Today I stumbled upon a little live distro called PCLinuxOS . I’ve seen it before mentioned online, but I never really looked at it in depth. When I found it under “alternatives” for Mandrake, I decided to take a look. I was surprized to what I found.The deal with PCLinuxOS is that it takes Mandrake, cuts it down a disk, makes it a live bootable cd, and adds great things that Mandrake now makes hard to get, and you’ve got PCLinuxOS. I looked at the site, and the first thing that caught my eye was “Including NVIDIA drivers…” I looked at a screenshot or two, and then I was off downloading my ISO.
The Install
As any install, I burnt my ISO, and rebooted the machine. You reboot into a nice looking boot loader, still not quite as good looking as Mandrake’s, but since it is a live cd, it makes perfect sense why there isn’t that same depth of style.
Since I’m usually pretty easy going on settings, I just hit enter and let the default run. The thing I really noticed on was the time it took. It took much longer than I would have liked it to. At first I thought it was strange that a live cd would take soo long to boot up like it was, but then I realised its technically booting Mandrake… off a CD. Any Mandrake user knows you wait a while for bootup, imagine the time off a CD! But all went well. The first thing that came up was the “NVIDIA” splash screen, which was a sight to see in “Mandrake.” I logged in as root, explored a little finding some great things like Firebird (now Firefox), Open Office, The Gimp, XMMS, Synaptic (a great change from the Mandrake package manager) and so on. I was impressed by the package choice, especially off the one CD. I decided to then begin actually installing it.
It took a moment to find, but I found the hard disk installer tool for it (located under the “K” menu, configuration, hardware, livecd-install) The installer is simple, and works pretty well. The one thing that’s always disappointed me about all live CD installs is that you never have any package control, but since the packaging was good I was happy. Anyway, it took a little bit of work, as QTParted wasn’t working well, but I worked around it, managing to get it installed.
The Usage
So far, the usage has been anywhere from pretty good to very good. Some things I would like to note would be primarily one- Synaptic Package Management (really apt4rpm GUI frontend). Its a welcome change. First off, its set to run off ibiblio, which is good, as my connection was doing about 350kbps off the server, which is good speed. Second, its much easier to operate, and navigate than the stock Mandrake packager. A nice change indeed.
Other things to note would be the good built in package selection: not too much, but not too little, and all the good tools you can use, and the theming. The theming on here is phenominal, as shown here with great shadowing, the nice layout (reminding me of Longhorn almost too much) the good background, and so on. Very impressive on that front. The last thing to definitly note were the drivers. You did away with the pesky NVIDIA/ATI driver troubles. As for autoconfig, I’m not sure as it does not seem to be running at its best, but its there and knows to run which is very good.
Now for some things that could use work:
1. Update the packages! I checked, and the CD I am using is its newest version. Things like KDE 3.2.1, QTParted, The Gimp, and so on were out of date on the cd. They were updated with Synaptic, which is good to have, but there should be the most updated things on there right away.
2. New kernel time! 2.4.23-2….what a version number. We’re on 2.6.4 kernel now, which is MUCH better than the 2.4.x kernel. Though solid, 2.6.x kernel does it just as well, and much faster at that. I’d say it’s time for the new kernel.
3. Keep developing!- What you have now is an incredible start. It is something very impressive, which will obviously do good if it keeps up, but with a Beta state, out of date kernel, etc it makes it hard to convert into this distro entirly. Though, I am using KWrite to make this article, it doesn’t seem quite ready for the big times yet.
Overall, I am impressed with what I see. With great package control and choices, this distro it hard to completly avoid. Also, great amounts of configuration options and so on give it a great touch. Some small things seem to need some tuning, but it seems every distro always need that. So, in conclusion, if you’re a die hard Mandrake fan looking for something new without completly leaving your distro of choice, a hardcore OS junkie (like myself) or a beta tester, this would be one of the distro’s to have yourself a look at.
Check it out online, and download a copy!
If you have any questions, feel free to email me (remove NOSPAM. from the address)
Also, check out SWAINNET if you have time.
About The Author
My name is Doug Swain. I am an amature 15 year old Linux and Computer user. I have been using Linux for approxamitly one and a half years, and have tried at least 35-40 distubutions.
