Monday, February 4, 2013

Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” Review: Lightweight, fast and elegant Openbox distro for low spec computers!


From performance point of view, these days, Openbox is my favorite desktop environment. I found it actually to be more efficient and less resource consuming than either LXDE or XFCE and works very efficiently on low powered P4 machines. Perhaps the most famous distros with Openbox DE are Archbang and Crunchbang. Recently, SparkyLinux came up with their version of Openbox spin. In this article, I review SparkyLinux 2.1 "Ultra" Openbox as well as do a brief comparison with Archbang and Crunchbang.

This assessment is done entirely by me. My assessment is based on installation on Asus K54C laptop with 2.2 Ghz Core i3 processor and 2 GB RAM and experience of using it for the last 3 days. I downloaded the 32-bit ISO (1.4 GB in size) for this testing. Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” has an Openbox DE with Linux kernel 3.2.0. PCManFM 0.9.10 is the default file browser. 

From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in


Appearance
Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” has a slightly customized desktop with a dark colored theme, a dock, a top panel and a good looking Conky to decorate the desktop. The theme looks very good. The dock or wbar is configurable and I could add shortcuts of newly installed applications like Skype. However, the new app icons don't gel with rest of entries in wbar, as you can see in the screenshots posted below. Unless you have customized icons matching the theme of wbar, this issue will surely bother you a bit. On appearance, Sparkylinux gets 8/10.

From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in
From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in

Menu is visible on right click. For faster loading, it is an iconless menu. 
 

From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in
Hardware Recognition
Hardware recognition is pretty good in Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” with Wifi, sound card and touchpad (vertical scroll) automatically recognized. For single and double tap on touchpad, a bit of manual configuration is required. Things work out of the box more or less, which is great.
I installed via USB live boot. It took about 30 minutes to install with a bit complicated installation process. 

Applications 
Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” has most of the everyday use applications preinstalled like 
  • Office: Document viewer, Abiword, Gnumeric
  • Internet: Chromium, Claws Maiil, Liferea, Pidgin chat, Transmission bit torrent client, xChat IRC and gFTP  
  • Graphics: Camorama webcam viewer, GIMP 2.8 Photo editor, Image Viewer, ImageMagick, Simple Scan, xPDF  
  • Multimedia: Audacity, Avidemux, DeVeDe, Gnome Mplayer, VLC 2, Record my Desktop, Xfburn
  • Accessories: Appfinder, Catfish file search, Leafpad, Parcelete, Root terminal, Screenshot, Xarchiver, Tux commander
  • Other: Unetbootin, Wine, USB Creator, Midnight Commander 
Multimedia free and non-free codecs are already provided in the distro along with Adobe flashplugin 11. Even Java (OpenJDK 7) is inbuilt. It is a really good collection from an Openbox lightweight distro point of view, most of the apps provided are quite lightweight and I like it. I feel it has the complete set of applications required for daily needs and hence Sparkylinux gets 10/10 for applications section.

From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in
From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in
From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in
Installation 
At a high level, installation seems really complex compared to any other Debian or Ubuntu based distro. Installation begins with default system language or locales. The choices given are file names like “en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8” for English (US). Simple English (US) would have done better for sure and this may bother first time users and Linux novices. Fortunately, by default Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” chooses the standard international configurations for keyboard and language. 

From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in
From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in
From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in
From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in


Second, the installer doesn't choose a drive by default but expects the user to choose a drive and format it using gparted. This is handy to power users but may not excite Linux novices. 

From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in
From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in
From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in


Third, on root and user setup, Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” doesn't accept same root and user passwords, unlike other Linux distros I have used. Possibly this adds an extra layer of security, but for those not working for intelligence agencies, it is a bit cumbersome to remember 2 passwords for the same machine. Anyway, with proliferation of social networks and email services, already there are a whole lot of passwords to remember!

From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in


Fourth, the grub installation has a couple of options – MBR of first drive and root partition. It is a bit confusing, but I tried both the options for testing and both of them works without fail. So, even if you don't understand what they are you can safely go ahead – either will work for you. But, this necessarily complicates the installation process for newbies.

From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in


Rest of the questions are pretty much same like location, time-zone, etc.

From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in
From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in


All in all it takes about 20-30 minutes to install Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra”. For a bit of complicated installation process, Sparkylinux gets 7/10 here.

Post installation upgrade is about 40-50 MB and Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” works out of the box even without the updates and upgrades. 

Repository

Synaptic package manager (version 0.75.12) is the default package manager GUI for browsing and installing packages. Debian wheezy is the default repository. Synaptic package manager works as expected and I downloaded Firefox and Thunderbird without any issue. However, addition of Debian Software Center would have really helped for Linux newbies as it provides a better view as to the available applications in clearly defined categories.

Given Debian Wheezy will release this month and there is a freeze, you may not find the very latest applications like LibreOffice 3.6 at the moment. But, once Debian 7 is released, I guess, all the latest versions will be available.

Gdebi is the package manager and using the same, I could install Skype 4.1 without any issue. Skype is not available in Debian repo but can be downloaded from Skype website.
 

From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in
Performance 
Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” takes about 1-5% CPU and only 90 MB RAM to load the Openbox desktop with task manager running. If I compare it to the leading Openbox distros, Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” is definitely among the top few, perhaps only bettered by Archbang. It offers absolutely great performance and is very smooth to use. Further, I found Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” to be very stable. On performance, SparkyLinux gets 9/10.

From Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in


Overall 
I really like the Openbox spin of Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” and purely from performance point of view, it is absolutely recommended. It looks good with the dark abstract theme but integrating user installed applications will be a bit tough and will require some customization. Conky definitely adds to the beauty of the distro and I tried using other conkies as well from gnome-look and they mostly work with Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra”. Performance is comparable to any other Openbox distro and added with the richness of Debian repository, Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” seems like an attractive option for low spec machines. Further, Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” is fully loaded with all essential applications and if you can bear with the clumsy installation process, I guess you'll like the distro.

Is it the best Openbox distro I have used? I guess still Archbang and Crunchbang are my favorite Openbox distros but Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” is close. I recommended Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” with a rating of 8/10.

You can download Sparkylinux 2.1 “Ultra” from here. Both 32 and 64 bit versions are available for download.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for another great review! I really like your approach, especially your consideration whether features are suitable for newbies or for advanced users. My interest in Openbox is growing daily and it is my favourite lighweight desktop environment now. Considering your interest in Openbox you should give Semplice Linux a try. Its implementation of Openbox is a bit more minimalistic than the one from Sparkylinux but i think its prettier and nicer than in Crunch- or Archbang.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks BaWo, I'll definitely give Semplice a shot!

      Delete
  2. can you do ubuntu 12.04.2 lts review?
    i want to know if the kernel issues still exists or not , thank you for great reviews

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sure. I'll review it this week. I am using Ultimate Edition based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS - got the 12.04.2 updates recently, seems to be a lot stable and crashing of the applications in background has stopped completely. But, a comprehensive review of Ubuntu 12.04.2 will give a better perspective.

      And thanks for reading my reviews.

      Delete