AgiliaLinux 8 GNOME review

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The collection of installed applications is very small, but there are many more in the repository. Firefox 7 is the installed Web browser, with Opera and Chromium available in the repository. The GNU Image Manipulation Program is installed, and Evolution is the installed email client. The only application category that is not represented in the default installation is the Games category, which comes as somewhat of a surprise because the installation image is just a 2.6 GB DVD image. Plenty of room left to toss in a few games. GNOME MPlayer and Totem are the installed media players. They can play video DVDs that are not encrypted, but because libdvdcss is not installed, they cannot play those that are (encrypted). For the record, libdvdcss is in the repository, so you can install it using the package manager..

Talking about package manager, MPKG plays that role on AgiliaLinux. There is no traditional man page for MPKG, but from what I could see from the utilities available from the command line, it has a rollback feature (mpkg-rollback). It appears that rollbacks can be applied to a set of system updates or a single application. The graphical package manager has a clean, uncluttered interface, but every attempt to install applications failed. Installation attempts from the command line using mpkg-install revealed that the problem is because the main repository is not reachable (throws an “unable to resolve host address core.agilialinux.ru” error). Not being able to install applications or apply application updates is obviously a major shortcoming.

This screenshot shows the list of available updates. While there is an updates notifier, it is not installed, so the only way to see available updates is to start the graphical package manager. As with all other applications, attempts to install the updates notifier failed.

Most of the graphical management applications that I could use where those accessible from the System -> Preferences and Applications -> System Tools menus. With the System -> Administration menu missing, the management applications under it were also missing.

In Terms Of Security, AgiliaLinux 8 scores below average. And that is because the firewall is the only security service running out of the box. That just takes care of one aspect of security – the network side. Even at that, there is no graphical interface with which to configure the firewall. With disk encryption and boot loader password-protect not supported by the installer, the physical security rating is very weak.

Final Thoughts: AgiliaLinux has what it takes to be a very good distribution, but like many Linux distributions, I think more testing needs to be done before a “stable” version is released. I will revisit this release with a review of a KDE installation to see if the if the issues with the package manager have been resolved.

Resources: Installation ISO images for 32-bit and 64-bit architectures are available for download here.

Screenshots: View more screenshots from test installations of AgiliaLinux 8.

What it will take to install a Fluxbox desktop on AgiliaLinux 8.

What it will take for the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment.

What it will take for Xfce.

And for Fluxbox.