Openmamba is an independent distribution from Italy which has been around since 2007 without ever becoming well known. I’m not really surprised.

The startup screen offers several options, none of which work: it just loads the default live session. This is a typical KDE desktop, but with very little software: Chromium, Kopete, Juk, and Kaffeine. All worked, but left warnings when run from the CLI.

The installer started well, checking the disk, but stopped after partitioning. I eventually discovered that it would continue if I ticked the “ignore swap check” box. Creating the user and setting the passwords are done by a post-installation script. Another script offers to download extra software, including media codecs and the flash plug-in. That was strange, as the codecs are on the disk; stranger was the fact that the script got stuck in a loop and kept downloading new copies until I stopped it.

The Smart package manager is good, although rather slow. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the repository. I installed LibreOffice, only to find it was the Chinese version: the only default language options were simplified or traditional characters. How did an Italian Linux end up with a Chinese word-processor?