OBRevenge OS 2017.02



OBRevenge OS was added to the DistroWatch database at the start of February. The desktop distribution is relatively new and is based on Arch Linux. OBRevenge provides its users with a live DVD with a desktop environment, a friendly, graphical system installer and a number of convenient tools to help users get set up. The project provides 32-bit and 64-bit installation media and the ISO file we download is approximately 1GB in size.



I downloaded the 64-bit build of OBRevenge. Booting from the installation media brings up a menu asking if we would like to boot the distribution's live mode, run a memory test or run a hardware detection tool. Loading the live environment brings up a desktop powered by Openbox and (mostly) Xfce components. A panel runs across the top of the desktop, providing us with access to the application menu, task switcher and system tray. Shortly after the desktop loads, a welcome window appears and presents us with buttons to quickly access helpful resources. Specifically, the welcome window's buttons launch the Calamares system installer, open user documentation, launch a text-based web browser to the project's Google Plus page, launch a simplified software manager and assist us with managing VirtualBox and NVIDIA drivers. I like that OBRevenge supplies both on-line and off-line documentation options through its welcome screen as there is no assumption about there being an Internet connection present. In the background, behind the welcome window, we find a clock and readouts showing our system's CPU, memory and bandwidth usage which regularly update.





OBRevenge OS 2017.02 -- The welcome window

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OBRevenge uses the Calamares distribution-independent system installer. Calamares is a graphical application which elegantly walks us through selecting our time zone from a map of the world and gives us a chance to select our preferred language and locale settings. We are then asked to select our keyboard's layout and walked through partitioning our hard drive. The Calamares installer offers us both guided and manual partitioning options. I used the manual partitioning approach and found it to be both flexible and easy to navigate. The installer supports working with a wide range of file systems, including Btrfs, JFS, Reiser, ext2/3/4, LVM and XFS. Once our drive has been partitioned we are asked to create a user account for ourselves. Then the installer shows us a summary of the actions it will take to install OBRevenge and waits for our confirmation. When the installer has finished its work it offers to reboot the computer for us.



The freshly installed copy of OBRevenge boots to a graphical login screen. Signing into our account brings us back to the Openbox environment and displays the welcome screen. This time the welcome screen is displayed with an option to update packages where previously the button to launch the system installer was displayed. The other options on the welcome screen for managing software, displaying documentation and managing drivers remain the same.



On the desktop panel there is an icon which turns red when there are software updates available. OBRevenge is a rolling release distribution and supplies both feature updates and security fixes together. Clicking the notification icon gives us the option of launching the Pamac software manager or an update manager. The update manager is a simple graphical application which displays a list of available upgrades along with the new package's version number, source repository and size. We can check or uncheck boxes next to each package to indicate which ones we want to download. Updates came in frequently when I was running OBRevenge. At one point I experimented with a month-old copy of OBRevenge and a check for software updates revealed 209 updates had been made available during the month of January. These updates totalled 405MB in size.





OBRevenge OS 2017.02 -- The update manager

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People running OBRevenge can make use of the pacman command line package manager to handle installing, removing and upgrading software. However, the distribution provides two graphical front-ends to software management that we may find more convenient. The first software manager is called Pamac and it presents us with a fairly simple interface. Software packages are listed in alphabetical order down the right side of the screen and, on the left side, we can perform searches and select filters to narrow down the list of items we are shown. When we find a package we want to install or remove we can click a box next to the package's name. Pamac is fairly straight forward to use and works quickly, but it is easy to get bogged down in the massive amounts of available software. To make finding popular applications easier, there is a second software manager.





