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I am writing this review with the intent to spread the word about this new distribution because I really like it and it's not one of the mainstream distros out there. I don't have any affiliation with the author and have only tried this distro recently. I have concentrated on the high and low points but I have not included an excessive amount of screenshots as for me at least, I find surfing through numerous screenshots to be tedious. If you really want a lot of screenshots I would point you here. For those that don't know me, I work in the law enforcement computer forensics field and use computers and Linux at a fairly high level every day. Co-workers know me as the “Linux guy” and I regularly field questions from them regarding all things Linux. I am starting with a roundabout explanation of my Linux experience and history as I think it provides a good reference for the reader on where I am coming from when you read this review...
So I have generally considered myself a Debian guy by habit. I have no real loyalties to any distribution – in fact – my loyalties lie with whatever distro I find that I can get the most work (or otherwise) done with. I first started out using Linux in about 2000 with Redhat 5 if I remember correctly. I learned linux using the RPM system in Redhat. I grew to love this system and followed over the first years Redhat's progress and eventually started exploring other RPM based distros including SUSE, Mandrake, and other smaller ones.

At that time, I knew of the existence of “Debian” and learned of it's reputation as a more difficult Linux to learn, as well as many in the community being notoriously patronizing to less competent Debianites. Along with this however I also knew about the apt package management system and how it is probably the best package management system around. Too many nights have I been up all hours trying to figure out some RPM dependency hell issue but I digress...

My distro of choice has up until now been Libranet 3.0 which I had purchased and have used faithfully since it's release over a year ago. It is 100% Debian compatible and it's adminmenu is something to behold! Incidentally, I wonder if there is anyone working on a Debian derivative that has SUSE's now open source YAST configuration module installed? That would be most excellent... Anyway, for various reasons, Libranet will likely not be releasing any more versions, and the company looks like it may be going the way of the dodo, thus, I have been back to trying out different distros for the last few weeks in the hopes of finding something new that attracts me for running on my home system.

On we move then to our topic of the day – RR64 Linux! So I have also tried out Gentoo in the past and it's Portage package system is right on par with apt in terms of how successful it is at solving dependency issues. The two systems basically differ in that while the apt system is fast at getting the packages and dependent packages and installing them, they are typically not optimized for YOUR system. This is in contrast to portage where the getting is fast, but the compiling of the packages from scratch may take a while to complete. Yes – go have dinner and a movie while you wait for that larger application to compile on your latest mean machine... The good side is that you will have a piece of software that is compiled specifically for your machine (in my case, and AMD64) and thus a lot faster.

I downloaded the version of RR64 Linux called 3.0b1 via torrent. It is a Gentoo Linux based distro that was released on March 18th, 2006 and is currently sitting in 23rd place on Distrowatch. I learned about this distro after doing some research into different AMD64 versions of Linux that I wanted to try out – after all, I really should be trying to leverage the power of my 64 bit processor and I wasn't getting that from Libranet Linux. It turns out that the only ones I could find that were made for the AMD64 processor that were based on the KDE environment were RR64 (Gentoo based), Kubuntu Linux (Debian based), and SUSE 10 (RPM based). Since I have tried both of the others before; I couldn't swallow using the RPM system again, while Kubuntu felt strangely not-done to me, this left trying a relatively unknown distro called RR64 Linux.