If you read my earlier review of Kurumin, you might recall that about my only problem with it was the older application versions. The system itself was quite nice and stable, and since alpha 5 was released this past week, we thought we'd look and see what was new.

Carlos E. Morimoto, developer of Kurumin, writes, "One important thing about Alpha 4 is that it has the same apps that Kurumin 5.0, that was released on August. I was working just on the scripts and other things related to the base system and doing the Xfree > Xorg, OpenOffice 1.13 > OpenOffice 2 migrations.

I did the other apps atualizations (kde 3.4, etc.) on Alpha 5, that I released yesterday: http://fisica.ufpr.br/kurumin2/kurumin-5.1-alpha5.iso

There is a new version of Firefox too, maybe this correct your crash problems. If not, please let me know."

Well, that was wonderful news and I promptly downloaded Kurumin 5.1-alpha5, even if I did have to wait a few days to boot and test it.

During this round of testing, Kurumin did even better than in the earlier review. While Mercury still wouldn't start, Firefox made a much better appearance. It was found to be quite consistantly stable this time. In addition we find that KDE has been updated to version 3.4.2. KDE was extremely fast for being run from a livecd and no adverse behaviors were exhibited.

        

Another wonderful feature of Kurumin that was either just added or overlooked in the earlier review is the Kurumin-Emu. With this script one can install vmplayer to run a virtual machine. The included script will install the software and walk you thru the configuration.

        

Since most of my original concerns have been addressed, I can only say "kudos" to our lone hero. This alpha is coming right along admirably and I can predict the final product will be amazing. I'm looking forward to test driving the betas and release candidates of Kurumin 5.1.