OBRevenge 2017.05..........
The curiously named OBRevenge is yet another Arch Linux derivative. After exhaustive testing, Shashank Sharma still doesn’t understand the name…
After exhaustive testing, Shashank Sharma is still clueless as to the reasoning behind the name. Perhaps you can help him out?
OBRevenge is a new distribution based on Arch Linux, which ships as a Live-installable 64-bit ISO featuring the Openbox window manager. If you prefer a more advanced desktop environment, the project also produces MateRevenge and KRevenge, with Mate and KDE respectively. Here though, we’re looking exclusively at Openbox.
With that lightweight window manager, vast software repositories and the stability and flexibility of Arch Linux, the distro can infuse new life into lowspec machines that would otherwise serve as impractical paperweights.
The Calamares-driven installation is fairly straightforward: you only have to select your keyboard layout, timezone, and provide a username/password. While the distro does ship with Gparted to help you carve space on the hard disk for OBRevenge, the installer is also equipped to handle a host of operations and supports a variety of file systems.
When you log in, there’s a unique Conky system monitor layout which shows CPU, network traffic and memory usage. The distro also features the fast and lightweight Synapse search and launcher which you can use to quickly find files, whether images, audio, video or documents, and even launch applications or search the web.
Customisations galore
Unlike most of its peers, OBRevenge doesn’t ship with too many tools out of the box. In fact,there’s no e-mail client, browser, office or multimedia apps. To populate your installation you can use the SoftwareInstall tool. However, this doesn’t provide for a means to search for packages and doesn’t offer more category-specific packages. This means the chat and IRC clients as well as network monitoring apps are all housed under the Internet tab.
Within a couple of weeks since its release, the project has already pushed over 600 new updates When installing updates for the first time, you must use the command line and run the pacman -Syu command, because installing them using the graphical tool produces errors about unresolvable issues regarding conflicting packages. When running pacman, the intelligent package management tool automatically suggests replacing the conflicting packages with alternatives from the community or extra software repository, and then proceeds with the updates.
The distro ships with an assortment of custom home-grown tools that provide many useful functions. The Autostart utility, for instance, can be used to define the apps you wish to start with each login. The Control Panel provides quick access to all tweakable elements on the desktop. From the default Customizations tab, you can switch themes, wallpaper, change notification settings and more. The System tab similarly lists Network and Display settings, while the Software tab provides quick access to configuring firewall, software installation and update tools. Finally, the OBR-Tools tab lists all of the distro’s custom tools such as its kernel manager, live USB installer, VirtualBox Drivers to manage guest modules, nVidia Drivers, Codecs Installer, and more.
Apart from a short quick start guide, (which is little more than a feature list) the distro also boasts of a forum board. It’s a young distro so the forums aren’t heavily populated yet with queries and answers, but being an Arch derivative there’s no dearth of documentation and community support.
With the exception of its limited default software collection, and the quirky behaviour of the graphical update tool, OBRevenge worked flawlessly. Although offered as a Live-installable distro with plethora of custom tools, OBRevenge remains true to Arch’s minimalist nature.