PCLinuxOS 2010.7 - Hello, Old Friend
Summary: I have not done anything with PCLinuxOS for quite some time. First there was some personal / political turmoil in the PCLinuxOS developer community, and then there seemed to be a long time with no activity.
I have not done anything with PCLinuxOS for quite some time. First there was some personal / political turmoil in the PCLinuxOS developer community, and then there seemed to be a long time with no activity. When development seemed to pick up again, in the first half of this year, I picked up a copy of the 2010 Beta release, and then through an unfortunate combination of a bug in the installer and my own complacency/inattentiveness, I made a mess of my primary laptop. Now the PCLinuxOS 2010.7 Final release has been out for a couple of months, and I have finally gotten around to loading it up again. It is, as the title of this entry says, like seeing an old friend again after a long time.
I downloaded the KDE installation, transferred to a USB stick, booted that and had it installed and running in less than 20 minutes. The installation dialog was similar to Mandriva, but not identical. (People often say that PCLinuxOS is derived from Mandriva, but that is not really true. They have a lot of common roots, and PCLinuxOS still uses a lot of the "drakxxx" utilities, but it is no longer "derived" from current Mandriva distributions.) It installed easily on all three of my most-used laptops, with the only hiccup being support for the Broadcom 4313 WiFi adapter in the Samsung. The default KDE desktop will be familiar to anyone who has used PCLinuxOS before.
Nice colors, nice graphics, good layout... overall a pleasant desktop. You will notice that there is an icon on the screen to download OpenOffice.org if you want/need it, rather than having it in the base distribution. This seems like a pretty good idea to me, by leaving that one package out of the Live distribution, it makes room for a lot of other packages to be included. Having the icon on the screen makes it easy for those who actually do need it - overall I think it is a better idea than Ubuntu just dropping Gimp a while back.
Another feature that caught my eye was that PCLinuxOS has the KDE "Smooth Tasks" taskbar enable by default. I haven't looked at this very much, because I am primarily a Gnome desktop user, but after this first exposure I have to say it seems quite nice. Here is a screen shot with a few things in the taskbar, and the Smooth Tasks settings window open.
The major components of PCLinuxOS are generally up to date; Linux kernel 2.6.33.5, KDE 4.4.5 (I might like to see it with KDE 4.5 at this point), Firefox 3.6.10, ATI and nVidia graphic drivers are included in the base distribution, Gimp 2.6.9, digikam 1.3.0 and so on. The list of applications included in the base distribution is too long to include here, check the page linked above for a complete list.
If you prefer something other than KDE, PCLinuxOS also comes in a variety of other flavors:
There is also a Gnome ZenMini distribution, which has a Gnome desktop and an absolute minimum of applications included, for the "build your own" crowd:
For the more minimalist/lightweight desktop users, there is an LXDE distribution:
and of course an Xfce distribution:
For the absolute desktop minimalist there is an Openbox desktop:
And last but not least, an Enlightenment desktop:
Wow. That's a lot of choices! If you can't find what you want in PCLinuxOS 2010.7, you must be very hard to please indeed!
In summary I would say that with the large and still-growing uncertainty about Mandriva Linux, PCLinuxOS is a very good alternative. Take a look - try it, you might like it. I'm certainly glad that I got back to it.
jw 22/9/2010
Update - it is now just over 24 hours since I wrote this post. I have no idea whether it is a direct result of my writing about it, but the Broadcom drivers have now been updated in PCLinuxOS, and the Broadcom 4313 WiFi adapter in my Samsung N150 Plus is now recognized, configured and working great - I'm writing this on it! So, this is one more example of how a small distribution with dedicated developers and packagers can be very responsive, and can actually "lead the pack" in getting features included. Great work.
jw
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Talkback
Actually, I suspect a lot of people will be asking hte same question. Is it better than Ubuntu for replacing your PC?
Mandriva is better than Ubuntu.
Mint is better than Ubuntu.
PCLinuxOS is better than Ubuntu.
Regards.
AndrzejL PCLinuxOS Forum Member
Search e.g. on Google for: pclinuxos versus ubuntu
And you'll find the answer very soon!
but as AndrzejL said, PCLinuxOS has a rolling release concept (you install, and you can keep your install up-to-date during several years)...
=> sometimes there comes an up-to-date release for people who haven't PCLinuxOS installed yet, but the people having PCLOS when the release comes out, are already up-to-date
Only, after some years (say 3 or 4 years), there is some huge break with the past (very big updates, difficult to make an upgrade (would cause many problems), etc.), and then you should reinstall your distro....
But excellent, and a review that's fine to read!
Ok, easy things first. I certainly didn't mean to slight anyone in listing the versions of various packages, and I have to admit to being a bit lazy. I do keep my PCLinuxOS installations up to date, of course, but when writing the above blog, I had just installed it on the third laptop (the HP Pavillion); I was curious about Firefox, because the 3.6.10 release is quite new, so I updated PCLinuxOS and then only specifically checked that, and was pleased to see that it was then up to the latest version already. I didn't take the time to check the other major packages, as I should have. In fact, I even remember thinking to myself that it looked like KDE 4.5, but I didn't check it. I'll be more conscientious the next time.
As I said in the blog, and as you mention, there are some significant advantages to a "rolling release". One of the biggest is not having to wait for the next "release date" to get a major version update of the Linux kernel, Firefox, OpenOffice.org - all three of which have been delayed in Ubuntu distributions, for example.
Thanks again for reading and commenting.
jw
Thanks for reading and commenting.
jw
jw
PCLOS is good choice for some people. It is solid and definitely has its supporters. I used it for a time, but switched because PCLOS does not support 64-bit. I also found that its repositories are limiting and sometimes stale dated. However, some people have modest needs and want something that is a bit different. In that case, PCLOS is worth a look. There is also a good PCLinuxOS Magazine online.
jw
"That's what I find so amazing. It's 32bit, not 64bit like my Lucid, but it runs circles around Lucid. More correctly configuring the GM45 video chip doubled not only the 3D speed of my box, but also the average use of the desktop. To be frank, the PCLOS i586 runs faster on my box than the x86_64 Kubunu Lucid."
"The only weakness I noticed was that the PCLOS repository shows about 12,000 RPM based applications, only 40% of those present in Kubuntu's repositories. But, it has everything you need the others are superfluous."
But, as you've shown, it's one of the few distros that offer so many desktop environments available under one roof. And it's the friendliness and helpfulness of people on the forums that surprises most new users. We have users from 6 years old up to those in their 70s.