Firstly, SparkyLinux 2.0 has not been replaced by version 2.0.1: that’s just a special gamers’ edition.

Sparky advises a PIII and 256MB RAM. Installation instructions are available in English, but the forum is only in Polish. Both Enlightenment and LXDE are installed, and you can select either when logging in. Installation can be done with a graphical tool on the desktop, or by running the text-based /usr/bin/sparkylinux-installer. The former uses Gparted, the latter cfdisk. Neither offers encryption, and both expect you to select your locale from a list of codes like en_GB. The only keyboard on offer is US.

The software includes, Iceweasel, Icedove, Pidgin, Gimp, LibreOffice, Audacity, Avidemux DeVeDe, Exaile, VLC, Gnome-mplayer, and Wine. Everything I tried ran from the CLI without serious warnings. The media players all had their codecs and worked perfectly. Flash was installed, although this was the version that’s incompatible with 32-bit AMD chips. This being Debian-based, I needed to edit two scripts to use my USB speakers. More seriously, there was no tool to set the keyboard except dpkg-reconfig, and that had no effect, so I had to use setxkbmap in .xsessionrc. Extra programs are installable with Synaptic from the usual Debian repositories.

For LXDE, I’d prefer ZorinOS Light, and for E17, Bodhi or AtlasX; nevertheless, this is a good distro for the experienced user, especially one who speaks Polish.