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PCLinuxOS 2K4: Mandrake Meets The Live CD
NoahsLinuxArk2K3 writes "For those of you who may not be familiar with PCLinuxOS, it's a Linux distro derived from Mandrake Linux 9.2, developed by none other than Texstar from PCLinuxOnline (best known for his RPM work for the same distro). The new distro is primarily a Live CD, but can also be installed to the hard drive. It is still in preview release, but at 306 hits per day, it's already #8 on the DistroWatch charts. This review is the first of its kind to surface and it is looking very promising." Update: 12/30 03:18 GMT by T :
A semi-anonymous reader writes "For those who dont have a high speed connection, PCLinuxOS 2K4 Preview 4 is available from OSDisc.com for a few bucks." Probably soon it will be at cheapbytes, too.
It's very rare to have a new linux distrobution hit the top 10 on distrowatch ever. Count this distro in your books as a record breaker. But why does it have to be based on Mandrake? Boo-hoo. =)
FuckTheFuckingFuckers.com - Post your th
If only there were enough moderators in this world to get rid of such postings.
This is a great day for us all.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Mandrake has always been my favorite distro for it's useability, while still maintaining the features that a Linux guru(not myself) would love, it's truly a distro for everyone.
But a Live CD is just awesome, think of all the new users who can try Linux for the first time, not as Knoppix, which is translated from German, but Mandrake! What a great way to learn about and be introduced to Linux!
Why aren't there more LiveCD installers? I used Knoppix as my debian installer and it was such a good experience that given the choice I would never go back to anything else. Text based installers are powerful, but for the pure user experience, being able to boot into a full OS and surf the web and listen to music while the OS installs in the background seems like the best way. So why aren't there more such discs? Also related, is this something other geeks would want? I can see the elitism of loving debian's old isntaller, but how much worse is a LiveCD version? Is the only problem hardware support? Its easier to have a simple installer that works on everything than try to get a LiveCD to boot? Appeal to the lowest common denominator?
Now I know for sure that Kindergarten is out for Christmas break. BTW: I kind of like Mandrake, I recommend it to lot's of WinTel users ...
this poor pengiun should have listened to Linus when he told him CDs aren't fish.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
According to the Harry Potter lore, if you've been petrified, the best thing you could do is take mandrake. Thus for all you BSODed Windows users out there who still freeze up, mandrake is your cure.
For those who don't freeze up, the livecd version is for you -- you can try it out and STILL have the exclusive potential to wait for that highly coveted Windows system lockup.
This is truly a great chance to let users of other OSs take linux for a ride, especially since Mandrake is quite user-friendly. If a user decides to install Linux on the HD, mandrake is quite newbie-friendly, pity that the current version seems to have quirky HD installer.
It is still in preview release, but at 306 hits per day, it's already #8 on the DistroWatch charts.
Way to shoot it directly to #1 with a bullet and a slashdotting!!!
moo.
Congratz asshole. I stop reading at -1 from now on. Good bye wonderful freedom of speech you trolls supposedly fight for.
Is it just me, or are the trolls getting worse?
Okay, sounds cool, I wanna try it, but I expect this 33k download rate won't last. Anyone have a bittorrent link?
I first got linuxed with Slackware (ouch!), but when I tried Mandrake, i seen the light, and the the elegent gears with K's engraved on them. Mandrake is a good distro, even power users will like it. Try mandrake cooker edition, its like Unstable Debian, but without the gritty bits of
Linux.
I have linuxed several people with Mandrake, Windows 98/ME refugees who don't want XP like it the most! So what are you waiting for, get linuxed today!
They should all compete for the first FP of the new year 04.
Mandrake with its superior driver support is the way to go for a live CD. I'm excited to hear that there is interest in pursuing this type of OS. My challenge with the live CD distro is that, as I understand it, its a "take it the way we make it" distro. No matter how much you like the way they made it, it just feels wrong. You should be able to build your own cd out of the Mandrake you configured. In any case, I still await the day Linux comes in a distro Grandma can use.
Ne faites jamais confiance aux Francais. Ils sont fromage mangeant, singes de reddition. Ne regardez jamais eux, eux des mots de pronouce correctement, la subsistance mettant le que a la fin des mots et plus mauvais de tous, ils prennent l'urine de chat et la vendent en tant que "vin". Oui, c'est un troll, et oui, j'ai employe les poissons de Babel mais qui s'inquiete quand le trollkore est sur le perdre.
Yeah. You always get americans going "when will linux be ready for The Desktop (tm)". Hint: It's READY RIGHT NOW. Mandrake rocks.
