Cool distro: PCLOS

[Sirber]

PCLinuxOS is one of the world’s up and coming providers of a Linux Desktop Solution. With a small but dedicated development team, PClinuxOS delivers Desktop Ready Software that harnesses the power of the Open Source Community.

PCLinuxOS Preview 9.1 is an English only self-booting live cd that runs entirely from a bootable CD without installing anything on your computer. Data on the CD is uncompressed on the fly allowing up to 2 GB of programs on one CD including a complete Xserver, KDE 3.4.1 Desktop, Open Office 1.1.4, Thunderbird 1.0.2, Firefox 1.0.4, p2p filesharing and much more, all preconfigured and ready to use!

In addition to the livecd mode, you can also install PCLinuxOS to your hard drive using our easy to use livecd installer, assuming you like PCLinuxOS and it runs well on your computer.

PCLinuxOS is currently under heavy development and should be considered beta software. PCLinuxOS should work on most modern hardware and comes with advanced hardware detection. PCLinuxOS runs best on computers with at least 256 megabytes of memory.

PCLinuxOS is released under the GPL license.

http://www.pclinuxonline.com/pclos/

[hulkenstrong]

Nice tips. Im gonna check this one out. As I use mandrake and love it now and this distro is based on mandrake tools its off to a nice start.

[Sirber]

Package system is based on Debian. It has it's own "Control Center", but it also have the mandrake one. It detected all my HW but I couldn't play sounds. Gonna retry when I stop encoding :)

[hulkenstrong]

Just one thought as you sem to have tested it out. Actually downloading the iso right now. To the problem I have 2 dvd-rw disks and one usb-mp3 player but no cd-rw or cd-r. Can you run the distro in another way like add a lilo entry to the iso or use the usb-mp3 as boot disk? Or are there any tools out there able to convert cd image to dvd image?

[Sirber]

Ish........ better buy some CDR...

[hulkenstrong]

Well actually I tried burning it using k3b and well it burned. Booting it soon hoping it works. Kinda low on cash right now due to an axident/unemployed.

[Sirber]

Sorry to hear. I hope you get back on track soon :)

[hulkenstrong]

Yeah doing rehabilitating at the moment. Up and running in a few weeks and a joob Ill find sooner or later.

To burn the cd image to a dvd worked great (to bad I didnt try it a week ago when I reinstalled mandrake. Would have tried the amd64 iso instead of the 32-bit dvd iso.)

At the moment using the live cd. Everything seems realy good. Will definitly try this out more. Basiclly the final point probably will be how good the package manager are. So far when using mandrake I only needed to compile 2 easy programs myself.

My monitor doesnt get detected properly. But thats easy to correct. But amazingly my usb mouse just started working out of the box a big plus. All 7 buttons worked the way I wanted them to.

First impression is definitly wow. Loads of aplication I will be using and not to many useless as other distributions comes shipped with.

[Sirber]

:D

If you don't want to install it, you can use an USB key to store your config and datas :)
I'll move it on my HDD soon.

[hulkenstrong]

No. Ill think Im going to install it to my hdd. I think its the best way so you really have to configure everything to work for daily use.

Besides its not like I dont have time over. It'lll be fun with a new "project". Worst case senario is I install mandrake again and is a experience ritcher.

[Sirber]

Use reiserfs :D

[virus]

hey! I'm so happy to see this thread :)

Actually, I'm a PCLOS user (preview 9 here). I've installed it 1 month ago.
I've decided to try it after reading a couple excellent reviews about it. Given my troubles with my ADSL USB modem, I was looking for something lightweight that allowed me to get basic Linux installed and start the quest to make my modem work, then extend my installation through custom downloads from the repository.
That's exactly what I've done (getting the modem to work was a PITA, but that is not distro-dependent... even the distros that promise "USB ADSL modems support" really support just 2 or 3 common models - you gotta do your homework with the EciAdsl drivers, no matter the distro).

Got some troubles when installing due to a bug in the installer (like most of the graphical "system tools", it is a Mandrake tool) which failed to format my drive. I've installed it on my secondary drive (primary has good ol' Win98SE as always :)). PCLOS has not hit 1.0 yet so some troubles must be expected... but the distro itself is pretty good.

PCLOS is a LiveCD (that contains 2+ GB of software) that you can optionally install as a (more or like) normal distro. It's KDE-based (and usually ships with the very latest KDE release), which is great for me since I only use KDE - it just rocks :)
Despite being some sort of a Mandrake springoff, it comes with Synaptic (apt) as package manager; it also features a pretty complete software repository (check it here (ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/metalab/distributions/texstar/pclinuxos/apt/) to get an idea - the Package List on the site is not 100% up-to-date). Most packages are updated quite frequently.