OBRevenge OS 2017.02 -- The Pamac software manager

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The second software manager can be launched from the welcome screen and it displays three tabs. These tabs (Internet, Media and Office) show us a short list of popular applications in each of the three categories. For example, the Office tab has Abiword and LibreOffice, the Media tab features VLC and a few other multimedia programs and the Internet tab includes such items as Firefox and Chromium. We can check boxes next to which items we want to install. This trimmed down package manager does make it easier to find popular items. My one concern with the simplified package manager was that it only shows users the short package name of each application with no description or hint as to what the program does. This leaves the user to guess what packages named "gnumeric" or "totem" do.





OBRevenge OS 2017.02 -- The settings panel and the simplified software manager

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The OBRevenge distribution does not ship with a lot of desktop software. Looking through the application menu we find the Elinks text-based web browser, the Qt Designer application, an archive manager, file manager, calculator and text editor. There are plenty of configuration utilities for adjusting settings which I will come back to later, along with the Htop task manager and the GNU Compiler Collection. The distribution ships with systemd 232 and version 4.9.6 of the Linux kernel. As OBRevenge is a rolling release distribution, new package versions will be introduced as they become available.



While OBRevenge is light on desktop applications, the distribution features many utilities for managing settings. These utilities can be accessed through the application menu or through a settings panel. The settings panel is divided into four tabs to help us find the modules we want to access. The Customization tab handles adjusting the look of the desktop and its components. The System tab handles working with most of the underlying operating system. The third tab, Software, provides launchers for accessing the distribution's software managers and software updates. The final tab is labelled OBR-Tools and includes a miscellaneous collection of small programs for adjusting system settings.





OBRevenge OS 2017.02 -- The application menu

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The layout of the settings panel is pretty straight forward and there are lots of useful modules we can access. My one complaint with the settings panel was many of the configuration modules require root access and the panel does not remember our credentials. This means almost every time we open a new settings module, we are prompted for our password. I prefer to input my password once and have it remembered while I am exploring a settings panel.



I tried running OBRevenge in a VirtualBox virtual machine and then on a physical desktop computer. The distribution operated well in the virtual machine and automatically sets up VirtualBox modules, nicely integrating into the guest environment. I had similarly good results running OBRevenge on the desktop computer. In both instances, the distribution booted quickly, the desktop was responsive and all my hardware was properly detected. The system used just 255MB of RAM to login to the Openbox interface and was stable during my trial. I tried booting OBRevenge in both legacy BIOS and UEFI modes on my desktop computer and found the distribution ran well in both situations. One of the few issues I ran into with regards to hardware was trying to set up my network printer. OBRevenge was able to detect a printer was present, but could not find any suitable drivers for the device.



Apart from the difficulty I faced getting my printer working, I ran into a few other bumps along the road while I was using OBRevenge. The distribution features a configuration tool which allows us to switch out the Xfce desktop panel for alternative panels. This gives us the flexibility to make our desktop act more like LXDE or another, custom environment. I found that changing the panel also swaps out the application menu for a different menu with different software categories. This means if we switch panels we need to also get used to finding our software in new locations. Later in the week, I tried to switch back to the original desktop panel. Selecting the Xfce panel caused an error to be displayed which told me I could not change panels because the system was running in "kiosk mode". When I dismissed the error message I found the Xfce panel had been loaded, but the LXDE panel was still in place, resulting in two overlapping (and visually confusing) panels. I had to manually kill one panel's process in order to use the other.





OBRevenge OS 2017.02 -- Exploring alternative themes and wallpapers

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For the most part, I enjoyed OBRevenge's dark theme. I liked the visual contrast and I usually enjoy darker themes as I find them easier on my eyes. A minor issue I had with OBRevenge's default theme was window borders were not always distinct. Sometimes, when I had multiple smaller windows open, they all bled into each other, making it hard to tell which controls were in which window. I was able to adjust the look of the windows and their borders in the settings panel.



