igelle Linux

[Aging Technogeek]

Has anyone tried igelle Linux yet?

http://www.igelle.com/

Version 1.0.0 was released on Monday. Distrowatch has an entry for it this week. It appears to be a light weight (.iso file is 587 MB), highly adaptable OS using a custom desktop called Esther. Epiphany is the default web browser. The selection of installable packages seems limited to someone used to the Mint/Ubuntu repositories, but it seems to include most of the popular apps.

I have only run it from the live CD so far but it looks good and is easy to navigate. The menu has only a few entries but each entry launches a window with a list of apps. Just click on an icon to launch a specific program. An autohiding dock is included in place of a bottom panel.

I've only run it for about 15 minutes so far and I'm liking what I see.

Bedtime now but will continue investigating tomorrow and report anything interesting here.

[Boo]

Yes i have used it live and installed it on my laptop.
It does not install like a "normal" live CD linux OS.
Live distros expand the squashfs onto the hard disk and run a heep of setup scripts but igelle esentially copies the CD to the hard disk, this makes a very fast install, sets up grub and a basic dir structure.
so the system is still a squashfs and can only be modified via tools, ie no manual edits of files.
when you install an new app (a limited number in repo) it puts it in an apps directory that is not in the squashfs.
it is an interesting and fast system, I like many aspects of it and can see some very cool uses for it.

Boo

[Aging Technogeek]

That information about the installation method is very interesting. It is not set out clearly in the igelle documentation I have accessed so far. Mention is made of installation using only 700 MB of disk space but it is not detailed.

One thing I did read and am going to investigate in depth is their sjapps system for semi-automatic compiling of applications from source.

I am also quite intrigued by the Esther desktop manager. It seems very intuitive and quick to learn for even new computer users.

[RichardH]

It ran fine in vbox 3.1.4 on Gloria.

Still building up a repo of apps configured for their new package manager.
It is interesting. The desktop looks like Lxde, but they don't mention lxde.

sidux has been using the copy to disk install for about 3 years now.
Install fromiso in about 2.5 min.

They [Igelle] have a license but I didn't recognize it as being particularly open.
Igelle is based on open source but from their license, it is not open source as is LinuxMint, Debian, Ubuntu, etal.
I like their approach but am still doubtful of their intent.
Other than to make money from support which I suppose is OK.

Time will tell. It is interesting work.

[markcynt]

Now I'm curious.

Anybody install this in a multiboot system yet?

Does the installer give the option to install Grub to the root partition?

[Aging Technogeek]

I installed it on my desktop which has Mint 8 x64, Windows XP Pro, and Mint 7 x64 already installed. The igelle grub installer did not pick up any of the other distros on the disk. The only thing I could boot was igelle.

I installed Mint 7 Mani ED. over the Mint 7 x64 install (it was a little buggy anyway) and the Mint Grub installer did not see igelle so it was not added to the boot menu.

It seems that, for now, you cannot easily dual or multi - boot igelle. That's a shame because I'm not going to devote an entire computer to testing one distro.

[Midnighter]

Licensing concerns. http://elevenislouder.blogspot.com/2010 ... -tide.html

[exploder]

The licensing does not look good...

[Kendall]

The licensing does not look good...

Seriously!!!

One thing that's interesting after reading the EULA is that it seems they're trying to keep their own code proprietary while still packaging a complete Linux OS in with it. This may not be "technically" breaching the GPL as that blog post states, but it's skating awfully close to it. Another interpretation might be that because GPL code is packaged with proprietary code in a format that won't necessarily be accessible, then the whole thing might be a gross breach of the GPL in and of itself. I'm tempted to ask for their source code just to see how much of it they give me. Either way, due to the restrictions in their EULA, I'm not going to give it a go.

[Fluxx]

Yeah, if you do that, look at the code and determine how much is free, some of us would certainly be interested to know. I don't have the time to try that right now, but I am curious.

I feel that if it doesn't actually break any terms of open source, it certainly violates the spirit of open source. For me, thumbs down.