Fuduntu Is A Fedora 14 Remix For Netbooks And Laptops

We've covered Ubuntu-based remasters which add a lot of tweaks, default applications and eye-candy. Today, I've tested something different: Fuduntu.

Fuduntu is a Fedora 14 remix (remaster) designed especially for Asus Eee (but you can of course use it on other netbooks and any laptop/desktop computer) and comes with some interesting performance tweaks by default. It was created by Fewt, the Jupiter (an hardware and power management applet for netbooks and Laptops) developer.

Among the tweaks you'll find in Fuduntu are:

• Enabling OOo quickstart
• Moving /tmp and /var/log to RAM disk - read more about this.
• Setting swappiness to 10
• Adding Jupiter for power savings
• and others

Also, being designed for netbooks/laptops, Fuduntu comes with a default font size of 8. And of course, Jupiter comes installed by default along with some other applications such as Revelation (password manager), Tomboy, GIMP, Inkscape and VIM Enhanced. I'm not sure why applications such as GIMP and Inkscape are installed by default in a netbook edition - I think an easier to use application would have been better for Fuduntu (although I personally always install GIMP, no matter the device I'm using; this includes my netbook of course) since most of the times you won't need to do advanced graphics on a netbook.

Fuduntu has also replaced/removed some of the default applications: Pidgin is installed instead of Empathy and the following applications have been removed: Gnote, Simple Scan, Gnome Games, Transmission. I have to agree with most these: you usually don't use a scanner for a netbook and you don't have a high speed internet connection when traveling with your netbook (so you don't need a Bittorrent client). Although some might miss the games.

Fuduntu has a funny name but is a serious distro, designed to be light (although the live ISO has almost 1 gb) and fast. Most of the changes are under the hood but that might change in the future.

Download Fuduntu | Fewt's blog