Distro#10 Simplis 2009

Simplis' website doesn't have much useful information about the distro itself. According to Distrowatch, this distribution is based on Fedora and it does look so, and it was called “Vixta”. It seems to have special support to eeePC and AcerOne.

After booted up, it's KDE 4.0 desktop environment. The screen resolution is 800x600. The desktop has few icons, I am interested in simplis 3D and webcam. The main menu has aMSN. But I think I should install first, therefore I clicked on Install Simplis icon on desktop. The installation took about 10 minutes.

After booted the newly installed Simplis from harddisk, you will be prompted to create a normal user. In the login window, beside my normal account, there is already an user called simplis. After logged in with the normal user, I got prompted to input the password of simplis account. Since I don't have the password, I could only ignore.

I set up DSL connection using NetworkManager and ran the first time system update. The repository source actually is Fedora and RPMFusion as well. I timed the boot time, it's about 45 seconds. I then remove PackageKit (troublesome) and tried to install nVidia 96xx driver, but I was being kept asking about kernel 2.6.27.9-159, which is not visible in yum. I downloaded it from Koji directly, then I installed kmod-nvidia-96xx. Now, I have correct resolution 1680x1050 and Compiz. Flash already works in Firefox 3.0.5.

So far, I really don't see any visual customized stuff, which is different than Fedora. But I think the point of Simplis is that if you can install it, then you would have multimedia things worked out-of-the-box. I would say Simplis provides a different installation, but after all, it's same as Fedora. Of course, the default desktop environment is KDE.

Lastly, a screenshot

This post was written and posted on Simplis.