Bodhi Linux looks like the CRUX of Ubuntu.

[elija]

Having tried it, I'm not a fan. It is very very fast though.

[hazel]

Well, I've not had much luck today. I deleted Debian and tried to install Bodhi in the vacated space. But the installer crashed.

Now I have a new logical partition that I can't mount because it's ext4 and I didn't build that into my Crux kernel. So I don't even know what's on it. I don't know whether to delete it and try again, build the ext4 kernel module and try to read it, or delete it and try to build a LFS system in the space.

[hazel]

It gets worse! To try and mount this new partition in order to examine it, I rebuilt my Crux kernel with an ext4 module and "large files" activated (you need this option to read an ext4 disk). And it made Crux unbootable. I actually hit a kernel bug - I never knew there was any such animal. They say all software has bugs but you don't expect to find them in the Linux kernel, that epitome of reliability. How often have I told people smugly that Linux never crashes! It's almost like finding out that your Uncle Joe is a serial killer.

Fortunately my alternative "framebuffer" kernel still worked and so I was able to log in and fix my main kernel but it took me all afternoon to do it.

No more Bodhi for me!

[Dapper Dan]

My daughter's macine is a Dell Diminsion 1100 that has been running an ancient version of Ubuntu. Since Gmail and Youtube were her only stops on the net, there didn't seem to be a need to upgrade. Recently, she's taken a liking to playing MineCraft and the installed Nvidia GTX was just no match for Java. I decided to install a new Nvidia Geforce for her and also felt this might be a good machine to try out Bodhi. The installation went perfectly. After rebooting, I was greeted by an attractive Enlightenment desktop but unfortunately, things went down hill for me from there.

Hours were spent trying to figure out how to kill X so I could install the Nvidia 3D drivers but every trick in my bag wouldn't work. X refuses to be killed in Bodhi. I ended up having to remove lxdm because you can't simply stop it in the same way you can with Slim, GDM, KDM and Xdm. After X was killed, I still couldn't install the Nvidia 3D drivers because it said the Nouveau module was in use. modprobe -r nouveau wouldn't work. Trying to remove it with apt-get or blacklist it didn't work either. I resorted to installing jockey-gtk and was successful installing the Nvidia drivers through it. After hours of configuring and tweaking, I got Slim working nicely with IceWM and felt I was on the verge of success when the sound issues started.

Alsamixer, would see the onboard Intel sound device but alsa insisted my new Nvidia card was also a sound device and made it the default. After more hours of attempting to get sound going I came to feel I'd been dropped into the Pacific Ocean blindfolded and told to seek out Easter Island. I've given up. In CRUX, I would have had sound working in no time. Tomorrow, I'll do what I should have done and install Mint 11 where we'll have sound and 3D graphics at the click of a button. If there is any bloat with Mint 11 that isn't present with Bodhi, my feeling is it'll be worth it

I like the concept of Bodhi but feel Ubuntu is the wrong distro to try to slim down to something it really can't be. Ubuntu relies on a lot of things to make it the distro that it is. CRUX starts small and can go as big as you like. Bodhi tries to take something big and make it small but in my opinion, this doesn't work as well as the other way round. I'll give Bodhi another try some time in the future but for now, my daughter very much wants to play MineCraft.

[hazel]

I like the concept of Bodhi but feel Ubuntu is the wrong distro to try to slim down to something it really can't be. Ubuntu relies on a lot of things to make it the distro that it is. CRUX starts small and can go as big as you like. Bodhi tries to take something big and make it small but in my opinion, this doesn't work as well as the other way round.

That's what I feel too. And I have read posts by Bodhi users complaining that Bodhi is sleek and minimalistic only when freshly installed; as soon as you start adding software, you run into Ubuntu's absurdly over-generous idea of what constitutes a dependency, because Bodhi uses the Ubuntu repositories. My own experience of the Ubiquity installer (see above) is similar; it's probably fine for the average Ubuntu user who just wants a single Linux running alongside or instead of Windows but it can't cope with any more complicated setup than that.

Bodhi markets itself to a different kind of user than Ubuntu so using Ubuntu as a basis looks like a bad error of judgement.

[Dapper Dan]

I installed Mint LXDE on her machine this morning and enabling the Nvidia 3D driver was easy as pie. In all fairness, I must admit I'm still having the issue of alsa seeing my video card as a sound device so this is a general Ubuntu problem for me instead of a Bodhi problem. The difference is, Mint has a much larger community of support so I'm hoping I'll get sound squared away soon.

[Dapper Dan]

This is getting funner and funner! Turns out the Geforce video card I purchased has something new (to me) where sound can be accessed through it. That's why it keeps getting seen as an audio device when running alsamixer. I've got a lot of reading to do on this whole "HDMI" business but surely there's a way to disable it and run sound through the existing hardware.

[Dapper Dan]

Lots on the net about how to disable the sound component on these cards both on Windows and Linux lists.

The trouble is, these cards steal snd-hda-intel away from the existing onboard Intel audio device if it also uses it. You can't blacklist the module because then, your onboard audio can't use it! When I removed the Geforce card, sound would work. When installed, it wouldn't. I outsmarted it by installing an older Ensoniq card I had lying around and blacklistIng snd-hda-intel.

Now, alsa finds and configures the Ensoniq as the default device which finally gives sound.