As I was looking for an alternative to non ubuntu , non-fedora , non -suse based distro I accidentally come up to a independent distro so actually thought what would be the distro would be like so decided to try it .First what is openmamba ? so its a GNU/Linux distribution for personal computers (Intel
i686-compatible) that can be used on notebooks, desktops and servers. It
works as an boot to live CD, offering out-of-the box support for a variety of
media codecs and proprietary graphics drivers and wireless network cards,3D desktop with KDE.
Their Tagline is
"Ready to use GNU/Linux".
wonder what it actually means to newcomers?
Sometimes generally I look for weird distros and actually got a new distro to test .This distro was relased on 2012 7th july .so almost its one year old . Let's talk today about Openmamba GNU/Linux namely their operating system Milestone2.0.10.1 kde edition . so I downloaded the dvd edition of kde which is almost 2.6gb in size . Tried to make live usb through uneetbootin / imagewriter /usb transfer noothing seems to worked for me , so decided to burn dvd-rw and fired my optical drive by reebooting to openmamba os .Then I was greeted with green bubble like s dollar effects wallpaper , this is the only wallpaper available related to brand Os .ALSO other options for live dvd gnome and studio edition available .
NOTE : Actually not able to create live usb since it is not a fully operational LiveUSB image. so you need DVD or CD image on your hard drive to continue but there's option to make live usb after booting live dvd image from optical drive for that u need to use live usb installer which will create live usb image of it using system tools .
This is the image background got after booting live dvd which has nice artworked wallpaper and lso while booting up the bubbles were shining and become invisible ie some type of flashing stuff during booting so nice boot effects I liked it very much .Also the colourful image was replaced by a similar picture, but in greyish look before KDE splash appears and during its usual boot sequence, the desktop image changed once again, to same greeny image
Here one thing is that "s" dollar sign like which resembles s-snakes which is actually logo of openmamba os and derived from mamba snakes from africa, you can get to know from here
Freshly booted system took about 250 Mb of memory and almost immediately after start, Openmamba decided by itself that it needs to update the repository which took about additional memory .Now just started the installer and then agreement of licensing starts
And then choose language , locale and keyborad settings as above as shown and below its checks integrity of default .
Now further steps are to choose and edit partition where you have to install openmamba image , bootmanager and then at last install and os start installing and took around 15 minutes to install on my Dell laptop .
Openmamba kde has lot of customization for folks who love
customizing their distros . In terms of aesthetic is just beautiful but with only one wallpaper and other stuff normal to any
kde based standard theme and would have like to see some more wallpapers from its related to brand other kde standard wallpaper set available . It would not change distribution size too much to add half a dozen of
wallpapers with openmamba logo would increase loyalty of users and
brand recognition, wouldn't it ?.
Bluetooth , 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 .Openmamba Milestone 2 configured the taps on the laptop's touchpad as I am used to seeing it. Both single and double taps were processed correctly fine out of box . 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. Also web camera just worked fine through cheese .Also one other issue I had I didn't see automatic power saving for brightness working like linux mint/ mageia os .IT has modes like performance/ aggressive powersave and powersave but manually .
Application list is almost complete with most of the essential apps available as follows ,
Some apps screenshot as below.
Adobe flashplugin is not installed by default. For internet access, Firefox browser is there in addition to chromium. I could play my favorite videos from youtube after installing flash plugin .
Burning dvd -rw caution as unetbootin / imagewriter didn't worked .
NOTE
If you have any issue just visit their forum you will get answered to all your queries.
http://www.openmamba.org/
you can download openmamba kde from here
Their Tagline is
"Ready to use GNU/Linux".
wonder what it actually means to newcomers?
Sometimes generally I look for weird distros and actually got a new distro to test .This distro was relased on 2012 7th july .so almost its one year old . Let's talk today about Openmamba GNU/Linux namely their operating system Milestone2.0.10.1 kde edition . so I downloaded the dvd edition of kde which is almost 2.6gb in size . Tried to make live usb through uneetbootin / imagewriter /usb transfer noothing seems to worked for me , so decided to burn dvd-rw and fired my optical drive by reebooting to openmamba os .Then I was greeted with green bubble like s dollar effects wallpaper , this is the only wallpaper available related to brand Os .ALSO other options for live dvd gnome and studio edition available .
NOTE : Actually not able to create live usb since it is not a fully operational LiveUSB image. so you need DVD or CD image on your hard drive to continue but there's option to make live usb after booting live dvd image from optical drive for that u need to use live usb installer which will create live usb image of it using system tools .
This is the image background got after booting live dvd which has nice artworked wallpaper and lso while booting up the bubbles were shining and become invisible ie some type of flashing stuff during booting so nice boot effects I liked it very much .Also the colourful image was replaced by a similar picture, but in greyish look before KDE splash appears and during its usual boot sequence, the desktop image changed once again, to same greeny image
Here one thing is that "s" dollar sign like which resembles s-snakes which is actually logo of openmamba os and derived from mamba snakes from africa, you can get to know from here
Freshly booted system took about 250 Mb of memory and almost immediately after start, Openmamba decided by itself that it needs to update the repository which took about additional memory .Now just started the installer and then agreement of licensing starts
And then choose language , locale and keyborad settings as above as shown and below its checks integrity of default .
Now further steps are to choose and edit partition where you have to install openmamba image , bootmanager and then at last install and os start installing and took around 15 minutes to install on my Dell laptop .
Thus the installation of the system completed as shown above from above installer seems to be easy go and dual booted win 7 and openmamba . Technically speaking it comes
with KDE 4.7.4 and Linux kernel 3.4 updated from 3.2 .
