Ulteo

or to give it the full title "Ulteo Sirius-Alpha1"
Ulteo is a new distribution from Gael Duval.
Linux users will remember him as the founder of Mandrake.
This helps explain the high interest in Ulteo.
Mandrake was reknowned for its simplicity, and ease of installation.
Surely  another distro from Gael would be the same?



Well, I downloaded it to see what the fuss was about.
Ulteo, as you'd expect from a live CD nowadays, boots quite happily on any hardware I've tried it on.
It found drivers for the hardware and configured the display all by itself.
Network was found and configured automatically as well.

 

The menu has the usual collection of tools, such as graphic viewers, editors, browsers etc.




The networking menu has a nice set of utilites for wireless and bluetooth with  FTPgrabber and Firefox as well as Konqueror. Why doesn't anyone include Opera as a default?
I could show grabs for all the menus but they have similar programs to most of the other distros, such as Open Office, VLC for video, Partition Manager, Amarok, K3B.
For an alpha release, this is very usable, it didn't crash and burn once for me.

I will show the system tab though. No update software icon ?

Again, it shouldn't look all that different from any other distro using KDE.
So, what is Gael trying to do?
According to an interview with him here
Gael is going to create a system that will took most of the management tasks out of the hands of the users.
The distro will automatically check for updates, download and install them and perform  all those fiddly tasks that users muck up.
Since this is an alpha version, these  changes aren't implemented yet and this is simply a means of showing that he has a valid  distro so far.
It will remain to be seen if it comes true.
However, I did find the switchuser menu strange.............

 


The distro is built around Debian and Ubuntu according to the site.
I found the distro nice and easy to use.
I will check back once new versions come along as I want to see what Gael is trying to achieve.
With a reputation like his, it should be rather good.