Perhaps the most curious issue I ran into concerned the system clock. When I first started using OBRevenge the clock had the wrong time and this confused Firefox and caused me to see an error message whenever I tried to visit secure websites. This inability to visit HTTPS-secured sites is a common issue when a computer's clock is set to an incorrect time or time zone. I opened the clock's settings from the desktop panel and found I could either manually set the time or enable automatic time synchronization using NTP. I opted to use NTP, as I usually do on other distributions, and an error message appeared telling me NTP was not installed. This seemed unusual and I went into the Pamac software manager to install it, only to find NTP was already installed. I then dropped to a command line to confirm NTP was enabled and running, and I restarted the service using systemd. I then returned to the clock's settings, which gave me the same error reporting NTP was not installed. In the end, I gave up on automatic time synchronization and manually set the clock's time.



One final problem which developed over the week was menu clutter. OBRevenge ships with very few desktop applications, but lots and lots of configuration tools. These tools are present in the application menu and in the settings panel. At first, they present minimum clutter, but as I added applications I wanted to use, the already full menu became more difficult to navigate and I found myself increasingly using the menu's search function and Favourites sub-category in order to keep my application launchers organized.



Conclusions



The OBRevenge distribution is unusual in a few ways and I sometimes struggled with aspects of the project's design. As an example, the distribution does not ship with a graphical web browser. There is a launcher for a text browser in the application menu and we can find a second text browser launcher by using the menu's search feature. It is unusual to find a desktop distribution with just a text browser, but what I found really strange was selecting the on-line documentation button on the welcome screen launches a Python script whose sole job is to open a minimal, graphical web browser to display the documentation. The minimal browser has no menu or address bar, but we can use it to view web pages and click through links. This seems to indicate the developers decided it would be better to create their own website viewer in Python and only use it for documentation while supplying desktop users with a text browser rather than use a graphical browser (such as Firefox or Chromium) for both tasks.



Little design choices like this show up in other places. For example, there is a settings module which downloads new wallpapers and then opens a file manager to show us the new images. But the file manager cannot change the desktop wallpaper so we need to return to the settings panel and launch a second module to actually access the new wallpapers while other distributions usually integrate the two steps into one utility, downloading and selecting wallpapers together.



Something which stood out while I was using OBRevenge was that my learning curve with the distribution was almost backward. Usually, when I start using a new distribution, I spend a day or two getting used to how things are set up and fixing minor issues. As the week progresses, things gradually get easier and I settle into a new routine. With OBRevenge, things started out well. The distribution ran well in both of my test environments, the welcome screen offered me documentation and a good first impression. The system was light and the Calamares installer made getting the distribution installed a breeze. For the first few hours, OBRevenge was looking very promising, friendly, fast and with cutting edge software.



Over time though, I started running into the problems I mentioned above. Firefox wouldn't display secure websites until I fixed the clock, my application menu soon became cluttered, adjusting settings took longer than expected because I was regularly prompted for my password. My usually Linux-friendly printer was not recognized and switching desktop panels did not go as smoothly as I had hoped.



During my time with OBRevenge I tried to figure out who the distribution was targeting. It is easy to install, but there is a lot of work to do afterward installing software, codecs and possibly drivers. These characteristics, along with the style of the software managers and many configuration tools led me to believe this distribution is targeting people who have run (or who would like to run) Arch Linux, but who want to skip the initial installation process. The distribution seems to be made for people who want to install the system with just a few clicks, but then wish to heavily customize it and manually select all of their own desktop software.



OBRevenge seems to be taking the stance that we, the users, know what we are doing and we want to customize our system from the ground up, we just want a minimalist foundation in place first. The distribution does a great job of making a first impression and helping us get the core operating system installed, but then largely steps out of the way and leaves us to install and manage the system as we like. I feel as though OBRevenge takes a similar approach to Tiny Core Linux or Arch Linux in that we are given some basic tools and left to craft our own system. I can see why this approach appeals to some people, it starts us off with a fast and light system. Personally, I found it meant I spent more time getting the pieces I wanted in place and adjusting things than I would usually like. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications: Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU

Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive

Memory: 6GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card

Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card