator, terminal, Leafpad, Firewall, Printers ,sparky back up,conky, unetbootin

 Application wise it is having healthy list of course firefox clone iceweasel  browser preinstalled and other browser  it can be found in repos .Multimedia free and non-free codecs are provided and apart from it adobe flash plugin and open jdk 7 is inbuit .Daily needed apps are preinstalled .Actually sparkylinux come with it  vlc media player, Gnome Mplayer pre-installed ,Sm player is available in repos. Just look how media plays in default media player.

I didn't faced any issues while playing videos on youtube or on default media player.

The default email client available in sparkylinux is Icedovemail/news 10.0.12.

It comes with multimedia and restricted codecs preinstalled as it played songs and videos very well in vlc and exaile  is default audio player.

And now how the default theme for file manager looks like i.e PCManFM

TIME TO CONCLUSION

 Sparkylinux comes to very good lxde spin in terms of my assesment .Desining is better with black background and performs well than other lxde based distros and has lot of daily needed application preinstalled .Remix of lxde and e17 has not affected the performance at all .Afterall the desktop is purely a remixed one but it enhances user functionability . Performance wise it is light weight blazing speed performance and good on limited resource systems . Even it will work well with modern advanced laptop and computers.Only one thing to note is that if you bear the hiccups while installation u will have a good distro to use .


U can try it using ,

1. unetbootin
2. suse image writer
3. usb transfer.


NOTE 

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

http://sourceforge.net/p/sparkylinux/discussion/

you can download both 32bit n 64 bit Sparkylinux  from here.

http://sparkylinux.org/download/

Fedora 19 “Schrödinger’s Cat (Meow) " kde review :An Innovative Distro which brings happiness or heartattack on every release.

Fedora 19 (Schrödinger's Cat) arrived on on July 2nd its been late but reviewing now .  Fedora, being a cutting-edge distribution, is an unpredictable beast and one never knows, prior to installing it, if the release is going to bring happiness or heartattack , but actually it survived the glitch and the cat is happily meowing "meow meow".This release has just been bug fixes which were being interpreted in fedora 18 due to revamp anaconda its traditional installer with its new look ,but i still like old installer which was just better than this .

Fedora comes with “bleeding-edge” software—packages in their latest upstream versions at the time of release so it will work for someone and will not work for other no guarantees . Truly speaking i don't use Fedora as i just feel that it is directed towards enterprise so than u can still use it for desktop purposes as its rock solid with new features in cat's kitty .And also fedora is a test bed for red-hat based commercial products .It is more used on server side than desktop use.Fedora has provided leadership in the open source community, holding up to strict open source policies, continuous support to upstream projects, and by offering the latest software before any other distribution.

But as usual , i will just stick to how it performed on my Dell inspiron laptop as also i m not a developer so just would be reviewing as a normal user .








I visited their site   http://fedoraproject.org  and downloaded the live 64 bit  kde desktop edition, which is a 900-odd MB ISO with only an essential set of applications required for the latest Fedora experience.

Software package management: YUM graphical and command line utility using RPM packages.
Available editions: Fedora for 32-bit (i386) and 64-bit (x86_64) processors; Red Hat Enterprise Linux for i386, IA64, PowerPC, s390x and x86_64 architectures .

 Alternate downloads are also available:

--KDE Spin (live)

--Xfce Spin (live)

--LXDE Spin (live)

--Fedora DVD.
There are also security spins available .

The release note states of incremental improvements for developers, like: 

"The Fedora Project is delighted to announce the release of Fedora 19. What's new? Developer's Assistant is a tool for new developers that helps you to get started on a code project by offering templates, samples, and toolchains for a variety of languages; Skeinforge, SFACT, Printrun, RepetierHost,3D modelling and printing are supported with OpenSCAD  and other tool options; MariaDB offers a truly open MySQL implementation and is now the default MySQL option in Fedora ; OpenShift Origin makes it easy for you to build your own Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) infrastructure . The release notes also mention that users who run logical volume management (LVM) file systems will be able to take advantage of file system snapshots. These snapshots will be taken by the yum software manager during updates to allow administrators the ability to rollback to previous package versions. "

So the experiment with Cat  starts here as i created live usb .Installation is just simple select your language ,country , timezone , keyboard n lastly configuring  default grub is provided and then user n root  password creation .This is how the installation starts n actually i was able to take snaps while installing the fedora cat .First while booting from live usb a nice blue screen splashed .

It has its own tool to create live fedora distro as here

And then i clicked on install fedora started installation procedure and took me around just 8 minutes to install OS on HDD.

This finished the installation process and actually all worked without flaws and this are snaps taken by ksnapshot while installing now its time to reboot .

After reboot i got booted into blue screen as here desktop is standard kde stuff. The desktop has standard kde panel with blue elegant background .

