OzOS

OzOS is a desktop Linux operating system based on Xubuntu, and using the Enlightenment (E17) Desktop. It’s still a very “young” distro, but it has attracted the attention of a significant number of Linux enthusiasts.

Snapshot review based on OzOS-0.5 (32 bit version)

Origin – Home Page: USA – OzOS

Desktops: Enlightenment – E17 – desktop

Price: Free and Open Source

Comments: OzOS boots into a live CD E17 desktop environment, and from there, you can install it to hard disk. The installer is the same that you will encounter in most Ubuntu-derived distros, and offers very few customization options. It also does not support LVM disk partitioning or RAID setup.

Those not used to the Enlightenment desktop, will be pleasantly surprised at the speed and responsiveness of this distro. Speed aside, it will take – especially if you are used to the KDE and Gnome desktop environments, a few moments to get used to the fact that calling up the system menu means left-clicking on the desktop.

By default, you won’t find a whole lot of applications, but any application that you need can be installed easily either with the Synaptic package manager or via apt:foo, the Web-based apt portal. For Web browsing, Firefox 2 is installed, but it lacks the plugins needed to render multimedia content in Web pages. It does offer a one-click installation of Adobe flash plugin, but for rendering other multimedia content, you’ll need to use Synaptic or apt:foo to install the necessary plugins.

There are still a few areas that this distro’s devs need to work on before we put it up there with the likes of Mandriva, openSUSE, Fedora, and Zenwalk. One or two more updates, and we think it will get there. What would we like to see in future releases? Here’s a short list:

• More applications installed by default – Sabayon Linux is a good example to follow
• A graphical interface to configure the firewall, and the firewall should be enabled out of the box
• Firefox, or any other browser that is installed, should be able to render all multimedia content – by default
• The system should launch the right application whenever an audio or video media is inserted

Download/Buy: Install iso images for x86 and amd64 architectures are available for download here.

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