Austrumi Live CD and E17
Sorry to post twice in a day.
I'm writing this from the Austrumi live CD. It's a CD where you just put it into your computer and it boots up into the Linux environment without touching your hard disk.
This particular Live CD was propelled into semi-stardom when it switched from the Openbox window manager to Enlightenment E17... that is, the development version of Enlightenment.
Enlightenment is an excellent window manager/desktop environment for Unix and Linux, with two focii: It must run okay on older hardware, and it must look good.
Thus, Austrumi looks pretty good. It is stable, fast (the whole CD, being only 50 megs, is running directly from my system memory), and has enough features for a Live CD.
My only little quibbles are these:
1. It starts up in Romainian; you must switch it to English after the desktop has loaded.
2. Even after you switch it to English, the keyboard mappings are a little odd. For instance, if I hit the apostrophe once, nothing appears. If I then press the "s", this appears: ลก. If I want an apostrophe, I have to hit the apostrophe key twice. Obviously, this is how it's done in Romainia, but it's making this post quite difficult to write!
3. It doesn't set up the Internet connection out-of-the-box - I had to explicitly tell it to use DHCP rather than it scan on startup like most other distros do. But then, when I first used Knoppix I was actually thrown by the fact that my connection was automatically set up; I was trying to set it up and being mystified by the "already in use" errors!
4. It didn't want to run in Qemu.
5. If I try to bring up a menu too close to the edge of the screen, the menu opens off the edge. This is probably an Enlightenment bug though.
6. There's no "man" or "info" commands, but then I think it would've been a tight fit to get full manuals onto the disc.
Other than these little things, it's quite a nice little distro! It fits on a business-card-sized disc, and reportedly you can remaster it.
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