The standard selection of software in the CD is very reasonable, including the kinda Debian-ish choice of relying on GCC 3.3.x for now... something that I have quite appreciated (some projects - like GNU MP (http://www.swox.com/gmp/) - still have issues with 3.4, not to mention the brand new 4.0 branch). I didn't have to download too much stuff to complete the collection of software I wanted - and yes, after 1 year of bluescreens under Win9x, I finally managed to see VLC in action... :D

As Sirber said, PCLOS comes with an own Control Center (and a very powerful one I must say) and with a variety of precompiled kernels. And thank God, all of them quite features rich, including the stuff needed by the modem... :rolleyes: Modem notwithstanding, I didn't have to configure anything particular to get my machine to work - though admittedly my PC is 2 years old so... ;)

All in all, I'm pretty happy with PCLOS. After all, it's always good old Linux - and with a Linux system you never go wrong :)
(the bottom line is: don't fear lesser known distros - the OS is always the same)

And now excuse me, but I must return to my Perl experiments in KDevelop, while surfing and chatting in Opera 8 for Linux, with aMule and XMMS running in the background... :D

cheers,
virus aka "PC usage -> 75% PCLOS - 25% Win98" :)

[hulkenstrong]

Really nice installed and configured in 3-4 hours.

Only had to install wondershaper,mp3gain,cpuspeed manually. The rest was in the original repositories.

Only run in to a few easy bugs beacuse I reused my old home folder. Even managed to install the useless ati drivers :). This one will most likely stay installed.

Does it use pure debian files (can you add debian repositories?)?
Gotta say I liked the installer trough livecd. Surfing the doom9.org while installing the os is nice.

[Sirber]

I have a wierd problem. Sometimes, when I start an app, it says it got terminated and I can't start other app after that. Why? :(

[hulkenstrong]

Tried starting it trough the terminal and checked what it says?

I aint no guru so cant give 100% support. Sounds like the program your trying to start crashes and takes with it an importent kde service and rendering the system unworkable.

Have had similar problems when I havent configured something correctly. Recheck settings and make sure all gets loaded properly (network/acpi/apm/hdds etc).

The computer isnt overclocked? Had a real problem when I overclocked my cpu.It worked during winter season, but when the summer came it got a litle unstabel and caused alot of funny errors.

[Henrikx]

From my circle of acquaintances, I hear lately strengthened of PCLinuxOS. According to the reports, the integration of KDE succeeded better, than with Kubuntu. Likewise the installation is to be a very riser friendly. True praise singing on the PCLinuxOS 2007 version. Since I am somewhat tired “testing” at present, my question: How do your experiences look? Would interest me also; Expandabilities, is it complicated or uncomplicatedly to integrate programs for which it gives still no RPM . Maintenance, update, the system. - Complicates or simply? For problems, there is competent assistance? Is PCLinuxOS one fully “everyday life-suited” distribution and thus an adequate replacement for Kubuntu?

[lpn1160]

I,ve been using this distro for almost two years and exclusively (read: no windows) for 18 months, have never looked back. Good luck to all and all welcome to Linux. The good side of the force

[Henrikx]

@lpn1160
Thanks for your answer!
I test since two day. Result until today. Super user-friendly!
Best integration of KDE!

[DSP8000]

After reading some reviews I decided to try PCLinuxOS 2007.
I must say that I love it. I'm posting now from the live CD.
Currently I'm downloading MintLinux CD v3.0 just to compare it to PCLinuxOS 2007. Very easy setup, cool graphics, much better than Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Integration of read/write to NTFS out-the-box is just a bonus. All of the very latest applications are included in the LiVE CD.
Great hardware detection as well.

Looks like I'll be resizing my partition, coz the more I use it, the more I like this Distro.

DSP8000

[Henrikx]

Good report.
Recent experience with Ubuntu 7.04 Vs Suse 10.2 Vs PCLOS 2007
http://journals.aol.com/anantgowerdhan/pclosexperiance/

[shevegen]

Well, if you look at distrowatch, you will see that pclinuxos "skyrocketed" similar to Ubuntu - but without all the negative fuzz ;)

Anyway, I believe install is super easy and straight in PCLinuxOS, detection is nice as well. In overall things just work, and you can easily use grub or lilo, something which isnt yet as easily available form zenwalk (which i like a lot too btw)

[RadicalEd]

Cool. I'll add this to my repertoire of VMWare images.