A Quick Look at that Windows site's Linux Distro

[Steven P. Administrators]

When I read of this Windows site working on their own Linux distribution, not only did I wonder why, but I also wondered what it might be like. It was stated that it was based on Morphix, so that was a clue, but I still wanted to take a quick look. I share my quick look with you.

Shift Linux is a 337 MB download. It's only a livecd at this point, but a hard drive installer is in future plans. The story I read (and linked to) mentioned a version 0.3, but looking at the site, it seems it's not ready. I downloaded 0.2 Flux edition, (and I understand a Gnome version to either be available or in the works). It boots up to what I think would be the familiar Morphix grub splash, but it didn't render properly on my machine. It did show up well enough that I could pick out a boot option that worked. The grub menu contains all of the options found in Morphix and Morphix based distros, but some of them don't work. For example, choosing "Boot using NVIDIA proprietary graphic drivers" doesn't work because those drivers aren't included.... Full Article

Negative review, but I assume he knows this is in alpha stage.

[kinetix63 Veteran]

Yeah, we've already had the pleasure of that being posted over in the Shift section of the forum.

I don't think the review is ENTIRELY negative, but at least the word is starting to spread a little now. Hopefully we'll get a bit of positive press when we hit the 0.5 milestone, although that's still a long way off yet.

[markwolfe Veteran]

The tone of the review was slightly negative. However, it was an honest assessment of where the project stands right now, as the basics are being worked out. It certainly isn't ready for casual users, not like Knoppix, Slax or Ubuntu LiveCDs.

I am certainly helping where I can (with four kids active in school, sports, and other extra-curricular activities, my time is limited to short bursts where I can have enough free computer time to make a flurry of brief posts on Neowin).