Distro Journey Series: iMagicOS
by thomas on Jun.30, 2009, under Unix
Thomas Holbrook II | *NIXEDBLOG 3.0
This is a summary of what I have seen in iMagicOS 2009. It shall be kept brief as I will be writing an article for the latest issue of THE *NIXED REPORT.
What I liked
The idea of MagicOnline is well thought out. It utilizes Prism, thus making it act as a standalone application. For those who don’t like the concept, there’s still Synaptic. After all, 2009′s based on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. The menu by default looks pretty good, but when installing third party applications such as World of Goo, it may not show up. Changing to the KDE 3.5 style menu fixed that issue. The included applications is of a decent variety, and with the bundled copy of Crossover Office, plenty of existing applications have a chance to be used while migrating to a *nix-based environment.
What Needs Improvement
The attempt to detect certain downloads via Firefox can be helpful. For example, downloading a Windows setup file would cause a message box to pop up asking the user to click the "ok" button when the downloading was finished. It would then offer to open Crossover Office. The problem isn’t with that feature. The problem lies in how to shut it off, especially when it continually pops up over and over again. For those who have purchased a copy without Crossover installed, please let me know if that’s an issue or not.
The update system has a cosmetic flaw as well. When it asks if you want to install the Madwifi drivers, it is wise to say no, because (with me at least), only an archive of source code is downloaded. When the update reaches 100%, the window has to be closed, and the user’s password has to be given. MagicSongs can be improved as well (it crashes if the play button is clicked without a file being loaded). MagicWriter has the potential of being a drop in WordPad replacement, but I would recommend the file format being changed to RTF or ODF instead of TXT.
Overall Impression
The 3D effects are a nice touch. The fact that OpenOffice.org 3 was included shows that the maker, Carlos La Borde, cares about balancing stability and new features. Plenty of thought was put into iMagicOS, and with subsequent improvements to any cosmetic glitches, could replace any past commercial "easy to use" distros of the past.
Next Destination
SuperOS, Linux Mint, and Fedora 11 are the next stops on the Distro Journey. I won’t be testing the first two on the ZaReason 3110 system due to the Intel Graphics regression issue.