PCLinuxOS is under development. P6 should have all the software updates that the reviewer mentioned. It is a wonderful distro, and Texstar has done a fantastic job!
I use PCLOS preview5 exclusively now. I find it to be a wonderful distro. Texstar seems to have the mindset of… if you have something better than what I have and I can legally use it, I’m going to.
Synaptic, Mandrake’s Control Panel, Texstar’s version of Ark Linux’ control panel, Realplayer, Flash, 3d drivers (ATI’s are broken in preview5 and you have to fix it after install), OO.o, KDE3.2 + Kernal 2.6 (they are in the unstable repository), various codecs, Mplayer + kaffine + xine, plus all the eyecandy Texstar put into it. As the author said, menu shadows, but also better default icons, backgounds, login, etc. And that’s just a little bit of it!
AND he’s building support for saving settings to a USB key (it’s working, sortof), and a persistant /home and /swap partitions on the hd (slated for future release).
AND he doesn’t paste PCLOS all over the place like some other distro’s (*cough* *lindows* *cough*). I think you see it once on the splash screen but otherwise is absent other than defaulting to PCLOS’s webpage when you open the browser.
But one of the best things is the livecd-install attitude. Most livecd’s have some sort of install proceedure, but so many of them say it’s a live cd and not really meant for installing. PCLOS is different, Texstar’s attitude is that installing the OS from the livecd is a feature and something to be desired instead narrowing the focus of a livecd to only being a live bootable OS.
It’s not so much it makes PCLOS shine, others do have it to, but Texstar’s overall approach shows to me what the future of installing will be like. No more slapping in your disks one after another, staring at install screens before you get a working desktop. The future will be dropping in your OS medium (disk, usbkey, wireless harddrive, personalPC-PDA, whatever), booting up to a fully functional desktop, THEN installing the OS complete with all your favorite software, settings, and data.
Some caveats are, it’s beta, has only one person working on it (with the help of others but this is a one man distro), you have to be very minimal when you install since the livecd installer is alpha-beta quality. And there are things to fix after you install.
The forums are decent. There are those that help, and Texstar does parse the forums nightly and answer relevant questions. Beware, if you ask general questions or ones that don’t necessarily apply to PCLOS that a noob site can’t answer, he usually ignores them.
So the conclusion is:
PCLOS is good.
Don’t forget this distro would not exist without Mandrake. It is built on Mandrake cooker, with some nice tweaking and eye candy, with a live CD generator script (available in cooker btw). So it depends also on the support which is given to Mandrake.
Actully you speaking of all the out dated apps is incorrect
Most of the updates can be downloaded to bring the App
up to current with Synatic including unstable
The new version updated should be out in a few weeks from what i have been told PV6 Live Cd
The article’s spelling was fine, but the “About the Author” section had loads of typos. It kind of makes the whole thing look unprofessional. Just run the entire article through a spellchecker next time, please. 🙂
Other than that, nice overview.
Yes, I’m sorry, I’m not very good at spelling grammer and things like that. It was also originally for my website personally, and I didn’t think of taking it for another check. I was kinda scared when I came here and saw it there just now. Hah. Yeah I know, I don’t get much done, you’re right, but hey, I’ve got 60 years of getting things done to do (the projected worktime for my generation) so I figure I’ll screw around now.
As for that, yes I know, but the cd itself came with many outdated packages, which kind of surprised me. At least the 2.6 kernel should have been there.
Disk came out in January 1.20.04 a whole lot of changes were made did you look at the Dates ?
including KDE 3.2 which was beta and the 2.6 kernel wasnt even close to being production.
You might check out the PCLinuxOs forums to see what changes have been made also the mailing list it might shed some light
Im saying you havent researched your story before commenting.
well, he is only fifteen. Still a few more years of Engilsh lfet.
that was a joek, bwt.
That makes sense obviously, I don’t know the dates I’ll admit. As for the English joke- hahaha, yes me do, yes me do…
You are correct “Anonymous” you’re correct, it is thanks to Mandrake that this exists. Mandrake is a great distro too, which I love. One of my favorites, but PCLinuxOS seemed to really strive for some improvements, and acomplished these, even in beta form.
