One More Guest from East

Do you remember Pet Shop Boys song "Go West"? Sure you do! Today we will not follow their recommendations. We will go East. How far? Japan? Russia? Not, that is too far. I have already told you about one Russian distributive. Today we will see what Latvian developers bring to Linux world.

There is distributive called Austrumi. This is "East" in Latvian. So, let's go East.
Austrumi is very light distro, just around 120 Mb. It can easily fit to business card size CD. That is why Austrumi will not be listed among distributives you can get via my Buy Linux CDs page.
Anyway, business card CD is not my case, I use standard size CD-RW. Image of Austrumi 2.2.5 is downloaded, burnt to CD-RW, reboot, choose to boot from CD. Let's go East!

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Boot screen of Austrumi already gives you quite few nice ideas about this system. It allows you to run itself from CD, but... without CD. Once loaded, you can eject disk from CD drive and use it for something else. Music, films - choice is up to you!
I cannot tell that boot time of Latvian Tux is small. It takes quite a long time to load 120Mb from CD to memory. But it is worth waiting. Once booted, you experience virtually no delays. Everything fires up in few seconds, even complex applications like GIMP and Libre Office.
Yes, that is not a typo. 120 megabytes of disk space have full versions of GIMP image editor and full version of Libre Office. I assume that is not final version of LO, because it was just released, but last betas were reported to be very stable. As addition to LO and GIMP you have good package of other software.
Opera is default browser. Some screenshots you can find in the Internet show my favourite Chromium to be default browser in Austrumi, but latest release has it replaced with Norwegian tool. Of course, there are lots of other utilities and games. You'd better check yourself!
You can feel from my tone that I kind of like Eastern Tux. Are there any downside of it? Yes, to be honest - quite a few!

•  When booted, your default language is... even not Latvian, but Latgalian. Do you speak this language? Most likely not. So, you need to switch to English or any other language you know. Actually this distro has many language versions available. In order to switch you need to choose menu (left click on any free desktop space) item Istatiejumi - Voludis. This item has United Nations flag as an icon.
• Eastern Tux speaks Russian! Yes, one of available languages in the menu is Russian. But does it understand Russian? Can I type Russian there? Keyboard settings say that technically - yes. But I have not found any language indicator or keyboard layout switch combination. Hmmmm...
•  Does Austrumi like walking? Probably, yes, but not on my machine. As you know, I have Broadcom 4311 WiFi card on my laptop. My first ever Linux distro (SLAX) supported this card "out of the box". Austrumi is a cousin of SLAX. They both are based on Slackware. But, unfortunately, relatives behave themselves differently. Eastern Tux found my card (as per lspci), but did not activate it. For whatever reason...

So, Austrumi has good and bad sides of it. Do I like it? Yes and no. Will you like it? Probably! You can only tell if you try!

Useful links:
http://cyti.latgola.lv/ruuni/ - official site
http://forums.slackers.lv/viewforum.php?f=12 - official forum
http://forums.slackers.lv/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=367 - Version 2.2.5 release notes and download link
http://martik-scorp.blogspot.com/2011/01/austrumi-based-on-slackware-gnu-linux.html - Martik's page about Austrumi