I wrote about my experiences with both Ubuntu 5.04 LiveCD and NetBSD 2.0 Live a while ago and one of the things that I evaluated them based on was whether they ran multimedia applications. They both failed rather miserably as they didn’t even allow hard drive access to MP3s and movies stored locally. Of course with enough Linux trickery anything could be done but I was mostly interested in how these distros performed out of the box.

Gary (a feature writer here on Distro Jockey) read my reviews and then mentioned that what I was looking for was Dynebolic. It’s apparently a multimedia-based distribution that caters specifically to playing various forms of audio/video (and maybe editing as well). I figured it was worth a shot and this is my review of Dynebolic 1.4 LiveCD.

Test Hardware

Dell Optiplex GX100
CPU:	500MHz Pentuim II
RAM:	128MB SDRAM
Hard Drive:	5GB
Video:	4MB onboard video ram
Sound:	Onboard sound
Input:	Generic PS/2 mouse and keyboard
Lacks:	2-pass encoding, subtitles, bitrate calculator
Summary:	This is a totally ghetto system - perfect for testing a distro that’s supposed to provide multimedia support. If it can run on this, it can run on anything (provided the hardware is supported)

Booting Dynebolic

The first thing I was greeted with was some awesome ASCII art. Well, maybe not awesome, but the fact that they even used ASCII art in this distro made me love it already.

Before the kernel was loaded it asked me to enter information about my monitor so it could run the framebuffer. This is kind of unnecessary and should be avoided unless the distro is specifically aimed at non-beginners. I skipped the framebuffer by pressing enter and it loaded the kernel immediately.

Super-fast boot time
I was testing this on a crap system and it still took less than a minute for me to be greeted with a desktop environment. Kudos to the Dynebolic team, this is an excellent way to introduce someone to your product - and to keep them from tiring of it quickly.

Dynebolic’s Mouse Problem
Dynebolic does not work with non-scrolling mice. The driver that is loaded only handles modern scroll-wheel mice that include a third button under the wheel. I first booted Dynebolic with an old PS/2, 3-button mouse but I was greeted with an inability to navigate the screen. The mouse moves to the bottom-left corner ever second and a half and the user is crippled from clicking on anything. Once I plugged in a scroll-wheel mouse it all worked fine.

The Desktop Environment
Dynebolic uses Window Maker as it’s default window manager. Window Maker is the last incarnation of the revolutionary NextStep window manager. It is very light (hence the fast load time) and yet doesn’t restrict the system in usability at all. A nice addition to this configuration of Window Maker is the GkrellM running in the bottom-right of the screen (to monitor system resources for you) and some shortcut buttons on the top-right of the screen.

When the system is booted and Window Maker is started the Dynebolic menu will appear in the middle of the screen. It let’s you know that right-clicking on the desktop is how you’ll find an application menu.

Multimedia Applications

There’s an incredible number of programs installed on Dynebolic that are multimedia related.

Video:	Performance (VeeJ): freej, hasciicam, bomb, xaos, gephex, synaesthesia Playing: xine, xawtv, mplayer, gmp4player Recording: kino, mencoder, xvidcap, transcode, nuvrec, nuvplay, nuvedit Editing: LiVES, avidemux, jahshaka, cinelerra Streaming: mp4live, mp4creator, palantir, openmash
Audio:	Performance (DeeJ): Jack daemon, Alsa patchbay, PD, TerminatorX, SoundTracker, Hydrogen, Seq24, ZynAddSubFx, FreqTweak, Jack Rack, Jamin, SpiralSynthModular, Ardour, gdam Playing: xmms, ogg123, mpg123, madplay Recording: grip, rami, timemachine, rp, oggenc Editing: audacity, rezound Streaming: MuSE, Icecast2
Image:	gimp, inkscape, blender, gqview, xsg
Text:	abiword, scribus, ted, bluefish, nedit, vim, emacs

There’s more than enough here to handle most Linux-based multimedia stuff. Since I mostly just edit some audio files and play audio/video, Dynebolic seems to have more than enough for me already.

Performance/Stability

There’s a big difference between how well something should work and how well it does work. I should note before I continue that Dynebolic automatically runs a samba server and an ftp server at boot. This probably isn’t a security concern, but even if it is it’s likely to be greatly outweighed by the advantage of automatically being allowed to share your audio/video work over the network.

XMMS
XMMS loaded immediately (with a slick skin) and I was able to find some audio files to play with it. Dynebolic mounts your hard drive under /home/hdisk and that’s where I had to go to get some files to play. XMMS worked perfectly.

Xine

SMB support is not built into the kernel so I couldn’t mount samba (windows) shares over the network. Despite that, Dynebolic includes LinNeighborhood which allows browsing of samba shares. I navigated to another box on my LAN and copied an Xvid movie.
Despite horrible hardware, Xine immediately recognized and started playing my Xvid/MP3 file.
The problem happened when I tried playing a DVD. Xine looks for a disk in the location /dev/dvd which is not where Dynebolic mounts discs by default. I couldn’t (with default privileges) change Xine’s configuration to read the real disk location (/dev/cdroms/cdrom0). All things considered, Xine worked acceptably.

Audacity
After checking that basic playback was working I had to see if Dynebolic was up to the task of some editing. I opened an MP3 file with Audacity to play around a bit and see what Dynebolic could do.
One of the immediate drawbacks to Dynebolic’s Audacity that I noticed was the problem of temporary storage. Audacity tries to use /tmp by default but on Dynebolic that directory was only 30MB (may be larger with better hardware). Before using Audacity I had to switch the swap space to my local hard drive. Despite the swap problem, however, Audacity worked perfectly.

Nesting

Dynebolic 1.4 has a feature that I hope eventually becomes standard for all LiveCDs. If you decide you like it and want to install it to your computer somehow, Dynebolic allows you to ‘nest’ it into your computer. Basically this installs it either to your hard drive or a USB drive (like a USB pen drive). It let’s you choose where you want it.

Summary

I was told that Dynebolic was suited to multimedia needs. I had no idea how true that would be until I tried it. Dynebolic is probably the perfect distro for portable DVD-watching. Keep it around in case your system is ever messed up or you’re visiting a friend who doesn’t have the right software installed. Just as long as it’s got strong enough hardware it’ll play just fine - and considering that it played videos nearly perfectly on a system that had crap hardware, it probably doesn’t need much.

Overview of Dynebolic 1.4 LiveCD

Installation	Boots to a working computer in under a minute
Ability to find necessary programs	Excellent. The menu is heirarchically ordered and there’s nothing unnecessary.
Office	Absent. This distro focuses on Multimedia
Multimedia	Amazing. Dynebolic is created and supported by people who have real multimedia needs. This distro meets them
Image Editing	Dynebolic features the Gimp - and it works fine.
Filesystem	Automounting of the local hard drives under /home/hdisk. This is a requirement for saving any data and it’s good to see they added this. LinNeighborhood also allows for browsing a samba/windows network.