Simplicity Linux 12.7 Release Day!
Okay, so Simplicity Linux 12.7 Netbook has been (unofficially) available for a little while now. But now we can officially announce that Netbook, Media, Desktop and Subdivision are all officially available for download.
Simplicity Linux 12.7 Netbook:
Sometimes you don’t need a massive distro to get things done. Sometimes you just need a browser and a few other apps. That is what Simplicity Linux 12.7 Netbook does for you. You get Firefox and Midori as browsers, Flash, a few other little bits and pieces, but nothing which is going to seriously strain your system. It’s designed for people who are pretty much 24/7 connected to the Internet. We personally have this installed on a USB key which we keep in a bag and boot our netbook from without even using a save file – because we just store everything on Dropbox!
Simplicity Linux 12.7 Media:
So using Simplicity for a netbook is great. But what about your movies, your music, stuff like that? We’ve got you covered there too! Media is designed for entertainment. You get Midori and Firefox, but you also get the amazing Clementine media player, which lets you get music from online and offline from a variety of sources. You also get a link to Blinkbox, where you can choose between free older movies, or renting or buying new releases. Our QA process may have involved quite a lot of watching The Batman cartoons from here… Plus if you want to game, you can use OnLive or Gaikai. There is a known about bug for OnLive where you need to search for the launcher using pfind, but this was discovered too late to rectify. Apologies.
Simplicity Linux 12.7 Desktop:
Our heavyweight distro. Yes it weighs in big at 557mb, but for that you get VLC, the full LibreOffice, Skype, Gimp and a whole ton of other full featured software. If you need or just like local applications, then this is the Simplicity flavour for you. It’s what we use around the office, and hopefully it includes everything you need to be productive.
Subdivision 12.7:
Our new, experimental distro. This is aimed squarely at Windows users who are disillusioned with Windows, but find regular Linux too difficult to grasp. At the moment it’s still alpha and unpolished, hence experimental, but current and former Windows users have told us that they like the familiarity it has. It comes with LibreOffice, Skype, an anti virus and a preconfigured firewall. Again it’s big, but you can just shove it on a USB key and boot faster than a Windows PC. Subdivision is a seperate project from Simplicity, despite sharing code with it, but we plan to work harder on it for the 12.10 release cycle.
I ran across this the other day and thought I’d try it out on my netbook. Looks nice, but when booting up it tells me that the device drivers are not loaded (“it is likely that the zdrive is not installed”), and it says to make sure that zdrv_luki_022.sfs is copied to the same location as puppy_luki_022.sfs.
Is this something that has been addressed in the next release?
Oh, I forgot to say, the file does exist and is in the same location.
Hmmmm…really weird bug. I’ll look into it. Thanks for the feedback!
I downloaded the Netbook version of Simplicity and installed it in a 4GB pendrive. Next I booted my Samsung N-148 Netbook with this pendrive. I was pleasantly surprised at the results. Booting time was very impressive, the interface is awesome, especially the dock at the bottom of the screen. All said and done, there was a big disappointing waiting for me when I tried to configure wireless network. It could not detect my built in wireless lan card. Next I tried a USB lan adopter (Netgear WG111 v3), but even after two hours of struggling, I could not connect to the internet. It did detect the wireless network, and even accepted the security password etc., and after automatic DHCP configuration was done successfully I clicked on “Done” button. But on opening Firefox, I could not access any website. Firefox message said there was no internet connectivity.
The dialogs in this version of Linux seems to resemble Puppy Linux; is this based on some sort of Puppy Linux distro? Even the network configuration is exactly the same as in Puppy, and it is interesting to note that I had faced the same problems with Puppy Linux, and had to give up Puppy for good! Can anybody please enlighten me as to what is going wrong in my system?
Sorry that Simplicity didn’t work for your wifi, and yes it is based on Puppy Linux. Networking on Linux is one of those things that can be tricky to set up, and we only have a limited amount of test hardware, so we can’t guarantee it will work on every wifi setup. However, we keep making improvements, and hopefully the next release will work better for you!