PClinuxOS

My newest addiction is PCLinuxOS .93. I am not sure but I think Texstar is the main person at PCLinuxOS. I remember the name from years ago when I was playing with Lycoris, I believe he had his own repositories and I have also seen texstar repositories for Suse, so he is quite active.

I am a big fan of Linspire, but I have had problems running Linspire on some of my equipment and I am not sure if it is me or if Linspire has just become buggy. I have had numerous browser crashes in Linspire, and if there is one program that should work flawlessly, it is the web browser. The crashes have occurred on multiple computers so I don't think it is a hardware problem.

Besides the browser it is nice to have Windows emulation. Codeweavers is good, but I cannot run Dreamweaver MX 2004 (I haven't tried it in the beta yet), among other programs (I am still waiting to run Tombraider in Linux). I tried Win4Lin, and I am still a little pissed that they seem to have dropped support for the old version. I actually bought the new version and tried to use it but is so sloooooow. VMware is darn good free emulation, I wish they would have started giving it a way before I bought Win4Lin. I have tried running Linux (Suse among others) in Windows and it is just to slow. But when running Windows in Linux, Windows seems to be running at almost full speed, after installing VMware tools.

Back to Linspire- it is very hard to get VMware to install in Linspire. I have done it (it take some command line magic) and there is a comprehensive how-to in their forum, but if they wanted to Linspire could make it an easy to install (CNR perhaps) program. Since they don't, I think this is a huge mistake because I now have to find a Linux distro that will run VMware, and I am sure I am not the only Linspire fan in the same boat. Makes you wonder if they might have some sort of contractual obligations or even get a piece of each sale of Win4Lin.

I recently bought a 120 gig hard drive for my laptop so I could easily have three to four Linux distributions on my laptop. I thought Ubuntu/Kubuntu was the next great thing. I had tried it a couple of releases ago and it just required to much tweaking out of the box. With their latest release, 6.10, I thought I would actually run Ubuntu for a while. I had plans of installing a Mac OS X theme, but none of my six, yes six, PCMCIA wireless cards would work with Ubuntu. I am not sure why, but I checked the forums and I could not get anywhere. I went back to OpenSuse 10.1 it would not allow me to access my Windows partition without some editing, of course any closed source programs/drivers are missing from the OpenSuse release. And yes I know I can set up repositiories to download those packages, which I did, but is is just a lot of tweaking to do when Linspire does it out of the box. The deal breaker was a Suse bug, at least I consider it a bug, it does not seem to bother them. Every time you turn off your computer or reboot you have to use their network manager tool (which is a slick little tool) to find your wifi hotspot and connect to it. With other distros it will automatically connect.

After a little searching I decided to try PCLinuxOS. I really do not like Mandriva, which it is based on. And I had tried a previous version of PCLinuxOS which I did not like, but this version is great.


Installation:


Installation is easy. Boot into the program to run it live and click on the install icon. Unlike Linspire, there is a built in partitioner which worked great. I had run into a problem in Ubuntu and Kubuntu, if you did not create the partition with their partitioning tool, it would give you an error saying something about there not being a root partition, even though you just tagged one of the existing partitions as root. I scoured their forums to discover the workaround is to delete the partition and then create the partition, then Ubuntu will install. It is kind of crazy that a polished distro like Ubuntu would let a bug like that go into the released version.

There are three sizes of PCLinuxOS that you can download. I grabbed the smallest one. I prefer to install the base system and then get the programs that I want from the repositories. Unlike Suse, the installation did not take long. I rebooted and entered the system.

The System:


It was great, I love the cursor theme, transparency was enabled in the task bar by default, the icons were great, the icon for the synaptic manager was on the desktop and the repository was listed. I guess what I liked about the feel of the distro is that it felt like I would have done it this way. PCLinuxOS found my wireless card and even though network setup is a little different than what I am use to, it is simple and straight forward. I could access my NTFS partition, even though I could not write to it. I could also access my Windows computer via the network.


Installing Programs:


As I stated before I can install many-many-many programs through Synaptic, so I enabled the repository and grabbed all of my favorites.



Emulation:


I grabbed the latest beta of Crossover Office and installed it. I also installed the free version of VMware server. Compared to Linspire, I was amazed at how easy it installed. I installed XP in VMware and everything is working great.



Complaints:


Not many, I could not get my touchpad to scroll, so I installed synaptics (I hate that this projects name is so close to the synaptic front end program for apt). I still could not get my touchpad to scroll, so I will have to look at the PCLinuxOS forums. My second complaint is not really a complaint, it is more of a preference. There is no network manager in the panel, but you don't really need it because as long as you have the same access point it will connect automatically. Still, I would prefer a network manager like Suse or Linspire's.



Closing Thoughts:


I could be wrong but I am guessing that other than Texstar, there aren't many people involved in the OS. Again, I am not an expert, and I just go by what I read, I would guess that PClinuxOS is structured like Mepis where Warren seems to be the man in charge and I don't think there are many other people helping with the coding.

I need to use PCLinux for a little longer and then if everything continues working as slick as is does now I need to donate to the cause.