The two package managers included are Apper and YUM Extender, and in general the latter tended to work much more reliably than did the former. I was able to use this package manager to successfully install various softwares .You can also use terminal to install stuff.

It comes with an classical default application launcher according to any kde standards .

To create desktop cube and cylinder in KDE use the settings. One thing here, by default, the KDE version has a single desktop. To make the desktop cube work, 4 desktops are required. I could easily create them from System Settings - Workspace Behavior - Virtual Desktops, as shown below here. Further, I selected OpenGL as compositing type and Native as Qt graphics system from the Advanced tab to activate the desktop cube.

I didn't had any issue when going through Indian language websites as i could easily read it which i was not able to do it  in rosa desktop fresh which i reviewed earlier .

http://gujaratsamachar.com/

It doesn't have inbuilt cloud application but u can use dropbox ,spideroak ,yandex etc .You will have to download from their sites respectively.

Beauty n Aesthetic 

In terms of aesthetic is just to normal any kde based standard theme .As it kde it has lot of customization for folks who love customizing their os.Fedora 19 comes with vanilla desktop environments in all the versions and has a common wallpaper with the same dark blue theme. The wallpaper looks good and represents well the simplicity of Fedora.  

wallpapers available in fedora 19 desktop kde

Aesthetic looks with a beautiful analog clock widget .

Hardware integration

wifi , touchpad etc worked well within my use for week and seems it has well configured hardware integration but note touchpad is not enabled by default so u can enable it in touchpad settings .

Actual performance of cpu while updating distro.Performance wise it consumes  more than 1gb ram actually while updates were running in background .

When it detects pendrive or external hdd how it looks n recognize it.

Applications
you can install through yum terminal or apper software management centre.

KDE:- 
**Office: Korganizer, Ktimetracker,  Kaddressbook, Import wizard,Ktnet, Okular document viewer ,Calligra Office 2.6.4 (Stage, Sheet, Words), 
**Internet: Kmail,  Ktorrent, Blue Devil, Kontact, Blogilo,krfb desktop sharing,  KDE IM contacts, Konversation IRC client, KDE IM log viewer, Kget download manager, Akregator feed reader,Knetattch, KRDC remote desktop cleint, Konqueror, Knode news reader.
**Graphics: Kolour Paint, Kamoso, Gwenview image viewer, Kcolorchooser, Kruler ,Ksnapshot. 
**Multimedia: KsCD, K3b disc burning, Kmix ,Amarok music player, Dragon player for media .

**Accessories: Ark Archiving tool,  Krusader file manager, Kleopatra, Klipper, KGpg encryption tool,Nepomuk backup, Nepomuk cleaner,  Ktimetracker, Knotes, Kjots notes taker, Kalarm,Kcalc, Kwrite .

Every spin is loaded with its default  apps as its kde specific so it has kde applications and the default office suite is calligra .

Firewall and selinux alert browser can be configured as

Application wise it is having healthy list of  course firefox browser is not preinstalled and the default one is konqueror ,but if u need chromium or other browser  it can be found in repos .Actually Fedora 19 kde comes with it Dragon media player which is a kde based apps .But i use smplayer  which can be found in default repos.look how media plays in default Dragon media player.

As noted it doesn't comes with multimedia codecs preinstalled but u can get it in extra repos of it and also vlc is not available in repos . It can be downloaded from RPM Fusion repos of fedoras  by running the following commands at the terminal as follows:

$sudo rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
$sudo yum install vlc mozilla-vlc

Flash player is not preinstalled so you have to install it from default repos n then it will play youtube video efficently .

The default email client available in Fedora 19 kde is Kmail but you can install mozilla thunderbird from repos.

 Fedora 19 kde doesn't comes  with multimedia n restricted codecs preinstalled so it didn,t played songs  in amarok as its  default audio player ,but u can install codecs later on.

Now how the default kde based theme for folders looks in dolphin file manager.

After screen lock how it looks .

TIME TO CONCLUSION

If your heart rides on strong  ‘GNU’ philosophy, a free open source OS  that gives a ready to use kde desktop and willing to go through a slight hassle while Fedora requires a bit of work to get into a generally useable state, at least when it comes to things like Flash, Java, codecs, and more  then Fedora 19, unlike its predecessors, is a very stable and a responsive OS that is well worth trying. However, anyone thinking about doing the same will need to remember that although most would still prefer to use  Mint, Mageia or ROSA, that have everything ready-to-use . Fedora 19 is not an exceptional or eye-catching release has marginal improvements over Fedora 18, but it is a very stable one. Performance definitely has improved for all the spins from the last release, most notably for KDE. Just try it if it works for you it would be  a nice thing to know recent development in linux world .


u can try it using ,

1. unetbootin
2. suse image writer
3. usb transfer.
4. Fedora live usb creator .



NOTE 

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


http://forums.fedoraforum.org/

you can download both 32bit n 64 bit Fedora 19 kde  from here

http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options