64 Studio is a 64 bit (though an identical 32 bit version is also available) Linux distro focusing on meeting the needs of visual and audio artists. Their website is at: http://www.64studio.com/ 64 Studio is a customized Debian variant. It's setup with the Gnome desktop. The download was a little around 800 MB and designed for a DVD NOT a CD (obviously people made the mistake of trying to get it on Cd based on the website repeatedly stating "use a DVD not a CD to burn to). Download and burn was standard. Installation was straightforward and basic with only a few options to check or uncheck. I opted to install everything available. During and after the install unfortunately it did not manage to detect the audio or wifi on my laptop, only the built-in nic and video (and mouse and kb, etc. of course) were detected to any usable level. The RAID1 mirror detected fine during install so there was no problem with performing the install in that respect. Unfortunately, since it couldn't get the wifi going (as per the rules I've set for this series of evals, see the first article), it is considered to have failed this evaluation. Especially since artists are either not particularly apt with technology, or just don't have the interest in having to deal with spending too much time figuring it out, one would think they would make this distro especially "non-techie" friendly so that the average artists could So the score so far is:

• RHEL/CentOS 5: FAIL
• 64 Studio: FAIL

Next up: Fedora 8 test 2...