Berry Linux released version .65 yesterday or so and I thought I'd take a look. This release brings some updated applications and services, but overall, it's basically looks about the same with the same boot splash, kde splash and kitten wallpaper. This time we have linux 2.6.14.1, gcc 4.0.2, and KDE 3.5.

Berry is a livecd, appearing to be based on Knoppix startup scripts, yet it had fedora core packages. It is primarily for the Japanese language speaking world, but it has support for English as well. It is invoked at boot up with the option LANG=us. This is also where I put my "xmodule=vesa" or else Xorg 6.8.2 would lock up.

Berry is released in about a 450mb iso, featuring KDE as the default, if not only, desktop. The menu was quite limited as they had stripped kde to little more than the basics and then featured gaim (which would not open here), thunderbird and firefox (v1.5) as the primary internet applications. It did include gimp, which was good considering it didn't even have ksnapshot. There were a few configurations, some graphic applications, a few games, and some sound and video apps.

        

There were no common plugins or java support included, however the mplayer did a good job of playing movie files on hand. Demonstrated in the following screenshots are mplayer playing an avi, a mpeg, and a bin file.

        

Berry ships with OpenOffice.org 2.0, PlanMaker demo, and TextMaker demo. I always liked the *Makers because despite their wonderful functionality and built-in features, they are quite lightweight and small in size. I can even run them on my old laptop. The only drawbacks for the given market are they aren't open sourced, lack the really advanced functions I'd never use, and cost like 50 bucks for the full version. Actually the demos are the full versions, they are just time-limited.

    

Berry comes with its own Berry Control Center. It's not too extensive at this time, but it does include a netconfig, hostname config, and a package updater. It is an attractive piece of software, perhaps they plan to add more features as time goes by.

        

There was a hard drive installer included as well. It was the Kanotix hard drive installer that we've seen before in symphony, kurumin, and very similar to arabian's. If you've not see it, it basically walks the user through the configuration by asking a few simple questions. The full process is shown in the screenshots. It worked good and completed the install without incident here today.

        

Hardware detection was a bit spotty as well. Artsd didn't function at all although it appeared some snd_emu10k1 drivers were inserted. It detected my crt-1 first before (actually instead of) my crt-0 which put the wrong modelines and resolution in the xorg.conf file. Given this, I was stuck in 1024x768. My webcam and bttv are rarely if ever detected properly. It did not see my printer at all, as if it wasn't even connected and turned on. I didn't check on the scanner, but then again, I didn't see any software for it anyway.

The list of applications were limited but Berry Linux is a nice little distro featuring a pretty look and some necessary basics. I congratulate and thank any developer for making Linux available to other languages and Berry's a great effort for the Japanese market. More Screenshots.