More than one year ago, I reviewed UHU-Linux 2.0, and I very much liked it. Now, when UHU-Linux 2.1 is about to be released (I don't understand Hungarian, so I can't read their forums, but I suspect they want to release before Christmas), I tested UHU-Linux 2.1 RC2 (released on 12/16), downloaded from here: uhu-linux-2.1-rc2-dvd.iso.

The installation screens are not radically changed since the previous version, so I'll pass over them without screenshots.

As usual, you should press F9 first, and change the language from Magyar to English. Then, I tried to upgrade an existing UHU-Linux installation (a snapshot between 2.0 and 2.1), but it said the found 2.0 system was not upgradeable, so I had to perform a fresh install.

Those installing the system in English will be prompted with an extra screen before reading the License (which is in Hungarian). The said screen explains a few things, such as the fact that there is no bugzilla, but you can forward your bug reports to dev[AT]uhulinux.hu. Then, you can't click the "License" button before 2 minutes!

After 2 minutes, I was prompted that "The magic keycombo to jump over this page is CTRL-SHIFT-E!" Go figure.

I had the option to either "Use entire disk", or to "Use old or existing partition", and I opted for the second one.

The presets for the choice of packages are:

 Base text mode system: 676.8 MB

 Recommended packages: 2.5 GB

 Full installation: 12.5 GB

The DVD holds about 2,400 packages — here's the full package list —, plus SRC packages.

Also worth noting is that UHU-Linux 2.1 comes with firmware for the following devices:

 ACX

 Intel PRO/Wireless 2100, 2200, 3945

 Ralink RT 2501 (2561/2661), RT 2501 USB (2571W/2671)

After it installed everything, GRUB was installed in the MBR, and I had the choice of testing the video driver and to set a screen size.

Oddly, the proposed resolution was 1360x768 @75 Hz. I changed it to 1280x1024 @85 Hz.

The default GNOME layout is not entirely as expected, as the tray in the bottom right is annoying:

Quick numbers: kernel 2.6.23, GNOME 2.20.1, kdebase 3.5.8, Firefox 2.0.11, GIMP 2.4.2, WINE 0.9.50, Mono 1.2.5.1, Beryl 0.2.1.

An unpleasant thing is that packages have only Hungarian descriptions in Synaptic, so you should know by name what are they for, otherwise... (quick tip: try http://packages.debian.org/packagename, select a release and read the description.)

DHCP was autoconfigured by default, otherwise you can use the very nice UHU Control Panel.

At some later point, I noticed that Network Manager (nm-applet 0.65)... managed to disconnect me unexpectedly, so I had to reconnect manually to the network.

Another queer is that I wasn't able to activate the correctly formatted swap using swapon, whatever I tried. It always fails with: "Invalid argument." So: no swap. Also, that leads to: no hibernation.

I haven't tried anything except GNOME, but a bunch of alternate window managers / desktop environments are available: Blackbox 0.70.1, Enlightenment 0.16.8.9, Fluxbox 1.0_rc2, FVWM 2.4.19, IceWM 1.2.32, MWM 0.95.0, TWM 1.0.1, WindowMaker 0.92, XFCE 4.4.2.

From the plethora of the installed applications, I only selected a few of the menus, for a quick sampler — Programming, Web Development, Graphics, Music players, CD/DVD Writers, Viewers:

Surprisingly: out of all the viewers, there is no CHM reader! (Popular choices: xchm, gnochm, kchmviewer.) To compare UHU-Linux with another "national distro": Pardus does have support for CHM files!

I was also surprised by the absence of GnomeBaker. OK, it has Brasero, but I happen to prefer GnomeBaker after all.

Note that for the KDE or Qt based apps, UHU-Linux comes with the qt-theme-bluecurve, but you can change to the traditional Qt themes in qtconfig and qt4config. In a previous snapshot, the look of the Qt apps (e.g. QtParted) was horrendous, but now it's fixed.

Now we go into Firefox.

I noticed at first that it uses bitmap fonts as replacement for the non-existent ones, which leads to ugly rendering of some sites, including Yahoo Mail and UHU's own site (this blog was however rendered fine). As I've encountered this issue in some other distros too (e.g. Mandriva Spring), I had the fix at hand (as root):

ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf

The lazy way was then to restart X.

Firefox comes with the following plugins already installed:

 Flash 9.0 r115

 DjVuLibre 3.5.19

 Java Plug-in 1.6.0_03-b05

 Adobe Reader 8.0

 Totem Web Browser plugin 2.10.1

 Helix DNA Plug-in (using Totem)

 Windows Media Player Plug-in 10 (using Totem)

 DivX Web Player (using Totem)

 QuickTime Plug-in 7.2.0 (using Totem)

 mplayerplug-in 3.25

 Google VLC multimedia plugin 1.0 (using MPlayer)

 QuickTime Plug-in 6.0 (using MPlayer)

 Real Player (using MPlayer)

I am not sure if the plugins pack was the reason for that, but Firefox was slow, CPU-consuming and barely usable: with 12 opened tabs (none of them with multimedia, nor Flash content!) it was extremely unresponsive, with CPU almost 100% and occupying 300 MB or RAM (out of 512 MB).

The following Gecko crash was not unexpected under the circumstances:

Well, to end this post rather abruptly: I know this is a Release Candidate, but UHU-Linux 2.1 won't be usable unless/until the following major issues are fixed:

Firefox/Gecko hogginess and stability;

swapon.