An Hour with IGN 2006

Monday, January 08, 2007

So, what the hell is IGN 2006? IGN 2006 stands for IGOS (Indonesia Go Open Source) Nusantara 2006, this is the latest open source operating system product provided by Indonesian Research and Technology Ministerial (Kementerian Riset dan Teknologi) over the Indonesian Information and Communication Department (Departemen Komunikasi dan Informasi) as a strive to expanding & to take much more profit of the Open Source Software (OSS) systems.

As an indonesian citizen, I should be very proud of the government which has take a part to make another solution of Information Technology (IT) choices besides of existing commercial closed source dominated by the mighty lord... Micr*soft, although the Indonesian government action is not too well quickly & actively to responding the existing of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) piracy legally law. Moreover, this OSS part has been added to local LINUX histories map just likes you would see at the picture below:

Anyway, about a month ago, we - company, the place I’d been worked - had visited by (or inviting?) the vice deputy of Indonesian Information and Communication Department to support our movement to migrate - any of the whole things - into an OSS. This session was titled: "OSS: The Bright Solution". In the end of his short courses, he gave us a full pack of IGN 2006 setup cd's as a momentous of the day.

However, I just have a chance yesterday to tried the IGN 2006 since I don’t have much time before. The IGN 2006 comes with only 1 CD, powered by the Fedora Core 5 kernel as I had tried previously when I got to work on a research of an distro's election to start the corporate migration mechanism in the middle of last year. Overall, the installation processes was quite easy with an automation modules. It is a common feature of Red Hat derivative distro's. I tested with my Relion Pentium 4 2,66Ghz with 256 Mb of RAM (share 16 Mb for the VGA GMA) & equipped with Intel 915BG motherboard chipset. It finished until the main desktop show up in about less than 30 minutes from it started the installation process.

But wait, why that they:
1. Use Gnome as the default window manager? AFAIK, the KDE is the more user friendliest desktop ever! Somebody who want to learn the OSS quickly should use KDE. What is the main consideration instead of using the Gnome?

2. Don’t use the Midnight Commander (mc) as the easiest text based file manager & text editor? What about if the X get troubles? Are the end user should re-install the Operating System (OS) and having a great risk to loosing the data? I think the next release of IGN should reconsider the existing of this all-in-one small power tool, even that this application is not purposed to common basic users.

3. Removing the automount daemon? This is also the same question if the X is in trouble due to my question number #2. It is a difficult one if we try to mount a removable storage manually since it didn’t create a symbolic link automatically.

These 3 major point above has faced me after an hour previewing this OS. Besides of it, lots of lack are covered I found such as:

1. High CPU resources are needed by this OS kernel. My 256 Mb RAM are fully swallowed with a small parts Kb remained. This is a default factory system remained without any services running available!.

Compared to next images of FC4 with full services running (Apache Web Server, MySQL Database server, NFS, VNC & Samba).

2. The kernel are not supporting our company existing emulator application. It is not because of the IGN 2006 comes with unexisting development package, but the latest version of dosemu are failed to compiled due to incompatible kernel. This is my result research when I had tried FC5 with complete 5CDs before.

Except the deficiency using of FC5, there are more surplus about the latest FC5 kernel likes:

1. More & most undetected hardware are known by FC5. You don’t have to be worry if you’re monitor will not showing kernel panic message anymore. It is just an example about failures of linking & matching with the native hardware driver kernel.

2. This just a consequence of using the newest kernel than FC4. The frame buffer of pure text mode driver are more mature. You will not find a blank console anymore when you switch to text mode & let you troubled to make a change the xorg.conf manually.

Even that the IGN 2006 is lack of cd's, the repository are quite well prepared at address: http://www.igos-source.or.id & there be a dozen of local OSS created by indonesian programmer will come into this room.