Dream Linux 2.2

Posted on Feb 11, 2007
The February issue of LinuxForYou included Dream Linux 2.2. The LiveCD booted really fast in comparison to other distros, perhaps because it uses a light XFCE environment.

But for its weight it sure looks amazing! A highly Macish look and feel with Engage completing the Dock. The applications installed are also a good mix of commonly used to niche ones. Overall I found Dream had taken the good points of quite a number of distros, put together a nice control panel and easy installer.

So I jumped ahead and installed it on my spare partition. Installation was quite fast with just 7 steps, including partitioning, installation, installing bootloader, which I skipped and creating the user accounts.

DreamLinux too had a common problem I've faced with LiveCDs. The non root user's password is often not set properly, which means when you boot from harddisk, you can't login. Not a nice way to start with Linux. For someone in the know its easy to do a Ctrl+Alt+F1 and change the password, but for new users it can be harrowing.

Overall DreamLinux is a really good distro. Though Arch will still remain my primary distro, since I have it customised to heavily, it is one whose progress I will watch closely. If you are new to Linux I would highly recommend it. If you are not, you already know what you need. With a little tweaking Dream could easily become a Distrowatch top 20er.