Debian instller Rocks

You would have noticed that redhat installer anaconda just crows if you have anything less than 512 megs of ram . I have a two year old system and with only 256 megs of ram (of that 32 goes for on board graphics )and i expected the same slow experience when i tried Debian s etch . But to my pleasant surprise it turned to be very fast GUI based installer . it was so responsive , fast and offers good configuration option. (although package selection is a issue )

Dream Linux Review

One of the main problem of a desktop Linux user is the lack of support for multimedia and flash support by default. and they have to download hundreds of megabytes of additional packages to play their favorite music files or to play a you tube video or to view a website which uses java . Its not a easy job for a new user to configure their system for additional repository and things get worse if he is having a slow net work connection like me . Dream Linux tries to address these issue by providing a out of box multimedia distro which comes in a single CD .

 

Dream Linux is a Brazilian Distro based on debian the king of Distros. I got my DL CD from my friend Nidhees, many thanks for him for downloading it . i rebooted my system with the DL CD and within few minutes a MAC lookalike desktop came up ,it was smooth and cool and the most noticeable feature was the docking panel with smooth icon enlargement animation when the mouse pointer run across it just like the mac .unlike other live cds of ubuntu and others this one was real fast i felt just like operating from hard drive . Since things were going on well i decided to install it to my hard disk . and it was one of the most easy installation i experienced. just a single window and you have to enter root password , user addition , partition secletion and in a clik DreamLinux started to flow to the Hard Disk so of i went to have a coffee to kitchen and when i came back the installation was over .

 

after reeboot i installed the nvidia binary drivers which gave me a stable display with accelerated 3d . and then i configured net since i was having the gprs connection i tried gppp , although it detected my n70 nokia phone as modem but it couldn’t dial to net . So i edited wvdial.conf , and issued wvdial command and it worked .

Default brawser of DL is firefox renamed as iceweasel( v 2.0.03) and icedove handled mails . gmail check a application for using gmail is also there . since i use pidgin (gaim ) for im the default clint amsn was disappointing . Other net apps were gftp, bittornado . Flash and java are bundled. overall a good collection for net users excpt a good instant messenger client .

the highlite of Dreamlinux is its out of box multimedia support, . Mplayer and GXine handles the commenly used media formats like ,avi,mpeg very well . for playing mp3s and oggs the tried and tested XMMS is installed by default . one programe i miss here is amroke which could have been included . you can tune into net radio using streemtuner whith ease .and to ripcds and DVDs Grip and Dvd ripper is provided

Video and audio editing tools are provided like kino , audaci