If you read our review of Linpus 9.6, and are thinking about installing it or recommending it to friends and family, we have a few tips for you.
The Linpus site has been down for several days, but here are a few things we found out about the distro before the site was taken offline (for maintenance):
- Linpus 9.6 (the latest release), is an apt-ified, Fedora-based Linux distribution. What that means is that although the system is based on Fedora, with Gnome as the default desktop environment, the preferred package manager is apt, the package manager for Debian and Debian-based distros. So you can run apt-get from a terminal
- There is no documentation on the site. It seems that while the distro is free to download, the docs and other resources are accessible only to paid subscribers
- We could not update the system. In fact, running apt-get update did not produce the result we expected. Click on the image below to see the output from running apt-get update
- The default installation (of Linpus) gives you access to two graphical firewall clients - Firestarter and system-config-firewall-py, the custom firewall client for Fedora. Firestarter is one of the better graphical firewall clients for Linux desktops. Since you only need one graphical firewall client, we suggest that you uninstall Firestarter (system-config-firewall-py is better). In the menu tree, Firestarter is located in Linpus Start -> Internet -> Firestarter, and you will find system-config-firewall-py in Linpus Start -> System -> Administration -> Firewall. Uninstall Firestarter by running apt-get remove firestarter, or by using Synaptics
- If you chose the “Express” installation method, the firewall will be in the “Disabled” state. Be sure to enable it before connecting the system to the Internet. See the image below to see the Firewall in the “Enabled” state.
- The Network Manager client, nu-applet, has an option to configure VPN connections. Problem is no VPN application is installed, and you wont find any in the default repo
- Because it is apt-ified, you can manage and add repos to Linpus by editing the /etc/apt/sources.list file. The problem with editing the sources.list file is trying to figure out what third-party repos are compatible with Linpus 9.6. We couldn’t, but we are still trying. Stay tuned. Aside from editing the sources.list directly, Linpus makes it easy to add repos using a gui tool (Click on image below)
- Installing multimedia codecs in Linpus 9.6 requires the use of the fee-based Codeina plugin installation service, You may have to pay between 7 to 28 EUR (10 to 39 USD) to install all the multimedia codecs you need to actually enjoy using Linpus. That is, until you can figure out what third-party repos are compatible with it. Once you do that, you should uninstall Codeina by running apt-get remove codeina or by using Synaptics. Codeina is also used by Fedora 9, and Mandriva
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