Linux "VIXTA" an answer to Windows Vista

Vixta comes on an installable live CD, available in either English or
Portuguese. The live CD's rather plain boot screen and verbose boot
output aren't especially impressive, but about halfway through the boot
process a splash screen appears to hide the rest of the output.

Bypassing the login screen, a scaled-down KDE 3.5.7 desktop appears.
With a large blue flower and folliage dominating the wallpaper, the
desktop already feels a bit busy by the time an analog clock and
calendar appear. The clock and calendar are locked in their positions,
making them too centered at some resolutions and off-screen on others.
You can unlock and move the widgets to another position, but at the
next login they've moved right back. The whole desktop doesn't scale
well and seems optimized for 1280x1024.

The glossy and uncluttered black panel contains a pretty menu start
button that invokes a menu that looks very much like the Vista menu,
thanks to a customized KBFX theme. A similar theme is available at kde-look.org.

The menu consists of two panes. The area on the right contains menu
headings such as Internet or Settings, and the one on the left shows
the applications available under each heading. If the application list
overflows the given area, scroll bars appear at the top and bottom of
pane. Under the application headings, the KDE control panel main
modules are listed. I find this much easier to navigate than the
flipping back and forth of the typical KDE Kickoff menu. Another nice
touch is the search box at the bottom of the menu below the panes. It
will isolate a specified search term or launch an application if it's
not in the menu, as long as it's installed on the system.

All these visual elements come together to make a pretty and unique desktop.

On the desktop is a Vixta installer, which is the Fedora live CD
installer with no customizations or changes. It walks the user through
configuration steps such as partitioning and setting up filesystems. It
installs a standard system -- no package selection is offered. There
are some options for the bootloader, and after a reboot you set up a
user account, root password, firewall, and SELinux options. The
installer appeared to work well, although I was to find out later it
had at least one problem.

Vixta comes with a software manager and system updater, which have
uncluttered interfaces with Fedora repositories set up. I found both
worked well for installing extra software and applying Fedora updates.
Some of the updates, unfortunately, broke a few things, such as the
network configuration and setup tool. After the updates, I had to start
my network connection manually.

Also included are Firefox 2.0.0.6 and elements of OpenOffice.org 2.3.0.

Not so pretty

Unfortunately, there weren't many applications in the menu other
than a few KDE apps, such as Konquerer, Kate, Kolorpaint, and KTorrent,
but no KMail or Kontact.

However, there are lots of handy system tools and settings in the
menu. One of the most notable is the sound card configuration. Vixta
detects most sound chips automatically, but if not, there is a
drop-down list containing a few sound card choices. The utility offers
a test function for the sound card. I wasn't sure mine was working
until I used this test, as KDE system notifications are turned off by
default. You can turn them back on, but if you do, Vixta's aRts server
seems to lock the device so other applications can't use it. On the
other hand, that doesn't matter much because Vixta fails to include any
audio CD or video players, or even recognize the audiocd protocol.

Before the Fedora updates, my wired network was activated at boot
time. I used the configuration tool to set up my hostname, but
otherwise the network was available at login. However, my wireless
Ethernet chip isn't supported by Linux without using Ndiswrapper, which
was neither included nor available from Fedora. I attempted to compile
it from source, but though I was able to install the compiler I was
still missing the kernel sources, which weren't available.

Vixta's kernel was compiled to save space and doesn't include the
modules needed by modern machines to activate CPU scaling (the process
of slowing a processor's CPU cycles, commonly used to save battery life
or lower temperatures). At the full processor speed my laptop seemed to
run much warmer in Vixta than in other systems when I used its full
capacity, such as when compiling software. There is a battery monitor
applet in the system tray, but full support for suspend features aren't
included.

Another annoying glitch was the disappearing or blinking panel.
Sometimes, especially when the system was trying to do some CPU- and
memory-intensive task, the panel would just disappear from the desktop.
It would return after a few seconds, but it caused the windows to move
position.

No solution in sight

Since the kernel was limited in support and no matching sources could
be found, I attempted to install other kernels. First I used the
software manager to install another Fedora kernel, but it would not
boot. I found a kernel update available when I ran the system updater,
but it too would not boot. I even tried to install my own vanilla
2.6.23.1 kernel, but it ran into the same problem that plagued every
kernel I attempted to use. When the kernel was installing,
new-kernel-pkg would crash with a floating point exception. This
explains why the kernel installed by the system installer would not
work. I could not boot into my newly installed Vixta system unless I
used the kernel from the live CD.

Conclusion

All in all, Vixta has a welcome concept. Having a system familiar in
appearance to their current system might ease users' pangs of
migration. Vixta is nice-looking, but I found the system to be very
limited, even in the realm of live CD environments. In addition, it has
lots of bugs and is just not ready for everyday use.

Granted, this is a young project using an unstable branch of
software for its base, but there is a air of secrecy about the project
that casts an ominous shadow. The Web pages provide limited
information, and no matter how closely any distro is based on another,
source code must be made available, according to the GPL.

Vixta is a nice idea, but the execution needs work.