As part of my summer-end cleanup I format my computer to clear all the camp stuff off of it and make way for university-related stuff. This year, for a change I decided to try Christian Ubuntu instead of Fedora Core 5 which I normally run.

My first impressions of Christian Ubuntu are good, they made some nice graphics and added "Christian Edition" under all the appropriate logos. One thing that I noticed was that this is a live CD (a version of linux you can run without installing to your hard drive). Either I am blind or this wasn't mentioned on the website. I like the idea of a nice lightweight CD which contains several Bible translations and commentaries.

I installed the operating system from the CD to my hard drive and was pleasantly surprised by how well it worked. Some of the hardware in my laptop like the wireless card is slow to configure in Fedora, but was up and running with no intervention.

The two key features of the distro are Bible study software (gnomesword) and a Internet filter (dansguardian). I won't go into the performance of the Internet filter because I didn't really test it, but it is too sensitive for some of my browsing habits. (Emily we need to talk...)

Gnomesword is the most valuable part of this distro. It is a program that comes with several KJV type bibles (due to copyrights on NIV, NLT, NRSV, etc.) commentaries, and a Bible dictionary. You can view either a chapter at a time in regular view, or a verse from up to five different translations in parallel view. Should the existing Bibles and commentaries not fit your needs you can connect to the Internet and easily download more translations. All in all; it's pretty much what you would expect in a study program.

The only real downfalls are that you can not easily get the NIV, NLT and Message translations for gnomesword. Luckily someone has hacked up a script which downloads a copy of the translation of your choice from biblegateway.com and prepares it so it can be used in gnomesword.

This is a good distribution for Bible study, it is missing some packages needed for day to day use, but those can be easily downloaded. If I were to grade it, it would get an A.