D0h. I appreciate a good troll. But this is junk, shit! When they post a homosexual story, an ethnic joke with Slashdot management substituted for characters, when they make vague references to usablity of new feature in pr0n business, when they forge the Nigerian Scam or BSD is Dead to suit a story, the classic Beowulf, Russia and Profit, that are all really good trolls! But this?
Pathetic.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Regarde! Nous sommes francais! Nous nous rendons! Oh la la!!!
Fix your filters. You woln't have to see the crap. dave
Latest netcraft survey reveals: innovative trolling is dying. ( The cat thing was a pretty cool twist on an old theme though. )
YLFIJust did that. But now I might be missing a lot of valuable trolls :)
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Mandrake Has just relaesed a LiveCD called MandrakeMOVE. One version for use with an USB Key or one for use with no USB key.
Another thing is that Textar is mainly releasing an bugfix/update of mandrake. Nice, but 99% of the work is done by mandrakesoft. The world of GPL.
still reading?
That's gotta be painful to run through spellcheck.
Knoppix, which is translated from German, but Mandrake!
I thought Mandrakesoft is a company in France. No?
Who cares how a no-name site like distrowatch ranks linux distros? I'm more interested in where Casey Kasem and Rick Dee's weekly Top 40 distro rankings puts them.
Heres the google cache of the rankings.
It's from the 12th of December. PCLinuxOS is 11th in the last 3 months column.
Everyone says that Linux can't be easy to use while people have to go out and manualy get graphics drivers, Java, Flash etc, loosely ignoring the fact you do the exact same thing on Windows.
Why is this distribution any different? The legal powers-that-be in all the other distros say that they can't ship with Java/Flash/whatever. I don't ask from a "how have they done wrong" perspective; I'm hoping that there has been some background research done that could mean other distributions can start shipping with the NVIDIA/ATI drivers and useful gratis commercial applications out of the box.
The knoppix powerpc version sucked... but the idea is great for a rescue disk... I use knoppix for both x86 and PowerPC for this reason. Anybody seen anything ready for powerpc?
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Yeah, but Mandrake beat them to the punch with MandrakeMove. I find it very much similar in function and feel to a Knoppix/Drake bastard child, although it lacked a bit of the applications that I'm used to with Mandrake. It was much like Mandrake Light.
I'd like to see an uncompressed Live-DVD with twice as much stuff on it as on a Live-CD. Anbody working on one of those yet?
But in the meantime, anybody got a bit torrent for PCLinuxOS up?
-Rick
If you want to download the latest version right now, you can:
Download PCLinuxOS
(Hopefully, we'll have a hard time slashdotting Ibiblio.org)
If you're really impatient, you can Download the English preview-4 ISO here
1)Imagine a Beowulf cluster of trolls in soviet russia 2)???? 3)Profit /compound troll
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Never make confidence with the French. They are eating cheese, monkeys of rendering. Never look at them, them words of pronouce correctly, the subsistence putting it that has the end of the words and worse of all, they take the urine of cat and sell it as "a wine". Yes, it is a troll, and yes, I have employe the fish of Babel but which inquiete when the trollkore is on losing it.
MOOKORE 0WNZ J00
are replies to trolls, I think I should try to make a serious post. But in the christmas spirit, I have to admit that I'm very drunk at the moment, so most spelling mistakes are the results of being non-English and very drunk. And having just seen a friend run off with the only good-looking woman in the pub, and she wasn't that good looking anyway. But I'm not complaining, so this should be worth at least +2 informative anyways (at least, I'm not going to say that *BSD is dead). Alright, here goes:
I tried PCLinuxOS a couple of weeks go. It's a live CD a la Knoppix, but based on Mandrake instead of Debian. What I liked about the distro was that it found all the hardware, like Knoppix. I also liked the fact that it was really simple to find various apps in the menues, but that's not very unlike Knoppix, is it? I use Debian ayway, so Knoppix feels quite all right to me. PCLinuxOS is good in most of the ways that Knoppix are.
However, PCLinux were (at the time I used it, in the beginning of December) not very well localized. I'm used to Norwegian keyboard lay-out, and when I can't find the '|' and '@' symbols, I'm pretty much fucked (especially the latter. Try connecting to an email-address or a Jabber-account without '@'!). What I'm trying to say, is that it's not quite as well localized as Knoppix is. Most programmers (who use US lay-out anyway) or Americans wouldn't notice, but persoally, I get confused. In Knoppix, I just choose my keyboard lay-out by right-clicking on the flag in the system tray, and I type '@' by pressing '@'. PCLinuxOS just doesn't have that option, so it's obviously a very American product, although based on the French Mandrake. That's one point in favour of Knoppix. Oh, and when you exit Knoppix, it will eject the CD and ask you to hit ENTER before the computer turns off, as if by magic (but by ACPI/APM).
