Dragora is one of the handful of distros that is 100% FOSS, so if your hardware needs non-free firmware or drivers to get going, it’s not for you.

The installer gives you a command line in which you launch setup, a simple program based on Slackware’s installer. If you need to partition first, fdisk, cfdisk, and parted are available. When you’ve finished, you reboot and log-in as root. Then you can create a user with “adduser”, switch to your new identity with “su”, and use “startx” to get going. I learned all that from reading a review, for there’s no documentation.

The CD provides Abiword, Icecat (aka Firefox), Claws-mail, Pidgin, Xchat, Heybuddy identi.ca client, Exaile, Parole, Xine, Gimp, and Mtpaint. All were free of bugs, except Abiword which was completely broken. Codecs are installed and work, although both video players can be a bit fussy over which files they’ll play. I installed Gnash, after which Icecat locked-up every time I visited a page with flash content. Gnome-mount is broken, so other partitions and external devices need to be mounted manually, and sometimes they won’t unmount.

To add new software, the tool pgk is used in a CLI. It’s explained on-site that it is for installing packages that have already been downloaded, but it doesn’t say where from! It turns out that the two CDs are all there is. So, no word processor, unless you compile your own. Are there bug fixes and updates available? Your guess is as good as mine.