First off, the specification of the machine on which I tested BLAG:

- AMD Semperon 2800+
- 502MB RAM
- 19" Dell D1226H CRT display
- Nvidia GeForce FX based graphics card
- Belkin 10/100 network card
- Sony IDE DVD-ROM drive
- Sony IDE CD/RW drive

Installation

After I booted from the CD, I was dropped at a boot prompt, where I was instructed on how to do a default graphical, and default text install. It also gave instructions on how to discover more booting options using the function keys.

Since I wanted the default graphical install I hit enter, and was prompted to test my install CD for errors, which took a minute or two. The CD passed, and I was greeted a few seconds later with the Anaconda installer.

Anaconda is a simple to use graphical installer, very much like YAST on SuSE. It takes you through the install step by step, allowing you options such as a Desktop, Server or Custom install types. The anaconda install can be conducted in a number of languages and keyboard layouts, so people from all over the world should be able to install it easily.

After I booted my BLAG system for the first time I was greeted with a few more configuration pages, where I setup system users, the date and time, my display and sound card. Once this was done I logged into my system.

Usage

I use computers as most of us do, to view the world wide web, read e-mail, write reports and essays, listen to music, play games, and create art.

Gnome and XFCE were installed during the install. By installing both these desktop environments BLAG has given you the choice of using the slightly heavier Gnome, or the lighter XFCE (which can be great if you have an older machine). There are a number of light window managers such as blackbox also available on the CD. One niggly thing about Gnome was the default theme applied; I found it rather dull. The theme applied in XFCE seemed more vibrant and usable, but such cosmetic things are easy to change.

Office - BLAG's install came with AbiWord for word processing, and Gnumeric for a spreadsheet. These are both good applications and seem up to the tasks they were installed for. If you want a fully fledged office suite, there is only one name that comes to mind, OpenOffice.org, it's a pity the developers of BLAG haven't included it on the install CD, but it is available via the apt-get package manager - but this could be a problem if you don't have Internet access and you want to use it.

Other programs that came for the office were an pdf viewer, a label maker and the trusty calculator.

Internet - How would computers be without being able to browse the Internet? Internet wise BLAG comes with the standard packages, the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird for e-mail, gFTP for ftp, xchat and gaim for irc and IM, and BitTorrent and aMule for peer to peer networking. Firefox is one of the best browsers I've used due to its speed, tabbed browsing, and pop-up blocking as well as the wealth of extensions and themes available for it. Thunderbird is also a great application from Mozilla, which handles all my mail and contacts. Gaim is the multipurpose im/irc application, and it's great to see it included due the the number of protocols and services it can handle.

Multimedia - For my collection of music and LugRadio episodes, BLAG comes with xmms and mplayer, which do their job of playing audio well, though I find the xmms interface rather hard to use and also rather old compared with beep media player. Mplayer also lets you play video files, which is nice since you can have all of you multimedia covered by this one application if you wish.

BLAG also comes with audio editing, tag editing, recording, ripping and ipod managing software. Though I haven't needed or used these applications they can be useful for the budding podcaster or musician.

Art - BLAG comes with the GIMP image editing and creation application. The GIMP, is one of the greatest applications ever. The wealth of things you can do with it make it a versatile tool for your desktop. As well as the GIMP you are given the Inkscape SVG Vector Illustrator, which allows you to create and edit SVG files.

Day to day - Day to day one does things like mount partitions, read and write CDs. I managed to mount some of my other disk partitions in BLAG so I could get and write data to them. There was no difficulty in this, but it would have been nice if the partitions were added to the /etc/fstab file during the install so they would mount without user intervention. Burning both data CDs and CD images was a breeze using the Graveman CD burning front end. Graveman isn't a burner I've used before, but I found its interface simple to use, and thus it was easy to burn CDs. Data CDs can be mounted. Therefore, with the freshly burned data CDs, I mounted them to check they'd burned okay; and they seemed to have burned fine.

Configuration and Maintenance - BLAG detected my hardware well, the soundcard configuration worked for my onboard soundcard and display-wise all things seemed to work. I was given a choice of resolutions and I chose 1280x1024, which is great after being stuck at 1024x768 in Gentoo. The only hiccough came with the printer, BLAG detected it (an hp deskjet), but it didn't configure it properly. The Redhat based GUI printer configuration was appalling, so in the end I used the web based configuration available when one goes to localhost:631 in one's web browser.

To maintain the packages you can use either the Synaptic front end for the apt-get package manager, or if you prefer the command line interface, plain old apt-get. Apt-get allows you to update packages as well as install new packages for your system, with its dependency resolving I've found it much more usable than the rpm package manager (which is also installed). Since apt-get is a binary based package manager all updates are very fast. This speed is also useful if you want to install a new application there and then. With a package manager like apt-get it's easy to keep your system under control package wise, and it's updates are useful for security patches and so forth.

BLAG's Freedom - As well as BLAG being free to download, one of the main philosophies that drives it is that of the FreeSoftwareFoundation. This means that all the software that comes on the CDs or are in BLAG's repositories are Free as in freedom - there is no code you can't look at, and no proprietary file formats which lock you into a certain product or company. The slight downside for some is that proprietary software such as Java isn't included anywhere in their package database - this doesn't stop you downloading such packages separately though.

Conclusion - There are some great things about BLAG. Its main asset is its freedom, and being based on a maturer distribution such as Fedora Core 3 has given it an advantage of supplying a stable base from the outset. What makes BLAG different from Fedora Core 3 is its one CD download and its Free credentials, these may not be much for some, but it does make it a distribution to consider seriously.

Pros:

- Free enough that GNU lists it on its website;
- Decent selection of packages on the CD;
- Easy and fast graphical install;
- Apt-get as the main package manager;
- Easy setup for most hardware;
- One CD download.

Cons:

- Didn't set up my printer correctly, and the printer configuration dialogues were appalling - I don't expect this on such an entry level distribution;
- If you don't have Internet access you might be limited by the number of packages on the CD;
- Doesn't automatically put all disk partitions in the fstab file for mounting;
- Dull default theme in Gnome.

Roundup: BLAG is not just a distribution for the Free Software elitist, it may not include non-free software, but it is a fully functioning operating system. You can surf the web, write your essays, and listen to your music, just as you would do with any other operating system. BLAG is a distribution which will install with ease, and be low on hassle. This combined with the fact it's a one CD download, means I'd say BLAG gets 7 out of 10 penguins.