newbie distros

[Danny Sauer <sauer@cloudmaster.com>]

I'm not sure how many of you guys are into easy-to-setup distros
and whatnot, but I've been looking at some recently.  I stuck
Lycoris on a fairly new PC a couple days ago, and am fairly impressed.
The installer is very smooth.  It's just one CD (there's a devel
tools disk, a source disk, and a games disk too).  I used parted
to shrink a windows partition down, booted off of the lycoris
disk, and told it to use the remaining free space for linux.  It
did the partitions itself (reasonably sane ones) and starts installing.
There's no package selection, so it just goes.  While it's installing
the packages, it configures X (detected my TNT2 by itself, I needed
to manually select the monitor type by name), configures your printer
(local only - one of my complaints), and has you start adding users.
The add users screen asks for an "admin" password twice, and allows
you to create one normal user at a time.  When you've added all of
the users that you need, it starts up a solitaire game until the
packages are done installing.  Solitaire was decent - multiple games
and whatnot.

Once it boots, it comes up in a slightly customized KDE that's quite
windows-like, down to "my linux computer" and "network" icons on
the desktop.  The samba network browsing works nicely, and the KDE
desktop works well.  Wine's part of the install, so going to the
windows c drive and launching stuff from the program files dir works
just like a nicely configured wine system would.  The main system
menu is nicely organized for a new user, with more advanced / less
frequently used commands located one level deeper than the more
common programs.

In all, I'm pretty impressed.  It's *way* easier to install than
windows, and comes up in a very nice. clean setup by default.  The
remote support (pay-per-support) system looks like it'd be nice for
new users, and the online update system works well.  There's a 
decent on-line support community as well, located at the main
lycoris site in the form of discussion forums and a (presently limited)
knowledge base.  The distro is rpm-based, so it shouldn't be
tough to get compatible software.  I haven't looked at the filesystem
and compared it to the various interpretations of the FHS, but I
can't see it being terribly confusing.

I'm disappointed that parted is not included on the boot system,
though.  I had to boot off of another distro's disk to resize the
partitions and make room for lycoris.  I'd like to see an "automatic
resize windows partition" option sometime.  Aside from that, the
system is pretty nice, and I feel good about recommending it to new
users.

Lycoris used to be Redmond linux, but changed the name with this release.
It uses current software, and their distro site has rsync available, which
is always a good thing (mmm, compression).

http://www.lycoris.com/
rsync -zP rsync://ftp.lycoris.com/ftp/iso/

--Danny, setting up his parents to move from windows to lycoris this weekend

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