During one of my frequent
visits to DistroWatch I happened
to notice the post
informing of the latest release of BlankOn:
a Debian derived Indonesian Linux distribution. I, usually, don't
care much about “National” distributions, they are
interesting initiatives but often lack of support if you live outside
their “target” country. What in this case caught my
attention has been the custom panel interface resembling, in
DistroWatch screen-shots, the “good” old netbook
interface I used for years.
I so downloaded BlankOn
ISO Image; it took a little to me find the right
link since BlankOn site is only in Indonesian language,
eventually I found it by following the “big blue button”. I then
prepared a bootable USB disk using UNetbootin
and re-booted my EEEPC.
First impressions
BlankOn desktop is based
on Gnome Shell, it opens with plain screen with only a panel at the
to side.
by clicking in the
BlankOn logo in the upper-left corner the side panel is activated.
the side panel acts as
application launcher in similar way to many “applications menu”
Gnome shell extensions.
The “Locations”
button on the side panels open a “Places” side panel. This
panel offers a handy access to common home folders, mounted drives
and network.
The top panel hosts the
usual handful of icons for network, sound, battery and time. On the
left part the top panel hosts icons for open windows, hovering on
them with mouse pointer shows the icons enlarged.
in the top right corner
there is a workspaces switch icon
Conclusions
In addition to the good
custom desktop interface BlankOn is also a “rich” Linux
distribution, ready for use stuffed with most of the applications you
might need. I'm not going to install it but I might try to install
its custom panel on a Ubuntu installation. I have already found some
how-to
but I'll be very careful before to try it on the EEEPC since I
already had my troubles
trying things like this.
No comments :
Post a Comment