New releases

In addition to the 9.04 release of the Ubuntu family, there are some recent and interesting lightweight distribution releases.

Easy Peasy 1.1 is a distribution for the wildly popular netbooks. Easy Peasy is based on Ubuntu which certainly is not known as the most lightweight distribution available. Even Easy Peasy defaults to software like OpenOffice.Org 3.0 and Firefox instead of lighter alternatives.

SliTaz 2.0 has been released, as well. SliTaz is a live system installable to a CD or a USB memory. It packs incredible amount of functionality in an image of 30 MB. See the SliTaz Handbook for more information.

5 comments:

Pipps said...

What you think would be lighter alternatives to Firefox and OpenOffice. I would be interested to know! :)

Mikko said...

It depends on what you demand from the software. I'm completely happy with Abiword for text processing. The most problematic of the office suite is probably the Impress. AFAIK, there simply is no lightweight alternative that is compatible with MS Office. But on the other hand, I doubt people really use the netbooks for any heavyweight office tasks.

Some lightweight web browsers: Dillo, links, lynx, elinks. Even Midori and Opera seem to be lighter than Firefox is.

Pipps said...

I agree! OpenOffice and Firefox have both grown very sluggish.

I wanted to make Abiword my word processor of choice. I tried. I was so patient with it. Yet, it has so many bugs, and crashes so many times on Ubuntu, that it simple cannot be a viable alternative for me.

If you know of any other stable and reliable options than I would be very interested to hear it!

Mikko said...

LyX is a great choice for word processing, if you dont need interoperability with .doc or .rtf.

It is very stable & reliable, and it uses LaTeX as the typesetting engine.

Pipps said...

Thanks for the recommendation! I look forward to trying LyX! :)