A self review of OpenLab 4.1 Alpha 1

Atang1 from tuxmachines (http://www.tuxmachines.org/blog/203) has once more asked me to write my own review of the new OpenLab (http://www.getopenlab.com/) release. Of course this being an alpha, while it has attracted press it has not attracted much in the way of reviews. Most reviewers tend to feel it's a little unfair to be very critical of a self-designated alpha. Interestingly, while mainstream reviews have been scarce – this release got reviews from several bloggers something that had been absent before – I hope that is a sign that we are having a (growing) impact. Both the ones I picked up are fairly short. One pointing out most sullenly that not including vi was a terrible thing. I actually don't think my users have ever heard of vi, but nonetheless rather than fighting a holy war (especially since I'm a vi user myself), I will make sure I rectify this for the next build. The other praised our wireless integration in 4.1, but wept that it did not work. Well it is an alpha things are not entirely solid yet. It is also important to remember that it is a work in progress, those who keep wole open would have seen several major updates to 4.1alpha1 by now, including kde 3.5.3 and wole 0.0.3 (which among other things includes several major new wifi improvements). So I am actually going to be reviewing a bit of a moving target today, therefore I will try to focus on the major changes since 4.0. As Atang1 correctly observed, this was about evolution rather than revolution, so they changes tend to be subtle – but nonetheless important. I will therefore also refer back to my 4.0 review (http://silentcoder.co.za/tiki/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=2 postId=190) several times.