OEone HomeBase 1.0 Linux Review

By Joe Klemmer <klemmerj@webtrek.com>

I have been running some version or other of Linux since November 1991. Since that time I have been playing with the various distributions to see how they look and what each has that's good or not-so-good. It's been very interesting and fun to see how the different distros have grown over the years and to see all the smaller/specialized ones come up.

Recently I came across a distro from a company called OEone <http://www.oeone.com> named HomeBase. The company touts this distro as being easy and fast and all things wonderful. So, of course, I bought a boxed set. This is a quick review of my experiences with the product.

First things first. The box that the product came in was a simple white shipping box. Nothing fancy like the big seven. When I opened it there was a spiral bound Users Guide and some papers containing the license certificate and some updates. The CD was a simple CD-R with no cover in a plastic holder on the back page of the Users Guide. The manual looks good with some nice graphics and a decent TOC & Index. One of the first things you notice when reading through the guide, however, is that it was written for an actual system. It seems that OEone sells two computers that come bundled with the distro. One is the ASUS Terminator and the other the Future Power 17". But they also sell the software by itself so I figure they are just being expedient by having one manual for all the products. So it's on to the install.

My normal method of testing different distros is to fire up VMware and install them on a virtual machine. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. When I doesn't I try installing on a spare system I keep around just for this. I start VMware and get it all ready then boot the CD. The first thing you notice is the nearly standard lilo prompt. You get options to install or run in rescue mode. After that it is, not surprisingly, a Red Hat 7.1 install. Since the install is running under VMware it can't get X running so you go into the text install. No problem, I am just as happy with that as the GUI. After picking language and keyboard you come to the install options. You get a choice of -

ASUS-Terminator Hardware
Future Power AIO 17"
Generic Internet Computer
Custom System
Upgrade Existing System

This is when I start getting a little suspicious. I select Generic Internet Computer and it runs through the normal stuff, just like any other distro install, but when it is finished and reboots to bring up the newly installed system it can't start because this distro only boots into a graphical login mode and there's no real way to tell it to boot into single user mode.

Oh well, I just figure it isn't happy with VMware so it's on the the spare system for try. This time I do get the GUI install and am given the same basic install options as above. I first try the Generic option again but, upon completion and reboot, the system goes into a loop where lilo starts loading the kernel then it reboots and starts all over again. The next couple of times I try different configurations under the Custom System option. No matter what I select or don't select, I can't get a running system after the install. Just for grins I try the other two options and, as expected, they give no better results.

My guess is that this distro is very closely tied into the HW that OEone is selling and would run just fine on either of those systems. Unfortunately , while I can rationalize dropping $29 on a distro, spending $499 or $649 just to test a distro is not a viable option for me.

The bottom line for this distro is that I could not get it installed on anything in order to test/evaluate it. I ran through the support pages in their website but they all refer to the HW systems. All in all, not much was done with this distro.

Joe Klemmer is a "Unix SysAdmin/Ad Hoc Programmer"