Berry 0.82

Berry Linux is an installable liveCD based on Fedora. I've looked at Berry Linux several times in the past and always liked it. Berry .82 is no exception. Since I hadn't tested it in a while I couldn't resist looking at the latest released on July 10. Although I still like it, it doesn't seem to be evolving very much. This could be an advantage to true fans, but I believe they have gotten their money's worth out of that kitty cat wallpaper.

The fruity start sequence is still there as well. There are lots of boot options such as English, Rasp, or Vaio. Most of my hardware was detected properly and working including sound, but excluding my winnic. They include the NVIDIA 3D graphics drivers, but for some reason, I was still logged into a 1024x768 desktop. Thinking I could easily adjust that in the xorg.conf file and restart X backfired on me. Silly me clicked on "Logout" in the menu which proceeded to shut the computer completely down. Deeper in the menu is the "Restart or Change Desktop" option that I should have used. So, upon restart I used the cheatcode screen=1280x800 and was given just that. Then I was able to use Ndiswrapper, wpa_supplicant, and dhclient to bring up my internet connection. Inserting removable media results in an error, but are mountable at the commandline.

Berry comes with a limited control panel containing only options for changing the computer name and some simple networking details such as ip or nameserver. The main desktop is KDE 3.5.7, although not all the usual KDE applications are included. In the menus we find Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5.0.11, Gaim, Sylpheed, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, Planmaker, and Textmaker. In Graphics we find DigiKam, Inkscape, KPDF, Showfoto, and The GIMP. There are a few games such as Miss Driller, Pacman on SNES, and Winemine. Multimedia applications include Audacious, K3b, Kaffine, MPlayer, TVTime, and Xine. I was able to play video files at will. The browser comes with most expected plugins such as flash and multimedia support. Also included in Berry is Wine and Beryl. I wasn't able to figure out how to actually use Beryl without Googling to remind myself of the files I'd need to manually edit, but surely the option was there... somewhere. Berry also ships with the Rasp desktop environment, which looks like a Windows 98 flashback. Under the hood we find Linux 2.6.21.6, Xorg 7.2, and GCC 4.1.2.

All in all, Berry is very much as I remembered. It's stable and has fairly good performance. I did experience a bit of menu hesitation when using the liveCD, but nothing more serious. Hardware detection was good enough and the software selection was adequate. Overall, it remains a solid and respectable Linux distribution choice.

From : Distrowatch.com