5 Day in Manhattan OS Installation & First Impression
So far I have survived an entire day of using Manhattan OS and truthfully overall it was very enjoyable experience. This post will be detailing my experience installing Manhattan OS and my first impressions of it. As stated before Manhattan OS is derived from Ubuntu so it shares a similar installation process and hardware compatibility which are both great things. To start things off I downloaded the ISO image from their website, burnt to a disc, and proceeded to boot from. Of course I decided to run from the live disk to take a tour. I won’t get into that now since I will be explaining my first impressions of it later. Everything seemed to work well with my hardware so I proceeded to install onto the partition I had previously created. Earlier I said the installation process was similar to Ubuntu, well in fact it’s pretty much identical. Which is a good things since it’s derived from Ubuntu and being that installer is pretty simple to use there isn’t any point in changing what already works. The installation went flawlessly; however upon rebooting I hit a snag or two. One was that while booting it didn’t show the login gdm and instead just the terminal showed up and two the grub didn’t recognize my windows 7 partition. Luckily both were easy fixes and only took about 5 minutes with the first one I had to get the xorg.conf back to default setting which only took single command in the terminal. The second one was just as easy to fix and was even stated on the Manhattan OS website, all I had to do was type “sudo grub-update” into the terminal then bam I was able to boot up into both Manhattan OS and Windows 7 from the grub menu. I would like to note these two issues probably weren’t issues with Manhattan OS itself since both are ones that can happen to regular Ubuntu users as well. The strange thing is that despite both Ubuntu and Manhattan OS using grub2 I haven’t been able to fix that issue with my laptop which has both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 installed on it.
First Impression
After Manhattan OS, automatically located the drivers for my video card and I rebooted, I was greeted with what I think is an aesthetically pleasing desktop. Off the bat it employs plasma desktop and compiz which allows for a number of visual effects. The desktop environment(DE) is called Manhattan DE which is a combination of gnome and other things like AWN, Ubuntu social menu, and more. While being basically gnome with some add ons, I can’t detract that this combination does produce a rather nice and unique desktop environment especially since it employs plasma desktop which is normally something tied with KDE 4. Everything worked out of the box for me, it recognized all my hardware without any issues, recognized all the function keys on my keyboard , I was immediately able to watch flash videos, and as of yet I hadn’t needed to install anything further to it. So for basic computing usage Manhattan OS gets an A+ which is great for introducing those new to linux.
Speaking of which that brings us to the menus, which are extremely simple and straight forward. You click the Manhattan os M at the bottom of the menu and a little bubble come out give options for what type of application you are looking for such as accessories, games, internet, graphics, office, system, sound & video, and windows. All are straight forward, like the internet menu is the place where you can open you browser, skype, or torren app. Though you may be confused by the Windows menu at first but in realty it is just the dedicated menu for WINE and Playonlinux which both allow you to play certain windows programs and games on Linux. An interesting thing is that some of default application aren’t listed by their name, but by their basic function, for example GIMP is listed as image editor. While that is great for those new to Linux it is a slightly jarring at first for those experienced using Linux;however after five minutes I ignored it (Still the same great applications).
So far I only had one issue, and it revolves around the AWN dock. Before turning on the special effects when I opened the add widgets menu it sat perfectly on top of the dock. After turning it on it now proceed to place part of itself behind the dock which is rather annoying and I can’t seem to do anything about. In addition to that after turning the special effects on the dock decides to widen bit though if you mess with the panel setting a bit it goes back to normal on its own even if you weren’t messing with those settings. I plan on taking some screenshots, and reporting this to the developer.
*For my final review screenshots will be included to spice things up.
*A Manhattan OS review by Hitz
I’m the primary (only) developer of Manhattan OS and I can already tell I’m going to enjoy following this review as it takes place over 5 days. That’s an interesting and exciting way to review something! I’m glad you’ve decided to review Manhattan, as we’ve been getting quite a few reviews lately (I guess Alpha scares people away but Beta invites people from all over). I’d like to say a few things. In the next Beta we’ll be bringing a lot of our programs up to the latest versions, and introduce a newer kernel. To me, Beta is just a name, it doesn’t mean I can’t change those things. Second of all, that problem you experienced with the KDE widgets and the widget selection bar being placed behind the AWN bar will be resolved/addressed with Beta 2. The menus will probably go back to having original program names, as review after review has brought this up. While initially it was designed for the simplicity and new users, it may deter seasoned Linux users. I thank you for taking the time and the effort to attempt to report these issues. I was unaware about the dock widening a bit when effects were enabled, but effects should be enabled by default (and if not, the normal visual effects are actually better than the extra ones, not sure why, but as I’m the only developer this probably won’t be resolved for the final version). Sorry for such a long response, but once again, thanks!
Kevin
I must say I am impressed with all you’ve done while being the only developer for Manhattan OS especially. I really think it’s a very interesting project which I wanted to review it since one it let people find out more about if their are more sources talking about it and two it will allow me to find and address certain issues easier. So no problem on my part. Yeah the issue with simplistic menu was a good idea for new users, but as you said it’s just something quite alien for those experienced with Linux. Thanks for the comment and good luck!
- Rodney