Trench’s adventüres in Linüx: Emmabuntüs 2 and Wine Browser

A few weeks ago after I did my review of Voyager 14.04 I received an e-mail asking me to do a review of another French Linux distro, Emmabuntüs 2. When I went to Distrowatch to read up on it I saw that it was based on Xubuntu and comes with the Cairo Dock already installed. I knew this was going to be a great distro. I just didn’t know how great.

If you want to read some good technical reviews of Emmabuntüs please go here and here. When I read those reviews I found out that Emmabuntüs is specifically designed for older computers that are going to be re-purposed and donated to charity, based on the principles of the French charity organization Emmaüs. How could you say anything bad about a distro with that purpose? You could but it wouldn’t be warranted because this is a great distro.

Like I said about Voyager the French really know how to make a great distro. They are very passionate about their open source software and Emmabuntüs 2 is no different. Also like Voyager it comes pre-installed with a lot of very useful software, even more so than Voyager. I only had to install one application that wasn’t already on it. Now because of all that great software the iso file weighs in at a whopping 3.5 GB. If you use Unetbootin like I do I’d recommend using a USB stick that is greater than 4GB just to be on the safe side. When installing Emmabuntüs 2 to a computer it requires at least 15GB of hard drive. While it is a hefty sized distro that doesn’t mean that it’s slow. It ran fine on my EEEBox with no problems. It also comes pre-installed with both Firefox and Chromium browsers. Usually when a distro comes with Chromium I swap it out for Chrome because Chromium tends to give me some issues, not this time however, it’s been running like a top .

If I had any complaints about Emmabuntüs 2 they would also be sort of compliments. There’s so much software on here that a new user to Linux may get overwhelmed by all the good stuff that’s on here. Also both browsers come pre-installed with adblocking and parental plugins already turned on. As an intermediate Linux user I didn’t care for that but a new user may welcome that since it may be their only computer in the whole house that children may also use. So again what I consider a flaw others would consider a feature.

So if you’re the type that fixes up old computers to donate and uses Linux as the OS I highly recommend Emmabuntüs 2. Plus it has an umlaut in the name. It doesn’t get any cooler than that.

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I’m currently looking for a new job. When you apply to jobs online these days they sometimes have you do an assessment. I came across that this past week. The problem was it wouldn’t let me do the assessment on Linux. Considering I no longer have a computer that runs Windows this was going to be problematic. That was until I found Wine Browser.

Wine is an application that allows you to run some Windows applications in Linux. Wine Browser is a version of Firefox that runs in Wine. Once I installed it I was able to take the assessment with no problem at all. It can be downloaded here. Just remember that if you need to use it you have to launch it using the terminal.

I don’t know if I got the job yet but thanks to Wine Browser I at least had the chance.