Ulteo: Latin for 'Yet another Ubuntu based distro'

Michael J. Jordan, Linux Online Staff

December 15, 2006

Yogi Berra once said, it's like "deja vu all over again". And that's the feeling I got using the new Linux distribution Ulteo.

As I mentioned, Ulteo is a distribution based on the Ubuntu code base. What makes its name stand out a bit more (as opposed to say, Linux Mint) is that it was started by Gael Duval, erstwhile chef des opérations of the French Linux developer MandrakeSoft, makers of Mandrake (now Mandriva) Linux. Duval is also the second member of the Ransom Love Club. This club consists of Linux distribution founders fired by their own company. Like Mr. Love, Monsieur Duval may well be better off not being with his former employer, although that's not quite so apparent as is with the case of Ransom Love, whose company went on to become SCO. Duval apparently considered his firing a serious faux pas and is suing Mandriva. Though not nearly as infamous in the Linux community as SCO, Mandriva's trajectory has not been particularly smooth either. Mandrake was, at one time, the most important distribution of its day as it was the first really (and truly) user friendly Linux version out there. Had MandrakeSoft continued to improve upon what it was shipping around 2001, I don't think I'd ever have written my last op-ed piece But alas, Mandrake and success were not meant to be together. It seems MandrakeSoft got a touch of the dot.com fever and did what many companies of its day were doing. It had an IPO on the French stock exchange and then subsequently hired a brain-dead management team who went on to squander all their capital. MandrakeSoft then declared bankruptcy, rebounded a bit, tried to reinvent itself by acquiring two other distributions and changing its name, but eventually it took the long and winding road into irrelevancy where it peacefully (unlike SCO) resides now.

And just when I thought it was safe to start using Edgy Eft, this promising new distribution, Ulteo pops up. I was curious to see what it was like. Since it was coming from the hands of Gael Duval and the Ulteo website promises "to change the way we all use computers", I downloaded the ISO of the first release, burned it to a CD and plunked it in a test machine. It's a live CD, so it booted up into a usable operating system. It was very nice looking. The desktop is apparently based on KDE, but they've changed it a bit. There's a little button labeled 'Start' in the bottom left hand corner, apparently placed there so Windows refugees don't get confused. All of the applications you need to get productive work done are there. You get OpenOffice and Firefox (not the current version, though), plus applications for graphics work, for playing your music and for doing the other standard computer activities. You even the great desktop publishing app Scribus. Everything worked fine. It found all my hardware. I was able to configure my wireless card just fine. I have no complaints really, but I do have a couple of questions:

What's the compelling reason to use this over some other one? Why should I use Ulteo instead of Ubuntu itself? The website promises that it's going to be "more than just an operating system", but what it delivers is just Ubuntu with the logos taken off. Actually, it's not just Ulteo that suffers from Ubuntu-envy. It looks like Ubuntu knock-offs are becoming a cottage industry. But Ulteo is one knock-off you can probably live without. My advice: Stick to the real Ubuntu.

Michael J. Jordan is the webmaster of Linux Online. He can be reached at Michael.Jordan**AT**linux.org