By now, we all know about the linux “Golden Child” that is Ubuntu. It’s what I’ve used for the past year or so myself. I, much like everyone else apparently, love it. However, I didn’t want to do just another review of Ubuntu that would stroke the ego and points further south of Canonical. Instead, I thought I’d look at another distrobution that is also based off Debian, DreamLinux. To be more specific, DreamLinux Multimedia Edition 2.2.

Upon first glance, this distrobution looks pretty nice. Engage, the OS X-like dock at the bottom of the screen, makes for a welcome change to the standard panel I keep down there to house my most-used programs. It comes standard with some pretty nifty things, like easy install Picasa, the image software from Google, XFCE instead of Gnome or KDE, and enough codecs to run pretty much any multimedia right out of the box. It also includes setup for a graphics tablet, your trust Synaptic Package Manager, and a system control panel although it’s not much of one.

The administravite control panel offers a decent amount of control, but nothing compared to most other distrobutions. Likewise, the package manager was very buggy. It downloaded a number of files and then froze. It wasn’t until I hit the cancel button that it told me that there were problems with some of the repositories. If I hadn’t hit the cancel button who knows how long I would have been waiting.

With the few bugs aside, I was pretty impressed with this small Brazillian distrobution. Translations were not as smooth as they would be from a native-speaking programmer, but they got the point across with little effort. The addition of an XMMS applet in the system tray was very nice though, especially for someone like me who has their workspace cluttered with text editors full of source code.

Also, if you like parts of DreamLinux, but not others, and you have the iron constitution to venture into the lesser-known, you can make your own distro based around DreamLinux and Morphix using MKDistro, the utility provided to you when you install DreamLinux. I haven’t had the intestinal fortitude to go through with it myself, but perhaps one day we’ll bring you a review on how that goes.

All in all, if you’re a linux veteran you probably won’t find much of anything that will change your world in this distro. However, if you’re just getting into linux and you want something shiny that will play your MP3 collection and looks nice, this could be right up your alley.

You can download DreamLinux @ http://www.dreamlinux.com.br/

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1. Help Me Choose A Distro!
2. Review of Ubuntu 7.10
3. Ubuntu 7.10 Is Here
4. IBM ThinkSLED?
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