PCLinuxOS 2007 Review

Description:	Noob-friendly Windows replacement.
Disks:	1 CD
Rig:	Physical PC
EIT:	5-10 minutes
Rating (Out of 5):

Preface

PCLinuxOS is a derivative of Mandriva and my choice to do a rant about this specific distribution came as a thought at the back of my mind, because it's the first GNU/Linux distribution I really got into, which I enjoyed and basically, converted me to Linux.

However, this was version 0.90 and that's a while back, recently I'm using Debian as my main OS and I'm very happy with it, so this in essence is just a glimpse at what PCLinuxOS offers today. Another point to note is the recent rise of PCLinuxOS on distrowatch, it is now the distribution with the most hits second to Ubuntu, but seems to be catching up if you've been following the listing in recent weeks.

So taking all this into account, I just had to get my hands dirty. I did at first only test out the LiveCD so I can get a little familiar with the general "feel" of the distribution, make some notes and when it's finally installed I can assess that which I noted. At bootup the menu has the general options such as LiveCD, safeboot etc. etc. This is pretty much standard in most distributions, obviously I knew I wanted the LiveCD so I hit enter and it took about a minute and a half to load the whole configuration and to get me to a colourful KDE 3.5.6 desktop running on kernel 2.6.18.8 after querying for basic information such as keyboard layout, timezone and internet configuration.

What I did note that was a little different from other distributions is that it allowed me to choose whether my ADSL connection should start automatically at boot or whether it should require user-intervention, nothing major but still something different than what I'm used to. It's good.

The login looks sleek and so does the splash screen, see the demonstration below.

Installation

On the LiveCD desktop the look is simple, yet sleek and the menu's layout is similar to that of it's parent OS, Mandriva. The distribution's goal is to simplify everything for the end-user, hence calling it "PC" Linux, which means it's targetted at desktop use.

So next up was to finally install this piece of software and test its metal. This is where some problems started to initialize... The installation is very easy and the partitioner is extremely simple and very effective. I was impressed by the number of supported filesystems once I browsed along into "expert" mode. One notable question being asked is whether you want to install the distribution to a normall HDD (IDE, SATA) or to a USB HDD, I found this pretty neat.

After continuing the installation it seemed to be hanging at one point, where it was formatting a mere 10 GB hard disk as ext3. I later realized that this is because I opted for the installer to check for bad blocks on the drive too, however this was still pretty annoying at the time and it took about three to four minutes to format that partition.

Installation itself didn't take very long, it was probably another three minutes, maybe four and all was done. Next up I had the choice of either a graphical GRUB menu, a text-mode GRUB or text-mode LILO. This didn't really bother me too much whether it was graphical or not, but I do prefer GRUB before LILO so I chose that and whatever was first on the the list of choices (which was the graphical option).

Unfortunately, this is where things stopped running smooth and I noticed that it didn't pick up my Debian partition, nor my Ubuntu one, but it happily included Windows XP! Happily I saw an option to add entries to the right. Once I finally browsed to my Debian root and checked out its menu.lst, copied the image lines and boot partition lines, the installer quit immediately when I clicked OK. This was pretty upsetting, I gave it another go, this time I went into more advanced options and it did the same. Struggling on like this, I tried re-installing several times and on one or two occasions the installer even quit before I reached that point.

What I tried next, seeing that it had issues I just let the installer finish, thankfully it did and I had a graphical GRUB menu at bootup having only PCLinuxOS and Windows in its menu, the first thing I did when I booted up was to add Debian and Ubuntu to the party and rebooted to test it. All was fine.

I noticed that all my partitions were automatically mounted, that's nice however the NTFS partition did not have write support, though that's something that got fixed quickly by installing ntfs-3g.

The distribution had out-of-the-box support for MP3's, WMA's and WAV's as well as MPEG videos. I had no AVI's or others to test at hand. I did however manage to test out my Euro Trip DVD it worked perfectly after I installed libdvdcss2 via the package manager (which is apt). See the preview here.

Software Selection

I quickly installed a few things via Synaptic, such as the latest nVidia drivers, my favourite browser, Opera 9.23 and I upgraded the flash plugin from 9.0.31.0 to 9.0.48.0 with the click of a button or two.

Some of the default applications include Firefox 2.0.0.3, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org 2.2.0, GIMP 2.3.16, Amarok, MPlayer, Kaffeine, Frostwire P2P, KTorrent, Xchat and much more. Unfortunately it didn't include Pidgin, instead it had Kopete pre-installed, but I was easily able to retrieve my favourite instant-messenger from the on-line repositories.

The fact that Frostwire is included to the package list means that JRE had to be installed too, since it's a fork of Limewire, which needs JRE to run. I browsed along the menu to come across JRE 1.6.0, which is always a good thing to have.

Annoyances

Obviously, the installer and it's quitting nature. This is the only grief I have with the distribution and being a more technical kind of person, I prefer to have more manual configuration over things, though that's why I use Debian of course.

Conclusions

This is a fully featured, slick distribution that, apart from the installation, proved to be very easy to work with and most applications anyone would use is pre-installed and most notably, support for proprietary formats such as MP3's etc. is present and that Flash and JRE are included and they work perfectly.

So this is pretty much an all-rounder distribution for the normal desktop user, I wouldn't say it's good for everyone, but it comes pretty close to being as good as you can get. The only things I had to do manually was to install the nVidia drivers, this was handled by Synaptic in any case by searching for the term "nvidia" and selecting your preferred driver. See here.

Any new user who's looking for an alternative to Windows would feel really welcome with this distribution and there are not many obstacles that could pose problems.