BEAUTY N AESTHETIC
This is also an Italian distro like sabayon while here splash scrren of office gels with theme of it as shown below .
You can make cubes as seen here actually which looks beautiful but u can create it easily and by default
cubes setting is enabled.
After screen lock how it looks.
By pressing ctrl+f11 its just work out of box .
Hardware integration
Bluetooth , 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 .Openmamba Milestone 2 configured the taps on the laptop's touchpad as I am used to seeing it. Both single and double taps were processed correctly fine out of box . 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. Also web camera just worked fine through cheese .Also one other issue I had I didn't see automatic power saving for brightness working like linux mint/ mageia os .IT has modes like performance/ aggressive powersave and powersave but manually .
ONE issue I faced since I installed wireless broadcom driver but was not able to enable it or otherwise wireless was just not working for me .
Software Management
You can install and manage software through kpackagekit package manager . By default, the
repository is openmamba main and applications can be downloaded via kpackagekit. There is no synaptic package manager in the KDE version. Anyway, I
don't mind till I have the TERMINAL and till it supports command line and rpm based distro .
like,
sudo smart update /upgrade etc .
Downloading from
kpackagekit is quite easy, either browse through the clearly defined
categories in the first page and click install, else just type the name
of the application in the search bar and click to install the
applications.Also third party apps can be managed like skype etc
Even it has another smart package manager which also just works fine to install software were transmission installed successfully .
It doesn’t have inbuilt cloud
application but also was not able to install third party apps like Dropbox , Spideroak ,wuala etc .Also fedora based rpm of dropbox doesn't worked .
Applications
Application list is almost complete with most of the essential apps available as follows ,
- Office: LibreOffice 3Calc, Write, Base, Draw, Impress and Math, Okular document viewer, Korganizer, Kaddressbook,Gnucash etc
- Internet: Firefox 17, Kopete IM,Blogilo blog client, KTorrent, FileZilla, Akgregator, aMule, KRDC remote desktop viewer, aMSN messenger,wxcas , toptray , Ekiga .
- Graphics: GIMP 2.8, Image viewer (Gwenview), Ksnapshot,Digikam, panorama ,ShowfotoBlender ,Cinepaint ,Sodipodi , ufraw ,hugin . etc
- Multimedia: VLC , Juk music player, Dragon player, K3b , Audacity ,clementine, Kdenlive ,Cheese ,Ardour, Dvd styler ,Hydrogen ,kdetv. Lives,Mixx ,MUSE ,qtractor ,Rosegarden ,Timidity ,Record my desktop etc. etc .and lot more
- Accessories: Kate text editor, Ark Archive manager, Klipper, KNotes, KCalc calculator, Kwrite, Nepomuk backup, Konsole , wine etc . I tried to use Wine IE, but it didn't worked for me .
- Desktop Globe is only stuff in Education section of openmamba2 .A separate section for Development, where you can find Akonadi configuration, Java VisualVM, LogFactor and Chainsaw log viewer. The System section includes standard elements of kde . A distinctive subsectionscan be found here one of them is for openmamba network software installation, like Skype, Flash plugin, MS TrueType CoreFonts, B43 Wireless drivers, Win32 codecs. Another is for special log viewers, which can help in system debug, if you want to help developers of openmamba .Apart from it has many games pre -installed .
Some apps screenshot as below.
Adobe flashplugin is not installed by default. For internet access, Firefox browser is there in addition to chromium. I could play my favorite videos from youtube after installing flash plugin .
Actually Openmamba come with it tons of media player and all favorite media players can be found in default os installed .It played all my media from my drive as
well mp3 songs well as both juk , amarok and clementine pre-installed all are
one of my favourites .here media player like Dragon didn't worked but vlc and kaffeine played videos out of box as shown below .
I didnt 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/
http://gujaratsamachar.com/
The default email client available in Openmamba kde is Kmail but you can install mozilla thunderbird from repos.
Note : One thing to mention no crash even after using various apps ,even I installed this distro after longtime i.e one year but had marginal updates around 400 mb .So it will be helpful to peoples who doesn't need to often update their system and also where broadband availability is marginal .
Also another thing when actually installing ie updating system while it was half installed then rebooted system but it doesn't crash as had seen in other ubuntu/ fedora based distros while upgrading .
TIME TO CONCLUSION
It adhers to its tagline : Ready to use GNU/Linux"
Openmamba is definetly packed os with goodies . This distribution includes tools which allow OS usage right out of the box. I think not many distributions can compete here.Performance wise distro is rock solid .
Openmamba is not an exceptional release has
marginal improvements over previous one, but it is a very stable and defenitely a spoonfeeding os .It deserves 2.6 Gb distro size as lots of software you're likely to use, plus lots of software
you're likely to forget about very soon are pre-installed . It has amazing Aesthetic and blazing performance it is nice distro to have
a look at it has an attractive
interface, comes with a whole lot of pre-installed apps goodies for users which is integrated in KDE
Performance wise kde spin of openmamba sounds great from last
release. Yes, it quite put a good impression on
me. The most notable issue I faced it doesn't install wifi driver as it shows wifi driver installed but it just not working for me may be I have to dig more in the distro stuff .If you just need a
trouble free kde based distro which allows you to just concentrate on your work,
then this is it! I recommend openmamba even to a Linux newbie as well
as the experienced users.
Cons : It uses exclusively its own repositories as package format
RPM is widely used in general, it doesn't mean that any RPM from third party apps will work in openmamba 2.This fact make system unpopular as they cant get what they needed
U can try it using ,
Burning dvd -rw caution as unetbootin / imagewriter didn't worked .
NOTE
If you have any issue just visit their forum you will get answered to all your queries.
http://www.openmamba.org/
you can download openmamba kde from here
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