Another week, another operating system. This week it’s openmamba 3 GNU/Linux, an independent distro originating in Italy. Openmamba 3 is available as a live dvd, live cd (that is too big for a cd) and a disk image. Previous versions and a rolling release are available for servers, i586, x86_64, raspberrypi, bananapi and cubox ARM architectures. This review is based on the full 64bit live dvd.
The initial experience with the live dvd is not a happy one. Live dvds are always slow and on an Asus Eeebox’s paltry hardware they’re even slower. This one was close to glacial. Thankfully I wasn’t intending to review the live environment and chose to install as quickly as possible. The installation was quick and trouble free taking about an hour to the reboot point.
The installed system is slow to start but once up and running works well enough. Openmamba uses the KDE desktop on the live dvd but gnome can be installed and lxde is available on the rolling release lightcd. Almost the full range of KDE software is included but it is the extras that are notable. Libreoffice and Okular are added for office, Chromium and Filezilla for the internet, VLC and Wine.
In general software management is handled by Apper and Smart Package Management but a third tool, Network Software Installation, launches on first startup offering applications not available in openmamba’s repositories. These include Skype, Spotify, Flash, Java and MS codecs and fonts. There is just one problem: it doesn’t work. In the test the installation failed if attempted at first startup and had to be repeated later with each application installed singly if an overload of the system was to be avoided. Even then it took four attempts to install Skype.
Overall Openmamba worked quite well, was reasonably fast and didn’t overuse resources but there were problems. Sound playback on VLC was intermittently affected by what can only be called “crackling” and the program refused to recognise the subtitles inside an .mkv file, flash on firefox didn’t seem to want to display video and I could find no way to change the wallpaper (I know it’s there, it just wasn’t worth hunting for). Yes, it could look good and it has the compiz cube but compared to last week’s Trinity based distro, Q4os, Openmamba’s KDE incarnation was simply not good enough.
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