ALT is a Russian distribution available in commercial, educational, and free versions. It comes on CD or DVD, for 32- and 64-bit systems, and with KDE or Xfce. The Xfce versions are called ‘Simply Linux’. This review is of the 32-bit Xfce DVD, version 6.0.1.

The installer starts with a page in Russian: just press F2 and you can change to English (or Ukrainian, Tartar, Spanish, or Portuguese). You can then choose between a live session or installation. The installer has 11 stages, all very simple. It offers RAID and LVM, but not encryption. After rebooting, you can choose the correct locale and keyboard (if you don’t want US English) at login.
The main programs are LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Gimp, Gnome-mplayer, Audacious, and the Pitivi video editor. All ran from the CLI without serious warnings. Codecs were installed and all media played perfectly, even my ‘mp4 from hell’. You also get Wine, DOSbox, Virtualbox, and the Yagf OCR program. Firefox is set to use a Russian search engine, but that’s easily changed. Any non-ALT partitions on the HD are automatically mounted in /mnt. Software is installed with Synaptic (or apt-get) even though RPM packaging is used. Before using Synaptic, you need to use its Systems setting to disable the DVD as a repository and reload the data. I installed some extra software and the process was easy and fast. The firewall is not running by default, so you need to run the Services manager in the System management centre.

My problems were very few. The keyboard configuration tool kept forgetting my Compose key, so I had to set that from a script with setxkbmap. The Media systems tool (gstreamer-properties) was not enabled in the menu and, although it found and tested my USB speakers successfully, it didn’t persuade Audacious or Mplayer to use them.

The documentation and forum are in Russian, but an experienced user is unlikely to need help. I don’t know how long the support period is, but it’s probably long considering that versions only appear every 2 years and ALT is a commercial product. It obviously invites comparison with CentOS, Debian, and Salix; if the lack of English documentation is not a problem, and you don’t mind the lack of encryption, it’s well worth considering.