Kolibri: 1.44Mb of cute

This might not be of interest to you, but to me, it’s a miracle of modern science.

  

How KolibriOS squeezes all that into 1.44Mb is beyond mortal comprehension. And it’s not just that there’s a blinking cursor attached to a terminal somewhere, but an entire graphical system, complete with notepads, system monitors, games, utilities and more nifty doodads than you can shake a stick at. The mind boggles.

Like anything it’s dependent upon hardware, but you’re looking at the same 120Mhz Pentium I use on a daily basis with Debian against the framebuffer. Run-of-the-mill it is not.

And wouldn’t you know it, the touchpad is perfect (in fact, better than Linux, since it doesn’t have X’s odd tracking behavior), keymap is … well, it’s a Japanese keyset, so I am forgiving in that department … video is quick and responsive, powerdown is lightning fast (even if startup is rather slow, coming off floppy of course), and even the conventional PC speaker (you do remember the chirpy PC speaker, don’t you?) works fine. I can see where there is support for SoundBlaster cards, but to be honest I didn’t try setting it up. That might even work, you never can tell.

Hardware is going to be where it falls down too, of course. I don’t know how much it can do with network cards, and add to that the need for PCMCIA support, and add to that the need for wireless support, and short of a standard desktop PCI network card I don’t how useful (in a conventional, I-must-connect-to-the-Internet-or-I-will-go-into-withdrawal sense) it can be.

On a standalone offline machine I would endorse this in a heartbeat; on an online machine that has whatever networking hardware it can do, I would insist upon it. This is a great, full-blown operating system with a horde of additional goodies, and at the same time it’s a marvel to watch in action and prettier than most ultralight distributions based on other software. Granted, it’s not Linux, but with something this light, this functional and this cute, how can you complain?