Stella For Linux

Stella is an open source distribution of Linux based on the highly acclaimed CentOS operating system, which in turn is based on the award winning Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS. It is built around the GNOME desktop environment and oriented towards desktop users.

The distribution can be downloaded through Softpedia or from its official website (see link above) as Live DVD ISO images of approximately 1.5GB in size, designed to support both 32-bit and 64-bit instruction set architectures.

From the basic boot menu, the user can start the live environment with default boot options, with a basic video driver or in text mode. The user can start the installation script in graphical or text mode, perform a system memory test, as well as to boot an existing operating system from the local drive.

Being based on CentOS, the distribution uses the traditional and familiar GNOME 2 desktop environment, which is also known as GNOME Classic. The graphical session uses a two-panel layout (while from the top panel you can launch applications, from the bottom one you can interact with them).

Default applications include the FileZilla file transfer client, Mozilla Firefox web browser, Pidgin multi-protocol instant messenger, Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client, Transmission torrent downloader, TigerVNC viewer, and LibreOffice office suite.

The Cheese webcam viewer, Brasero CD/DVD burning software, Totem video player, Rhythmbox music player, Zenmap network scanner, GParted partition editor, gThumb image viewer, GIMP image editor and Shutter screenshot utility are also included.

Summing up, Stella is a great and stable distribution of Linux oriented towards desktop users, as it uses a traditional and familiar GNOME desktop environment on top of the latest upstream CentOS release.