Feast your eyes on Ultimate Edition Linux

Ultimate Gaming

A fun fork of the main Ultimate Edition OS is Ultimate Edition Gamers. Each version is built from a Lite version of the main OS and comes with over 30 preinstalled games (see Figure 3), such as the brilliant first person shooter "Alien Arena" or, for the more educationally inclined, the "Childsplay" Suite of educational activities for youngsters.

Figure 3: Ultimate Edition Gamers comes with over 30 preinstalled, open source games, such as scrolling space-shooter chromium-bsu.

Older games and titles for other platforms are also supported. Ultimate Edition Gamers includes ScummVM , which can be used to play classics like "Monkey Island," while Wine , Winetricks , and PlayOnLinux help to play some more modern Windows titles [9].

The most recent Ultimate Edition Gamers is version 4.6, which is based on Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet). It's available for download from SourceForge, either as a 4.2GB ISO incorporating the LXDE/Openbox environment [10] or as a 3.2GB ISO based upon Xfce [11].

Given the inclusion of gaming features and the more visually rich environment, there is naturally a greater demand on system resources. The Ubuntu website's stated minimum hardware requirements of a 700Mhz processor and at least 512MB [12] will not make for a fluid desktop experience.

When running in a virtual machine, the file manager and web browser worked perfectly with a 1GHz Processor and 1024MB of RAM. Requirements for individual games may be greater, particularly if compiz is also enabled. For this reason, there is an extensive section in the Ultimate Edition forums on which hardware works best with the OS [13].

Ultimate Builder

Although Ultimate Developers Edition has yet to be released, Ultimate Edition 5.0.1 does come with the ability to build a custom OS with Tmosb .

The user guide to the current version (1.9.2) is so extensive that TheeMahn has devoted a website specifically to it. Like Ultimate Edition itself, the tool focuses on simplicity, and TheeMahn claims the builder will build one of 138 different operating systems with the simplicity of a single command dropped in the terminal (Figure 4). A GUI for Tmosb is also in production.

Figure 4: The Operating System builder can build any Ubuntu OS from the ground up and can even include your choice of desktop environments with a single command.

This has been put to good use by the Ultimate Edition community, and the forum for Australian users, "Ultimate Edition Oz," lists some of their contributions, such as Ultimate Edition 17.3 LTS, which is based on Linux Mint rather than Ubuntu [14].