MakuluLinux 8.0 Cinnamon Screencast
 

MakuluLinux 8.0 Cinnamon - Boot and Desktop

Doesn't seem amenable to burning to a bootable USB stick with the usual dd incantation. Not going to buy a DVD burner and DVD's just to give it a look. C'est la vie.

Not sure what gave you that impression, this distro should work as expected booting from USB from what I can tell.

--jeremy

Well, downloads from multiple Sourceforge mirrors and Google (at the links on the site) all produce the same non-matching MD5 number.

The md5 sum listed at the site seems to have changed today, so I downloaded a new image from one of the Sourceforge mirrors. That image checked out with md5sum.

dd still produced a USB stick that would not boot. I noticed several reviews of Makulu mentioned similar problems and suggested unetbootin. So, I installed that. It's obviously a Windows app that's been crudely ported to Linux.

Annoying, too, because it didn't know how to ask for authorization to run as root. I had to manually launch it from a terminal.

More annoyance: Unetbootin immediately displayed a message telling me I should reboot, but it was simultaneously displaying messages indicating file-copying progress. This stopped for several minutes at "98" while syncing was obviously in progress, but unetbootin didn't offer any indication that it had not crashed.

Once done, unetbootin offered an option to reboot from within the app. That did not work.

On the reboot, a dozen or more options were displayed, with a timeout ticking. MakuluLinux was offered far down the list, but I waited to see what "Default" did. That booted into Makulu.

While I was adjusting theme components in Settings (to tone down the way overblown garishness), Makulu locked up, forcing me to reboot from a console.

I won't be installing any distro that crashes during Live Mode. The apparent reliance on a Windows tool to burn an image, rather than the standard Linux approach, is a complete turnoff.