Everest Linux 0.3

Everest Linux is a Chinese Linux Distribution which serves as an alternative operating system to Microsoft Windows especially for those who are not strong in English. I had used Debian for a long time and a bit tired of waiting for the Etch to be released as a stable distribution. I tried Everest Linux today and found that it is a pretty good substitution to Microsoft Windows for office work and surfing internet.

This distribution only have five mirrors at the moment and all of them are based in China. Depending on the location, one mirror might be faster than another. I have listed down all the four mirrors and you might wish to choose the fastest one to download the iso image.

1. ftp://mirror.linux-ren.org/pub/everest/0.3/iso/i386/
2. ftp://www.rabbitonly.org/mirror/Everest/0.3/iso/i386/ - Username: rabbit Password: &geotech&
3. http://mirror.lupaworld.com/everest/everest/0.3/iso/i386/
4. ftp://download.linux-ren.org/pub/everest/0.3/iso/i386/
5. http://www.linuxeden.com/download/data/soft/1293.html

Base System

The installation is quite fast and the options are similar to that of Red Hat Linux. After the base system was installed. Both Chinese Fonts and Chinese Inputs had been automatically configured. However, office suit is not included in this release so that I downloaded Evermore Office 2007 From the following website

http://www.evermoresw.com/webch/download/downEIOffice.jsp

This is a trial version and can be used for 100 times without prompt for registration.

Multimedia

Kaffeine was the default media player while amarok was not installed by default. Since, this rpm system was managed by apt. I added the following sources to the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/everest.list

rpm ftp://mirror.linux-ren.org/pub/everest/0.3/apt i386 base extras
rpm ftp://www.rabbitonly.org/mirror/everest/0.3/apt i386 base extras
rpm ftp://download.linux-ren.org/pub/everest/0.3/apt i386 base extras
rpm http://mirror.lupaworld.com/everest/everest/0.3/apt i386 base extras

Actually only one of them is enough. I installed both mplayer and amarok with following command.

apt-get install amarok mplayer ruby

Other windows codecs essential-*.tar.bz2 can be downloaded from

http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/

The files was unzipped with

tar xvf essential-*.tar.bz2

and copied to /usr/lib/win32/

The install the mplayer plugin for firefox, the following file need to be downloaded.

http://www.linux-ren.org/modules/newbb/dl_attachment.php?attachid=1150433696&post_id=2269

and then unzip the file by running the following command under konsole,

tar xzvf mplayer-plugin.tar.gz

and then copy all the .so files to /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/ and copy all the *.xpt files to /usr/lib/firefox/components/

The flash player included in this release is Adobe Flash Player 7.0. So I have uninstalled by

apt-get remove flashplugin --purge

After get to any webpage with flash, I was prompted by firefox to install flash player which is the latest version.

Other Comments

• The default user for this distribution is root which is not a safe option so I had created another normal user for daily usage.
• 3D desktop has already been configured with base install and beryl is the default rendering system. To activate it just type beryl-manager under konsole.
• The default locale and display is Chinese (UTF-8). It can adjusted manually.
• Softwares included in the apt depositary is only enough for simple online and entertainment. More advanced work, such as latex, xfig, octave etc are not included. It might need more time to get it build up more resources.