I installed BLAG 70000 on an old 450MHz box with 192 MB of RAM. You might just be interested to know how it turned out.

I have some old HP Vectras I use for testing purposes. Most have between 192 and 256 MB of RAM and a 10 GB hard drive. I decided to test out BLAG on a box with 192 MB of RAM. BLAG is Fedora-based, and focuses on getting rid of non-Free Software. It is among the distributions like gNewSense, Dyne:bolic and Ututo that aim to provide a completely Free Software experience. gNewSense is proving that I really don't have much of a need to depend on non-Free Software. How does BLAG stack up?

Installation

The BLAG installation seems simple enough. I let it test the CD, and after choosing the graphical mode installer, was told 192 MB of RAM just didn't cut it. I would have to use text mode. Fine. As usual, you choose your language settings and you're off. It asks you whether to re-install or choose SDA1. The installer is nice enough to tell you to choose re-install if you are overwriting a current installation. I also told it to remove the current GNU/Linux partitions and replace with the default layout. I chose to review the results, and finally moved on without modifying anything. Unlike many distros, it creates logical volumes. I'm not really sure what the benefit of that is on a 1-disk system, but maybe it's a good thing.

Next, because of my low RAM, the installer wanted to write the partition tables immediately, creating the swap partition in the process. Fine. I let it do its thing. Did I want to use GRUB? Sure. I didn't think choosing the alternative - "none" - would be a good thing. Then it gave me the chance to set any special boot parameters - something most installers I'm used to these days do not offer. Next, it wanted to know whether to set a GRUB password, and what it should be. Finally, it asked me where to install GRUB. I went with the MBR.

The next phase took me through setting up the NIC - whether to activate it on boot, whether to use DHCP, and even whether to use "auto neighbor discovery". I have never heard of AND, but chose it anyway. Then I set the hostname, the system clock and root password. I also chose to use the custom software selection to pick an extra application or two.

After that, I was tired and went to bed. When I woke up, I rebooted it, went and ate something, came back and logged into my shiny new BLAG system via Bash. Unfortunately, BLAG did not automatically start GDM at boot time, which most distros do. I'm not certain whether that is unique to my installation, or if that is expected behavior. Judging from a quick inquiry on BLAG's IRC channel, I'm guessing something might have goofed. GDM, GNOME and Fluxbox were all correctly installed. I can login as root, launch GDM and then choose a session and login to the GUI. It's just not automated yet.

I don't really consider BLAG to be all that fast. Debian and VectorLinux both out perform it on the same box, in my experience. If you're running a box that slow, speed may not be your biggest selling point, but it helps if the apps load quickly. Still, it's fast enough to make it worth keeping around, though I might put it on another box with more RAM. Basically, you get a Fedora-based distro with Apt-get for package management. How cool is that?

Using the Desktop

One thing that I haven't seen in quite a while is having to actually run startx to launch the desktop. BLAG brings up a console terminal to login to, and from there you can launch X and your desktop or GDM (the GNOME Display Manager).

While I'm more of a KDE guy, I can get along with GNOME just fine too. BLAG 70000 comes with the GNOME office suite, Abiword (for word processing) and Gnumeric (a spreadsheet). I prefer OpenOffice.org, but have to confess that Abiword and Gnumeric might be better suited to this low-memory box. I was actually surprised the BLAG folks left out Evolution, and supplied Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird instead, especially in light of the Mozilla trademark issue. Generally speaking, the developers have packed quite a good selection of applications into a distro that runs fairly well in 192 MB of RAM.

Fluxbox is very nice, and I really like some of the themes included. However, I think it would be nice to have the apps that appear in the GNOME application menu show up in an application sub-menu in Fluxbox. Still, you can run apps using the "Run" menu option - as long as you can remember which apps you installed and what they are called. I know this can be added in manually. But why do that when most GUI's actually set it up for the user to begin with? If a user doesn't like the setup, they can then go back and change it, just like they can start off having to build the whole menu from scratch. Only there will be fewer needing to change than to add a whole menu. I don't know if this is a BLAG issue, something to do with my installation, or if Fluxbox is just setup that way.

Based on my first impression, I think BLAG is a pretty good distro. It's got plenty of multimedia tools and Blasterisk lets you talk over the Internet using a regular phone. I haven't tried that yet, but just may soon enough. BLAG has a few other advantages over some of the other Free distros. BLAG enables the root account (unlike gNewSense). What's more, you can install multiple GUIs - Enlightenment anyone? And, if you're used to CentOS, Fedora or Red Hat, you'll have a familiar system environment with an easy-to-use package manager.

Of course, BLAG's greatest feature is its emphasis on freedom. Freedom is important to me. And I suspect it's important to a lot more people. Minor glitches aside, we'll have to keep an eye on this one and see how it fares among users. I have very little idea just how popular it really is, but in DistroWatch's list, it's currently #79 - just a little behind Dyne:bolic (#75).