Episode: 2033
Title: HPR2033: Distro Review: Bodhi Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2033/hpr2033.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:32:52

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This in HPR episode 2033 entitled Distro Remew on Hilux.
It is hosted by M1 on our Nero R5H for the 35 and in about 18 minutes long.
The summary is a brief review on on Hilux.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello world, mirror shags here again.
Today we're going to take a little look at a Linux distribution called Bowdy Linux.
HPR15 is a Ubuntu based on the long-term service versions and it's kind of a cool distribution
in some ways.
I'm usually not a super profan of Ubuntu.
There's nothing wrong with Ubuntu, I don't want to give you that idea.
It's not my usual go-to distro for anything but I really wanted to look at this today for
one reason.
It's kind of minimalist, it's advertised as working good on older hardware but it runs
just fine on new hardware too.
There's 32 and 64 bit versions and I think they actually make some of the legacy versions
available.
It's based on enlightenment or well I should say it used to be based on enlightenment so the
main lead developer guy he's Fort Enlightenment E17 to something he calls Moxha Desktop which
is essentially Enlightenment E17, there's some small changes.
For one thing it's one of the few distributions that is enlightenment based which is kind
of sad.
There used to be a couple kind of sad that we don't see more from enlightenment.
Back in the day, I really liked E16, I used to use E16 a lot, it had a lot of really cool
eye candy and E17 kind of continues that tradition.
I think in a statement somewhere on the website, let's see if I can find the actual quote
here for you, I know somewhere, he made the statement of the reason why there was a
change, unfortunately I don't have it in front of me, oh wait a minute.
From the Wikipedia page, Bodhi provides rich desktop effects and animations that do not
require high end computer hardware.
The rationale for forking the project from DR17 was due to its established performance
and functionality while E19 possessed optimizations that break existing features, users and joy
in use as per Jeff Hookeland's statement.
So there you go, it's really, it's enlightenment.
I'm sure there's some, if you really got down to the nuts and bolts of it, you could
really sit down and go over a bunch of the specifics to the changes, but if you're just
a person who wants to load it up and use it, it's going to feel, if you're accustomed
to E17, you're going to feel at home in Mochia.
One of the really cool things I liked about this distro was out of the box, it's pretty
plain Jane, they don't bundle 5 million applications with it, if I'm not mistaken, I might be
wrong, but if I'm not mistaken, the ISO is still small enough to burn to a CDR, which
is pretty cool.
When I tried it out, it was, I didn't have any trouble installing any of the software
that I use regularly, they were all in the repose.
I think the idea here was to ship a minimalist kind of operating system, but still have that
sort of eye candy, have a modern desktop.
I really liked that approach.
I wish more distros would kind of just start doing that.
I've seen so many arguments about which media player do include, which browser do include,
which text editor do include, and it's really nice when a distro figures it out and says,
hey, which just won't ship any of them, we'll just put them in the repose and you install
what you want, which is great, that's my favorite approach, but you know, it's not for everybody,
I guess.
It kind of, in some respects, Bodhi puts me in mind of crunch bang in a certain, in that
context.
I really, really love crunch bang.
I was really sad when core nominal ended crunch bang.
I know there's some, there's a community continuation of crunch bang called Bunsen
Labs, and I think there's another distro out there called crunch bang plus plus than
another guy started.
So if you really like those, you can, you can check those out, but it reminds me of crunch
bang in that respect where it's, it's really, really cut down not a lot of extras included
out of the box, and it runs good on all their hardware.
The, I believe it comes with, I wish I can remember what it's called, it's, it's a, it
comes with comp is, they call it something else, and I can't remember what it's called
now.
They have a different name for it, but the latest version comes with comp is so you can
turn those, you know, flashy 3D effects on if you want, but, and actually it's really,
it's really cool to see, enlightenments, you know, built-in eye candy combined.
You can actually set up a really, really slick looking desktop with those two things.
It's, it's really, really slick to see.
There's some really nice, if you want to see some screenshots, just Google Enlightenment,
E17, and go to the images, and there's just absolute tons of really eye catching screenshots
that people have done, and of course there's always YouTube, some people have done some
videos of their Enlightenment desktops that are really, really slick, see, and most of
the tests that I did with it, it, it ran great, it's fast, it's stable.
The only complaints I really have, and, and some of the stuff is probably stuff that
they're working on, so it's not really that big of a deal.
I know that their, their community is, it's pretty active, and they're, they're trying
to work on some of the bugs, because they're, they're sort of going their own direction
with this, Moke should desktop.
Also I'd like to say, I think most of the window managers that are out there are, are
lightweight, or should fall in the lightweight category.
