Quick review for SING , first distro of 31 Flavors of Fun project

SING is the first distro released by Todd Robinson for his 31 Flavors of Fun ( there are 4 available distros already). I was curious so I downloaded and put it into a USB drive anyway to test it. Here is a quick review for SING with some screenshots of this distro in live CD mode:

The size of SING is pretty big (over 1.7 GB) so you will need a DVD or a 2GB+ USB to test it, I used Unetbootin to create the bootable USB and got no problem at all.

The desktop environment of SING seems to be Gnome 2 and is highly decorated with an AWN dock at the top of the screen and a tint2 panel at the bottom. The AWN dock is quite well arranged with many applets and has several effects enabled, although it takes too much vertical space IMO. The main color theme of SING is brown and as you can see in the screenshot below, there are many shortcut folders on the desktop by default:

SING performs decently when it comes to hardware consumption, at idle, it eats up around 200 MB of RAM, which is pretty low in today's hardware capacity. However, its still not the lightest distro for sure.

The default web browser of SING is Ice Weasel, when you start it, it will open Todd Robinson's blog:

Good old Nautilus file manager is used in SING but the theme is quite outdated:

With 1.7GB in  size, there are a lot of preinstalled applications in SING. For internet use, besides IceWeasel, you also have Pidgin, Skype, Dropbox and IceDove (for mail client ):

For office and graphic work, you have the LibreOffice bundle, Evince, GIMP and several other apps. One thing I like about SING is that this is the first distro I've known that includes an offline dictionary (GoldenDict) by default:

 

For multimedia, you have Audacious and VLC to handle everything. However, due to some unknown bug, the sound doesnt work for me. Perhaps it's the problem when you want to create a full distro in such a transient time without proper testing. Flash is preinstalled by default but the sound still doesnt work:

The software center of SING looks like the old one of Ubuntu:

This is just a quick review of mine for SING, the first distro of the 31 Flavors of Fun project, I will do some deep testing soon when I have time. If you are interested in this extraordinary project, you can download SING and 3 other distros here.