Testdriving Wolvix Media Edition 1.0.4 Beta 2
Submitted by srlinuxx on Friday 17th of February 2006 02:30:29 PM
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Wolvix 1.0.4 Media Edition has reached the beta2 stage as announced on February 13. We took the beta for a test drive and had some mixed results. Tuxmachines still loves Wolvix, but was glad this is just a beta. There is still time to fix the glitches we encountered while testing. Overall, it's still a great little system and this "media edition" is a wonderful idea, but some of the apps need some work.
As you boot Wolvix you can see all the hardware detection happening and at the end is a commandline login. Afterwhich one can setup their X either using xconf to utilize autodetection or xorgconfig to use manual configuration. Most apparent in your choices for a desktop are xfce4 and fluxbox. Both are very pretty desktops, utilizing the same great looking themes we encountered during testing of the Desktop Edition, with the exception of an updated background to indicate that we are in fact using the "media edition."
Although the concentration is obviously on media applications, this edition still comes with many useful applications for most of the mainstream computing needs. Firefox and links, gaim and xchat, abiword and gnumeric, and many system and file tools are still among the included.
Under graphics we find the gimp, Inkscape, gtkam, GQview, CBRpager, and Buoh. These apps functioned as designed as far as I could test.
Under the audio heading in the menu gnormalize, jamin, Darksnow, Gungirl, somax, ardor, grip, Audacity, EasyTAG, ExFalso and Sweep are listed. These applications opened and appeared to work as far as my limitations in adequate avaiable testing media and knowledge would allow.
Under the tv menu are TvTime, Zapping, and Gvl4. We had trouble with TvTime, as it wouldn't open at all. Zapping at first only showed a scrunch up picture, but closing and restarting it yielded a normal picture. Gvl4 locked up during initial configuration and all efforts to utilize resulted in basically nothing. Back-end XawTV functioned quite well, and this is why it's still my tv player of choice on any system. I've always found the gui front-ends buggy. My card was not automagically detected correctly, but it never is. I must always unload the module and pass some parameters to the kernel when reloading it.
Under video we find Cinelerra, dvd::rip, DVDstyler, Avidemux, OMGrip, Kino, and Camorama. All these seemed to do alright except for Camorama which insisted upon using my bttv card instead of my usb webcam.
In the area of media playback our choices as listed are xine, xmms, realplayer, Quod, somaplayer, vlc and mplayer (I'm assuming gui). Here was had our saddest results as Quod did not function at all, as didn't vlc and mplayer. Xine did play mpegs and avis, although the performance was choppy and cost much system overhead. Even cursor movement became difficult. Frames dropped left and right until a final error and stop of the movie. Xmms did work fine and somaplayer wasn't tested. The mplayer glitch was most surprizing as it worked wonderfully on previous Desktop Editions.
Which brings us to browser plugins. Flash wasn't included although easily installable thru firefox, the mplayer plugin didn't function and java wasn't included (although javascript seemed to work).
So all in all, it's a beta. Wolven still has some work to do, but I think this is a wonderful idea. We are hoping he can work out all the bugs and we will keep you posted. If you are good at debugging and filing detailed reports he could probably use some help. Please visit wolvix.org to help with testing.
More Screenshots here.
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Thanks for the testdrive
Thanks for giving Media Edition Beta a test drive, I wasn't expecting to see you review this release.
The TV applications is a blind spot for me to work with, since I don't have a TV card. I've got other reports that TVtime works fine, while Zapping does not, so I have a feeling it depends on the card brand. The kernel in Wolvix is getting a bit outdated, so maybe an upgrade would iron out som wrinkles.
I'm suprised the music and media players did not work for you. I know VLC has problems playing WMV and MOV files, but other than that it works ok for me. So does MPlayer, the MPlayer package is the same I used in both DE and GE, but I've updated the mplayer_plugin. I'll give them all some vigorous testing this weekend.
The only other problem I've heard about with Quod Libet, is that it does not play files from a fat32 formated HDD. It's a bit slow to start the first time when I launch it, but other than that it has been working fine on my system. Looks like I've got gremlins and bad mojo running all over this beta. I'm thankfull it's just a beta version too.
Thank you very much for the feedback and for putting the spotlight on this release, I need as much feedback and as many bugreports I can get. Building this edition has been the most challenging taks I've faced in my project to this date. There are so many dependencies and packages it makes my head spin.
EDIT: Is the CPU load meter actually pink on your system, like this screenshot? http://www.tuxmachines.org/gallery/wolvix104m/gamesemu?full=1 It's black and white for me. Now I know there are gremlins involved.
re: testdrive
I'd been anxious to test it out, but time's been so short lately. I hesitate to call it review, I prefer testdrive.
I used vesa graphics, so perhaps that's the difference in the pink white thing. Yeah, they appeared almost pinkish here, best I recall. I wasn't paying a lot of attention to conky. Vesa is commonly used by me tho for these reviews, including yours in the past. So that's not the problems with the video applications. Nvidia 6800 chipset.
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