I mean, a lot of, a lot of, there's always much to do about that in different forms and
stuff for people to go back and forth, but really, I mean, I've used, of flux box, and
it's predecessor black box, I've used it, several different versions of Enlightenment, I've
used window maker, after step, I've used the old Nome 2, I really have a hard time getting
into Nome 3, I like Katie, okay, there's really nothing wrong with any of them, but really,
you know, most of the, the non desktop environments, just, just the window managers, most of those
are lightweight, most of those are going to run fine on old hardware, but Enlightenment
is, is quite nice, it does include just little, little touches that are, that are just
really nice, really slick looking little animations and stuff, a couple things that I didn't
like, for one thing, so it does ship with a handful of applications, and most of the applications
it ships with are Enlightenment centric, in other words, they're the, the Enlightenment
versions of different applications, so for a terminal emulator, you get terminology, which
is actually kind of cool, I really kind of enjoyed playing with terminology, that was kind of fun,
the browser, it comes with is Midori, and I've used Midori before, and I think Midori is a,
a fine browser, I'm not here to say anything bad about it, but in testing, Bodhi, out of
the box anyway, even after I updated, Midori was really crashy crashy, and there wasn't
any rhyme or reason either, sometimes you would start it up and just go to load a page, and
it would just poof disappear, and other times it would, you might browse for 20, 30 minutes,
and then for no reason apparently it would just go away, so I'm not really sure what the
cause of that was, I've kind of had that problem in the past with Midori, I have to say, it
is a really cool lightweight browser, but I installed Firefox on it, and Firefox ran fine,
so you know, your mileage may vary, also not really knocking PC Manifim, it's a great
lightweight file manager, I do kind of like Thunar a little better, that's just me, that's
a personal thing, you can you can change that if you want, it's just PC Manifim is so lightweight,
it looks, it looks a little bit out of place in Enlightenment, Enlightenment's very slick and
has a lot of little, like I said, eye candy little slick touches, and PC Manifim looks really plain
Jane, next all of your slick Enlightenment stuff, so it feels a little awkward sometimes
using PC Manifim in this, but I understand why they chose that, they were going with a lot of lightweight
applications, and that's definitely more lightweight than Thunar, so it's not really, I'm not trying to,
give them a hard way to go, it's just personal preference I guess, which is what Linux is all about,
so in the end it's not that big of a deal, but really enjoyed using it, it was, it's a fun
distro, and I think it's fun because it doesn't come with a bunch of extra junk out of the box,
I get frustrated with that, that's a point of contention with me, I don't like having to deal
with, especially when they do silly things, like if a distro out of the box includes like seven media
players, I'm just like why, what do we need to pick one and go with it? Usually I just install
VLC and call it a day, but I know some people don't like VLC, you could use whatever you want, it's just,
I don't see the need to have 15 applications dedicated to the same thing, so,
it's a great distribution, it ran really great, I tried it out on a fairly old laptop,
it was, I think it was, it was an allured deal, dual core, a couple of gigs of RAM,
which is more than enough for this thing to run comfortably,
just a couple other little side items about it, the distribution itself, they have, I think they
have versions that you can run on a Raspberry Pi, and I think they have a Chromebook,
or maybe you can just install it on a Chromebook, I'm not sure, I remember reading somewhere that
there's a Chromebook version, or there's a way I get to install it on a Chromebook,
like I said, for old computers, it runs fine, new computers, of course, you're going to get the,
you know, it goes without saying, the better your hardware, the better it's going to run,
the latest version is 3.2.0, and I think I don't know how up to date it is,
according to their Wikipedia article, the system requirements is 128 megs of RAM,
2.5 gigs of hard drive space, and a 300 megahertz processor,
I have not tested it on anything that old, I,
geez, I think the oldest thing I did, that's kind of anecdotal, I have an old machine with
a 500 megahertz processor that I did install, an older version of Bodion, sometime back,
and it ran fine, ran perfectly okay, of course it was a slow, as you would imagine,
but other than that, it ran fine, I've got, and the closest thing to that I think I have is a 700
megahertz pinning 3, that's a dead, I mean, as a desktop, I may throw it on there and try it later,
just to see how well it does on hardware that's that old, on my trials when I was trying it out,
compositing was a little walkie, that's probably due to the fact that the laptop I was using it on
has an Intel video chip, an older Intel video chip, so some Intel video chips support
OpenGL sort of a little bit, while some of the many, many of the older ones do not,
so sometimes you turn on compositing, and weird things happen, so you're, again, your mileage
may vary, it really depends on your hardware, then these aren't things, these are things that
you're gonna, you're gonna deal with on any Linux distribution, the installer was basically
a standard Ubuntu Linux Mint type of player, I'm sure that installer has a name, I don't know
what it is off the top of my head, but very simple to install, nothing to it, and the whole thing
was actually quite nice, I wish, I really do wish more enlightenment-based distros would
show up, I kind of wish there was more flux box distros too, I know Linux Mint used to have
a flux box edition, and I guess they tanked it, I know you can install it on any of the
other versions, but it just, I don't know, it's kind of nice, not a lot of people are doing
the minimalist thing either, and that's also another thing that makes me sad,
but anyway, you should check them out, I'm gonna put some links in the, in the show notes,
I'll try to link to obviously their website, maybe the distro watch page, and
a couple of videos, I think the videos that I've found that are kind of cool are a little bit older,
a little bit older versions of Bodie, but still, they really helped show off what the distros
like, and you can see some of the enlightenment eye candy, and anyways I've been rambling on here
long enough, so sorry this wasn't a little more coherent, I didn't really plan it, I just wanted
to sit down and talk a little bit about this, it was kind of a nice distro, and you should really
check it out, and with that I'll in this episode, thanks for listening, I hope it was helpful.
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