Granular 1.0 RC coming soon

Anurag Bhindari from Granular Linux reports that the release of Granular Linux 1.0 RC is almost ready and is expected in first week of June 2008.

Read more about it at the Granular Team blog page here.

Waiting for the exciting new release myself, thanks to the Granular Linux Project.

SaxenOS 2008 beta 2 Final Report

Working for few more hours on newly concepted SaxenOS 2008 after being based on PCLinuxOS I have a clear feeling in my mind that only basing it on PCLinuxOS will not raise its standards but lots of efforts are still needed to bring SaxenOS up to daily usable levels for end users.

stibs is current single developer of SaxenOS and in response to one question on SaxenOS forum he says

"Aim: A Linux desktop for our education institute and general office work."

This sounds fair enough in the light that XFCE is a good alternate to KDE for home users but I am sure stibs and his team members at BdH Dresden have to put lots of efforts to bring SaxenOS to a working level.

I reported few issues that I faced with SaxenOS 2008 at their forum but till this time I see no reply .

1: PC will refuse to auto shut down and needs manual interference for that.
2: Mklivecd doesn`t work.
3: SMPlayer , it works fine but wont show in menu in multimedia section.
4: Xfmedia refuse to play anything at all.

so the status of affairs looks like locked down at the moment.

STIBS is planning to release SaxenOS RC1 in a 2 weeks time , lets hope he finds some time to do some more testing before he goes for RC1.

I am not disappointed with SaxenOS , It will get better provided there is a dedication behind it as I see in Texstar and his team members at PCLinuxOS.

My SaxenOS 2008

OK as I promised, I installed the recently released SaxenOS 2008 beta today.

The installation was typical PCLinuxOS. Choosing English in place of German was not difficult ; at boot pressing F2 brings English.

Also at boot splash you can change and set English as your default language.

SaxenOS 2008 desktop gives the feelings of a KDE desktop from its layout .

It has nicely set menu and once you have set the language to English and installed the system you get a clear picture.

I set my time zone, display and changed the PCLinuxOS repository from the default to another one as it was unreachable.

Getting the available upgrades was smooth. Then I removed some packages I did not want. Nvidia driver and compiz setting works out of the box once installed.

Once I was all set I rebooted the system and upon re login my desktop settings were gone but I easily recovered them back with Desktop Settings for XFCE .

I noticed one weird problem though, when I tried to shut down the system it went through all the processes smoothly but at the end wont shutdown automatically and I had to press the power off button to shut it down manually.

Over all SaxenOS 2008 looks promising and quite stable at this early beta stage and I am sure it will be robust and stable enough once it reaches to the final version.

I will keep on probing into it more and report back any issues if I find any.

I would urge all my readers to try SaxenOS 2008 and I am sure they will like it.