Didn’t think that a fifteen years old reviewer would forget to mention the most important aspect in any distro – when the day’s ‘serious’ work is done, you want to play games. So how’s the gaming situation in PCLinuxOS?
But I’m not much of a gamer. I would assume that it is pretty good with games like UT2003 since it does have built in ATI/NVIDIA drivers with a little XF86Config modifying. Other than that though I honestly have no idea. My gaming days ended when I realised I’m bad at gaming.
The author says Mandrake is slow to boot? I use Mandrake 9.1, which is out of date, and it boots quickly… At lease compared to my XP installation. I confess, I haven’t tried any distributions besides Mandrake and MandrakeMove, so they might be faster. Also, Windows has a lot of non-OS tools that load at start up, which slow things down… but of course, Microsoft should have thought to add them in and optomize them.
Sorry to hear you don’t enjoy playing computer games. First person shooters sure are fun but I actually wasn’t expecting a LiveCD to come with UT2003. 😛
My point is that there are much simpler games for Linux that are still fun but distro makers often forget this at the point when they choose what applications to include and what to leave out. In Windoze World ordinary users spend much time playing addictive little games like Tetris or Solitaire. So why not include some games like Frozen Bubble or Cuyo, which people could play to pass time while they are waiting for their downloads to finish or something like that? Or is it that distro makers think that all Linux users are so hard core geeks that they prefer to pass their time by reading man pages?
How many more distributions of Linux do we realistically need? Wouldn’t it be great if people would put there efforts into improving the system instead of redistributing it?
Linux used to be my primary OS, but I banished it to my servers when Windows 2000 came out, it then lost out to Free/OpenBSD where things are much, much saner. (No more ‘only compiles on redhat’ or ‘won’t work on anything but SuSE’, etc).
I am not an origanizer, but wouldn’t, say, a decent GUI system not built on 20 year old technology help the effort more than having nine million distributions?
You do realize that the author of PCLinuxOS is not obligated to share his/her product to anyone.
PCLinuxOS apparently is based on Mandrake. This probably means the author liked Mandrake, but the direction of their development didn’t follow what the author had in mind. Therefore, he’s scratching his own itch by improving upon the product “Mandrake” (in his/her view)
As for your comment on a better GUI, both GNOME and KDE seem to be making significant improvements. Both these two GUI DEs are not 20 year old technologies you seem to claim. With regards to the X Window System, I wouldn’t trade it for anything right now. If you ever work in a data center with various UNIX-based network/process/resource monitoring tools , you tend to appreciate the fact that the views can be exported to you own screen via remote X.
If you are not satisfied with the current Windowing System implementation, you are more than welcomed to “scratch your own itch” by building what you believe is the better alternative.. or pay for one in the likes of Windows or Macs who may have better scratched your itch (i.e. the better tool for your job).
I understand. No, the livecd does not come with UT2003…that’d be something right?
I’ll tell you what, that may be good for anything else I look at in a distro, any idea’s to improve the quality of writing are good ones. I’m doing an Xandros review soon (since I got the trial) so I’ll make sure I take a look at it.
As for what Jay said, I can agree on that almost. The problem with that is that people then have a lack-of-control, which is the concept. Without being tied down to miles of license agreements, you’re more open to explore, and develop new options for people and yourself to use more often. Otherwise though, I can agree to that, as it does seem like that if there was some more standard involved (in all technology, not just Linux itself) then things would all start working much better. But because of the freedom to break away from a standard contradicts that, so as things are going, I say things like they are, are quite fine.
Besides, if they didn’t have so many flavors, what would people like me do?
age really dosent matter
My friend just pointed out I spelled my last name wrong on my article…its Swain. Wow… I should be banned from writing forever. Hah, oh well.
off-topic, but since UT2003 on CD was mentioned. aren’t there any live-cd modern linux games available right now? I’ve seen 2 before in gentoogames, but the links were dead.
For the slow boot, well I found that Mandrake is a pretty slow bootup. Mandrake 10 is improving this, but Mandrake has lots of tools that are built in to run at startup. If you modified this, then it would most likely improve. Also the 2.6 kernel helps out some. Plus computer specs can also factor in for boot.
For the slow boot, well I found that Mandrake is a pretty slow bootup. Mandrake 10 is improving this, but Mandrake has lots of tools that are built in to run at startup.
