Review: wattOS R2

[ Thanks to Prashanth for this link. ]

"The only review of a lightweight Ubuntu-based distribution I've done before this is of #! 9.04.01. I was looking around to see if there are any others, and I came across wattOS. wattOS R2 is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" and uses LXDE. From other reviews of this distribution that I have read, the thing that sets it apart is its comprehensive set of power management tools (hence the name). The other reason I wanted to test this is because I wanted to try to make a "light" version of my Fresh OS respin. Yeah, I know this is based on Ubuntu while the regular version is based on Debian, but I've heard murmurs in the wattOS forums of the next wattOS version being based on Debian anyway. Anyway, this means that I will also be testing the installation procedure as well as a few other things post-installation. I tested this in VirtualBox with 256 MB of RAM, as I wanted to test the performance of this lightweight distribution under a lower resource environment. Follow the jump to see how all of this goes.

"Boot Menu

"The boot and startup time is quite fast even with just 256 MB of RAM, and the nice boot menu theme is an added bonus. The boot splash engine is Plymouth, as in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx", but for some reason it doesn't display an image but it displays 3 differently-colored progress bars at the bottom much like Fedora 12 does (if the graphics rendering isn't quite right; if it is, the boot splash animation is of the outline of the Fedora logo filling up with the Fedora logo). I don't know if this is intentional in keeping with the lightweight nature of the distribution or if this is a glitch. The login manager is SLiM (with a pretty-looking background) probably for the aforementioned reasons."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Review: ArchBang 2010.09 "apeiro"(Sep 29, 2010)
• Whose LXDE Is It Anyway?(Sep 23, 2010)
• Mandriva has been Forked into Mageia(Sep 18, 2010)
• Counter-Debunking the 1% Myth(Sep 11, 2010)
• Help an Old PC: Give KDE 3.5 the Oxygen Touch(Sep 09, 2010)
• Review: Kubuntu 10.04 Trinity "Lucid Lynx" (Idea by Candid of Linux Today)(Sep 07, 2010)
• KDE 4.5: KDE 3.5's Stability + KDE 4.0's Promised Features(Sep 02, 2010)