Now, take a look at this screen shot. Notice the tooltip. That is a welcome feature, and that is how it should be.

Overall, I think it is a good effort, but there are still some rough edges that should not be too difficult to fix. So while I am still working on a review, here are a few screen shots from a test installation just so you could see what the distribution brings to the table.

The official rationale for the new design is that the current “graphical UI is really starting to show its age, both to the users and to the developers.

Webmin provides a web based interface to manage an Ubuntu server. One of the management options is to configure daemons to start at boot time. This task can be performed using Webmin.

Sadly, even this latest release does not ship with a graphical package manager. All package management tasks have to be accomplished from the command line. Aside from that, I think this release has a lot of goodies to offer, and is what a detailed review.

One of those utilities, Kaptan, was one I suggested long ago that every distribution should have. Kaptan’s main purpose was to offer users a means of customizing their installation of Pardus. It was not perfect, but it is better than any similar tool on any other distribution.

The alpha version of what will become ROSA Desktop 2012 has been made available for download. It comes about a week later than planned, but that is no big deal. The most important thing is that it is here. Let the bug hunting begin!

With an open source project like OI, contributors come and go all the time, but Alasdair’s reasons for quitting paint a very dark picture for the future of the project, certainly not a good advertisement for OI. From his email of resignation Alasdair sees the project as worthless and as good as dead, writing that: