User Feedback :: RETRY DSL 0.9.3 Remaster - BeatrIX 2005.1 Comparis



Hello and thanks for your patience:

I have been experimenting with BeatrIX 2005.1 and DSL 0.9.3 and am posting my early results for anyone interested. Some details:

Tests were informal and were done with the standard live CD version of BeatrIX 2005.1 and a live CD of DSL 0.9.3 remastered to provide "equivalent" functionality.  I tested only live CD's.  I have not tested hard drive installations. I did not test printing configuration capabilities in this exercise.  I have attempted to avoid comparisons about personal preference items such as backgrounds, splash screens, window managers, etc.

Unfortunately, the Openoffice.tar.gz files in the DSL CD were in the optional folder which makes boot times not directly comparable. I estimate an additional 35 seconds to download and install Openoffice.tar.gz on the DSL system.

I am a linux newbie. There may be some newbie misunderstandings in what follows. I welcome corrections to improve my understanding. I wish to express my sincere admiration to the BeatrIX and DSL teams. These distro's are fabulous and greatly aid mass acceptance of linux. I look forward to more releases. Comments most welcome.


RESULTS:

DISTRO                      BeatrIX 2005.1                       DSL 0.9.3 remaster

SIZE                          182MB                                  163MB

CONTENTS                 Standard                               Standard plus
                                                                          rcfirewall.dsl,
                                                                         firefox-1.0PR.dsl,
                                                                         jre1_5_0.tar.gz,
                                                                         openoffice.tar.gz
                                                                        (in optional folder)

BOOT TIME                1:55                                      1:46
                                                                          2:21 with OO (estimated)
CONNECTIVITY

Wired Broadband        Excellent out of box                 Excellent out of box

Wireless Broadband    Without ndiswrapper                Wrote boot script to
                             my adapter could not               configure wireless
                             function                                adapter; excellent

Other (dial up, etc.)   Not tested                             Not tested


OVERALL HARDWARE DETECTION

Dell Desktop               Excellent out of  box              Excellent out of box

HP Celeron Notebook   Scrolling and tapping              Excellent out of box
                              on synaptics touchpad
                              did not work. Could not
                              fix after 1 hour trying.
                              Otherwise excellent.


Save configuration     Save to hdd partition              Clever. Have to know
utility                      does not work.                       details of which files you
                                                                       need. Works well.


Security                   Did not test firewall                Firewall works well.
                             Otherwise seems OK.              DSL appears to allow
                                                                       any virus or hacker who
                                                                       gets in to sudo at will.
                                                                       Is this really the case?

Remastering             Not supported yet???               Documentation sketchy;
                                                                       essentially the same as
                                                                       KNOPPIX.
Interesting comparison. My only comment is that the remaster documentation is really right on the money. If you follow meo's remastering howto, you can easily have a custom OS. It is very complete except for all the messiness involved in chrooting. But others have discussed chrooting in the forums and Knoppix docs have most of this covered so why recreate the wheel. All people need to know is that DSL is based off of Knoppix 3.4 and they can go form there.

Nice simple comparison, though. Thanks for sharing

Chris
Thanks, Chris. I'll check Meo's HowTo. The only instructions I found earlier seemed to have a lot of errors.

Onwards. This stuff really rocks.

Greg
Why did you add the firefox dsl to it?  Firefox comes in the 0.9.3 release.

original here.