Friday 13 March 2015

Bodhi Linux

Ever since the demise of Crunchbang I've been on the lookout for an alternative distro for the Eee in case I ever need to do a sidegrade.

Hopefully I won't, it's currently working well for me, but as we all know, it's the unknowns that get you, not the knowns.

So I thought I'd take a gander at Bodhi Linux which is a lightweight distribution that uses Enlightenment as a window manager. I'd never used enlightenment, so even though Bodhi is based on Ubuntu, I thought it might be an interesting experience.

As always with these tests, I used a virtual machine. This time around though, rather than build me own I used the virtual box image available from OSBoxes to save build time.

The image comes compressed with 7zip, and needs to be decompressed first but it loads and runs first time.


Bodhi Linux is however a little less impressive. The application set (or at least that that comes with the pre-rolled image) is sparse to say the least and the performance of the window manager is slow. Bear in mind that this is being run on a virtual machine, and that the virtual machine has been configured as per OSBoxes instructions - as always your mileage may vary.

In comparison I can build a debian vm on the same virtual box installation and get considerably sharper performance.

Just for fun (and I probably should get out more) I installed an old fluxbuntu image from virtualboxes.org and that also gave considerably sharper performance even if the repositories etc were in severe need of an update, which leads me to think that perhaps bodhi isn't quite as lightweight as I'm looking for and some other distro with either fluxbox or openbox as window managers might do the job ...

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