Bodhi Linux is essentially a one man project, so Jeff Hoogland’s retirement seemed to sound the death knell for the beloved build-your-own distro. Thankfully, he had a change of heart and returned to continue work on the release that was under development when he quit.
This third major release of Bodhi is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and uses Linux kernel v3.16. This is also the first release that supports the UEFI BIOS found in nearly every new machine as well as the SeaBIOS found on some newer Acer and HP Chromebooks.
On the other end of the spectrum, the latest release also works with processors that don’t support PAE, such as the Pentium M Centrino.
In addition to borrowing the underlying infrastructure and core libraries, the project also uses a customized version of Ubuntu’s user friendly Ubiquity installer.
An enlightened desktop Bodhi is one of the few distro that uses the light and attractive Enlightenment desktop, and the latest release features a customized desktop based around Enlightenment E19.3. The one major change that long term users will notice is that unlike previous releases users aren’t asked to choose a layout style when they boot into the desktop. The developers argue that the consistent look will help make Bodhi more approachable to new users, although it wouldn’t have hurt to include other predefined styles in the Profile Selector tool like before.
In line with Bodhi’s philosophy of installing a minimum base for users to build their system, the distro ships with the Midori web browser and a bunch of Enlightenment apps written using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL). These include the file manager, the Terminology terminal emulator which includes bells and whistles like a visual tab bar and Gravatar support, and the Ephoto picture viewer among others.
There’s also the ePad plain text editor which is written by Hoogland himself in EFL and replaces the Leafpad editor featured in previous releases. ePad in its current form supports most of the features you would expect from a text editor. Another in-house app of note is eepDater which is a simple but fully functional update manager.
Any distro that ships with a minimal set of apps and calls upon its users to flesh out their installation must have an exceptionally good package management system. Bodhi Linux, piggy-backs on the excellent apt-get packaging tool and the AptURL protocol, has an app installation platform that’s flexible and easy to use. New users can just use its online AppCenter, optimized for the included Midori web browser, while experienced users can use the Synaptic . Bodhi’s online Appcenter includes a limited number of frequently used apps – such as LibreOffice, Firefox, Okular, VLC, Handbrake, Thunderbird, Pidgin etc –has also been overhauled in this release. The search functionality has been improved and now looks up queries in the software titles as well as their descriptions for more meaningful results. Furthermore, users now have the ability to rate the apps.
Bodhi Linux is more than a stripped down version of Ubuntu. The distro adds features that’d be of use to users irrespective of their skill set: You can e.g. use the distro in Presentation mode which temporarily disables the screensaver, lock and power-saving features, and if you forget to enable this mode and quickly disable the screensaver, the distro offers to enable the Presentation mode for you. Now that’s what you call user-friendly.
This Linux distro is a wonderful minimal version for DIYers that provides an ideal base and all the suitable tools for customization. We gave this a Cloudy Circuitry score of 95/100.
