Tuesday, October 05, 2010

ZevenOS

ZevenOS is a Linux distro (based on Ubuntu) which has speed and a BeOS/Haiku theme as some of its principal aims.
I installed version 2.0 on my EeePC 901 and it works fine although it did seem just a little bit buggy to me. For example, even though I had set up the file manager (Edit>>Preferences>>Behaviour) to open stuff on a single click, I still have to use two clicks and, sometimes, even that doesn't work. In this case, I must right-click and choose Open or Execute (depending on the type of file).
The window manager in the version I'm using is xfce which I never particularly liked although it is lighter than Gnome or KDE so should be faster.
ZevenOS has its own dock called Zeebar which works well. However, as I can't really use an OS without a dock (in Windows 7 I use the Nexus dock), I would like the dock to launch at boot so it's always there. However, my efforts here have failed so far. I've posted to the ZevenOS forum about this but haven't got an answer yet.
I was able to install (from Synaptic PM) Yakuake (version 2.9 I think) and I successfully added this to the Autostart list so this makes my lack of success with Zeebar even more remarkable.
All-in-all it looks good although as yet I haven't used it enough to comment on how fast or otherwise it is. I certainly like the Haiku theme with the Deskbar and the BeOS yellow tabs on all windows.
At present I have ZevenOS installed on the 4GB SSD on the EeePC901 and I'm very short on free space. Not totally sure what I can do about this but uninstalling OpenOffice might be a possibility (I use Google Apps for spreadsheets) and NEVER use Writer.
Also, I'll probably re-install ZevenOS (possibly the Neptune version which is rumoured to be even faster) and put a separate /home partition on the larger (16GB) SSD on this little machine.
Lets see how it looks and performs when it's all set up and configured.

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