Well, then don’t install all the server packages …
Mandrake often seems to be slower at some things (especially compared to Gentoo installs, which are normally much more minimal) because of the convenience factor. For instance, a console login takes about 1 or 2 seconds longer on Mandrake than on Gentoo, since it has pam_console installed so that users logged in locally have full access to local devices (which AFAIK isn’t the case on Gentoo).
Of course, you can disable many of these things if you like changing permissions all the time ;-).
Anyway, Mandrake makes a point of trying to support the idea of free software, and for this reason, no non-free software is allowed in the download distribution. It seems Tex cares more about convenience than about free software. If you don’t care about free software, you might as well use Windows (IMHO).
Of course, if you use a commercial release of Mandrake, the correct binary drivers are installed for you and work out-the-box too.
Also, you may note that apt/synaptic are available in Mandrake contrib (and have been for a while).
I’m just curious to see the comparaison of the boot time with a mandrake move. The move is supposed to be faster than knoppix.
I tried and tested it and indeed it rocks. I would have loved to see it stay a “Mandrake improved” instead of it going its own sweet way. That would have probably been less work and one would have kept the possibility of using Mandrake’s packages.
But it’s really a good distro in the true sense of the term. It uses preexisting components (synaptic, the MCC, and so on) and gives them a coherence and the Live CD approach of the installing is the way of the future
For specialized gamers there probably doesn’t exist Linux gaming outside Gentoo. For the rest of us, there’s a Morphix Games LiveCD action-packed with smaller Linux games so that you can pick your favourite and request that the developers of the distro of your choice add it to their gaming pack.
But back to the topic. The screenshots of PCLinuxOS look nice so I’ll try it if the next version comes with kernel 2.6. Throwing away the package compatibility with Mandrake would be very foolish for a one man distro like PCLinuxOS. Improved Mandrake on one CD sounds like a good idea – less trouble, more fun. 🙂
I think PCLinuxOS is running too slow,at least much slower than Morphix or Knoppix.Even MandrakeMove is faster than PCLinuxOS.(Of course MandrakeMove request you set the system up ,which is done after boot up by PCLinuxOS)
Not only did Doug write a good review, but he sticks around afterwords.
How many reviewers on this site do you see answering questions (negative and positive) long after the review is posted, and with the level of maturity that this young man has presented.
Not many….at least on this site.
I try my best. I plan on writing more eventually (just got to learn to spell
is all)
Speaking of spelling, adam, was the comment really nessisary? We’ve established the fact that I cannot spell, and also that I wrote it on KWrite not checking spelling and that it was originally for my personal site, not an offical (and great) one.
As for speed: well it makes sense. Imagine installing Mandrake from a bootable cd…its got good software, and much of it, so many tools are loaded.
As for the Free Software: Yes, that makes perfect sense, it should not be included, but it should be able to be installed is all I think. Its reasonable enough not to include it in the download version, though. But I mean, what disto doesn’t respect free software? And you can still install commercial products like NVIDIA drivers still, so why can’t Mandrake allow this in the free version? This is why I enjoyed PCLinuxOS.
To say there are too many distros is to say that linux is done, debian or redhat or madrake or whatever you say is best has done it right, that their vision is, “the one”. Fact is they are doing it completely wrong. Distros emerging and fading each attempting to fix whatever they felt was off in the other is our evolutionary process and must continue, support your local wiz.
~I lIkE wInDoWzZz!!!~
installed it, found all my hardware,and it works great. A nice job that showed a lot of quality, thought, and effort. Loking forward to their future efforts.
That’s good man, I’m really glad with all this reaction, I plan on writing more, about Xandros Business Desktop 2.0, unless that review is about Desktop 2.0, and if I’m allowed to publish more.
Use the command line:
livecd dma
and it loads up much faster. You should be able to HEAR the difference in the way your optical sounds when using that command.
The screenshot may not load for the next few days until I am finished with my server work (converting all my computers to Linux machines!) so it may be a good amount of workload. I took the liberty though to move the screenshot into another location for viewing here:
http://home.comcast.net/~d_swain/pclinuxos1.png
Just wanted to update everyone. Thanks for the comments also, it’s appriciated