Gaël Duval is the founder of the popular Mandriva (previously called Mandrake) distribution. He no longer works there, and now he’s been building a new distribution called Ulteo. It is to be a system combined of a Desktop operating system and tightly integrated network services. Combined together, they should provide real-time desktop sharing/collaboration, and automatic file synchronization/backups stored at Ulteo. At least, that’s what I understand from the Ulteo scheme. To get an idea of what Ulteo AS currently provides, the flash movie on this page should clear things up a bit.

I’ve given the recently released Application System beta 1 a try; here’s what I think about it.

The machine i’ve tested Ulteo on is an AMD 64 3000+ computer with 1.5 GB of RAM, an NVIDIA Geforce 5200 graphics card and 160 GB hard disk. The Live CD booted fine on this, showing a nice graphical progress window while booting:

Ulteo seems to be based on an older Ubuntu release, ‘Dapper’ as far as I can see. The default graphical environment however is based on KDE, with some special Ulteo modifications, mainly to the start menu (called Ulteo Panel):

After looking around a bit, and not ‘getting’ what it was all about, I decided to install the system to disk. The install application is a modified ubiquity (Ubuntu’s Live CD installer) . There are six steps required to go through to install the system. They’re all quite simple (choosing language/location, keyboard settings, etc.). Unfortunately the installer decided to hang in step 5, after the disk partition detection. I had a pre-existing small ext3 partition, and an LVM partition, and the installer didn’t seem to like that. After removing the existing partition table, rebooting the live CD, and re-starting the installer, everything worked fine.

The copying of the files took only 3 (three!) minutes. I think this is about the fastest install i have seen among complete Linux desktop distributions.

After the first boot, a little screen popped up asking me for my ulteo.com login data. This will connect your computer user account to your Ulteo online user account.

When trying out the features, you really have to go through the feature summary page. At least I couldn’t otherwise figure anything out. This is unfortunate; the Ulteo team should really work on making the features more visible on the system itself. I couldn’t figure out what the ‘My Digital Life’ item on the Ulteo panel (that’s what Ulteo’s start menu is called) was for until I saw you could add files to the “My Digital Life directories” by clicking the right mouse button. This only works from the Ulteo panel; not on files on the desktop for instance. It seems you can not (yet) remove or alter created directories.

Also, I was under the impression that documents were to be synchronized automatically to the Ulteo servers. This apparently only happens to files you place under the ’sync’ directory which lives inside your home directory. A symlink called ‘Autosync directory’ to the sync directory will popup on your Desktop. Ulteo provides 1 GB of free storage; and the maximum file size is set to 10 MB. Every half an hour the sync dir should be synchronized. I could not figure out how to check if the synchronization worked, or how to restore files from the remote backups.

Because Ulteo comes without a “normal” package manager like apt-get or yum, installing additional stuff like the NVIDIA display drivers has to be done manually, and requires enabling the ‘Development tools’ from the ‘My Settings’ tab in the Ulteo panel.

Another feature of Ulteo is inside their version of Firefox. Ulteo has developed an add-on called ‘Ulteo Sidebar‘. With it you can rate sites that you visit. The data is used by Ulteo to build a database of sites which their users visit. Later on they want to provide meaningful links to sites which relate to the pages you visit. In my opinion the add-on just wastes my browsing space. Also, I think there are quite a lot of people who don’t like a company invading their privacy in this way. You can just disable the add-on in Firefox’s default add-on preferences screen. Here’s a screenshot of Firefox with the add-on:

A technically interesting thing about Ulteo is that the operating system is compiled at boot-time from squashfs files. Ulteo automatically downloads newer versions of these, and places them under the /boot/yuch directory. Next boot, the new versions will be loaded. It works very much like a Live CD. That the downloading and installing all happens without any notice to the user might scare some people, others will like it. It’s unclear to me how well this works with stuff you build on your own, like new kernel modules.

Since there are no apt repositories configured, it’s not possible to select additional packages. You can only use the applications which are packaged in the squashfs files.

As Ulteo is based on Ubuntu Dapper, which was released in 2006, Ulteo is built from quite aging components. For instance, it comes with KDE 3.5.2, CUPS 1.2.2, Gimp 2.2.11, Xorg 7.0 and GTK 2.8.

Conclusion: It looks like there still is a very big heap of work to do before Ulteo can set itself apart from other Linux distributions. In my opinion it’s far too early to call this a Beta. Ulteo is missing out on recent interesting developments such as PulseAudio, SELinux, PolicyKit, etc. and the system is built on top of aging components, making the distribution slow, and dated. To me, the only interesting part is the way the system is updated from the squashfs files. This really makes updating your software a lot easier for people without much computer experience. I also expected far more integration with their Online Desktop offerings.