A look at LinuxConsole 1.0.2009

“The current release comes in three flavours: Multimedia, which
is a small live CD designed to enable you to get on the web, listen
to music and play videos; the full CD edition, which comes with a
complete GNOME desktop; and the DVD edition, which includes all the
packages from the CD with some extras thrown in. There is also a
tool, called Jukebox, which allows the user to build their own
custom install image. This is similar to Slax’s ISO builder and
allows for a great deal of flexibility. For my test drive, I
downloaded the Multimedia image.

“First impressions

“While downloading, I took a quick look at the project’s web
site. It has a clean, simple layout which appeals to me. The site
is easy to navigate and comes with some basic documentation, help
forums, a news section and, of course, a download page. One thing
which makes LinuxConsole stand out right away on the site is a
mixture of English and French. The login form asks, “Forgot your
password?” right next to the news announcement stating, that the
Multimedia edition is “Pour les ordinateurs anciens, ou les
système avec peu d’espace disque”. While I speak passable
conversational French, that skill doesn’t extend far into technical
terms and it made me shy away from trying my luck with the Jukebox
build-your-own feature. I’d like to add that during the course of
the week I was using LinuxConsole, more and more of the text on the
site changed to English and translation is an on-going process.

“To test this distribution, I put the Multimedia CD in my
desktop machine, which has a 2.5 GHz CPU, 2 GB of RAM and a NVIDIA
graphics card. My test drive also included my LG laptop, which has
a 1.5 GHz CPU, 2 GB of RAM and an ATI graphics card. To see how the
distro works on lower-end hardware, I also ran it in a virtual
machine. Once the LinuxConsole image was downloaded and burned to
CD things progressed very smoothly. The CD provides the option to
select your preferred language and has a live desktop up and
running in seconds. The desktop is easy to look at and comes with a
few icons for navigating folders and launching Firefox (version
3.5). The windows are themed to look like Mac OS X, but this can be
changed to any of the fifteen different styles.”

Complete
Story