So, personally, I don't see any reason to use PCLinuxOS instead of Knoppix, but if you use Mandrake or Red Hat, it's probably the rescue CD you want. Or if you use American keyboard layout. No matter what, PCLinuxOS has very good hardware detection, so if you can't be bothered to make your own rescue CD, you might just as well use that as anything else. It's good. Submit bug reports. I know I should have.
And it has many of the apps you want to demonstrate to most wannabee nerds.
I dont get the "Beowulf clusters" and the "in Soviet Russia" sentences. Can someone explain?
Maybe the BSD is dead too, if theres some kind of inside joke about BSD...
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
I've always liked Mandrake better than any, well, since Slackware went to v7. up to v4 slackware was best, after that... ugh.
;)
Mandrake has ALWAYS had the best hardware detection, especially for notebooks! my god it's easy to setup, and use too! and ALL the tools are there!
what the hell is yer problem?!?
It's got apt-get too yknow! and rpm! and mandrake package management... and everything.
sheesh.
BTW KDE kicks Gnome's ass all over the place. the new one, KDE v3.2, omg it's hot!
so stop spouting BS about Mandrake, it's the only stable, well-supported, fully open-source distro left. RedCrap is gone (always has been CRAP!) and SUSE is now going to be gone (thanks Novell). What else? Slackware which isn't so great any more?
Or debian? bah! debian sucks rocks, always has. The old Slackware could kick its butt into next week!
There's a Mandrake LIVE (boot from CD) version too out now, I think it's called Mandrake-Move. It's very cool!
So get off yer holier than thou bullshit. and btw - BSD Sucks! nice stable platform, LOUSY hardware support, write me when it gets out of the freaking darkages! Sun 2.4 left that kind of disk partition management in the dust eons ago!
it's (almost) 2004 people, this aint the freaking 70s!
And BTW I still prefer VMS (command-line!) v5.2 all the way baby, no gui's for me. and please! no bullshit about NT being VMS, it ain't, so kiss my ass..
and steaming hot grits poured down Natalie Portman's pants. you can't forget about the grits.
You CAN build your own live mandrake CD.
http://www.linuxminicd.org/mklivecd/
I don't trust "e"-voting. Why? Because it has been proven to be unsafe. That being said, I still like the idea of electronic voting and think a reliable system can be developed. I'm just curious as to why a dependable and safe methodology hasn't been implemented yet. I'm not convinced the reason is because it is not open source though. That would certainly make it better though given the implications of the results. But I could probably pick ten or twenty developers off /., make it closed source, and come up with a safe voting scheme. So why is it that things have gone so badly? Why do I constantly read about flaws in the system? Are the people working for these companies so incompentent that they can't write good code? I think the jury is still out on this subject and there is plenty of work to do, so I'm hoping that things will only get better.
Seems the author of the review did not read the README, which clearly states that installing to HD i experimental. Snooping around on the mailinglist one can see that some work has been done in this area and that a new preview is on it's way.
I agree, this is hilarious... I love reading at -1. I don't understand how people can read all these articles without being at -1... There's some genuinely funny stuff there, if you at least have some skin.
I guess one reason would be worrying about what's getting picked up at the firewall at work... I worry about that myself sometimes.
Honestly, having run Linux since before there was a Win32, and having upgraded a running Slackware system from a.out to ELF binary format and BSD init to SysV by hand (lets you know a bit more about what's under the hood) I'd have to say that Mandrake is built pretty well, considering it's based on Redhat and its oddities.
/usr/include/linux thing is strange, but that's not the kernel source per se - that's the headers which are kept around so that the compilers have headers if you don't install the kernel source separately. If it really bugs you, symlink it to /usr/src/linux/include/linux (and do the asm directory while you're at it) like it was supposed to be done. Fixed quite quickly, and nary a wasted minute.
Yes, the
If someone's actually a guru, as I suspect you're not since you sound quite frustrated, they're not going to have problems with something like this. They'll be smart enough to put a new compiler and compatible binutils in their own separate directory, and they'll realize that they should test the compiler with some sample code in a few languages before they start depending on it. Hell, they'll probably even compile their own kernel before they even get to that point. They'll get by without the tested and patch-labeled kernels provided by the distributor.
The point is, if you're a Linux guru, the distro isn't likely to stop you from doing anything. You'll be able to make it do what you want regardless, and for those who don't want to waste hours, Mandrake saves a lot of tweaking when getting to a usable desktop. It's the average user who is going to have issues like these, and that's what Mandrake will have to keep working on if they're going to actually make it to Joe Blow's new computer. They've certainly got a lot of work to do before it's ready for you.
Looks like you picked the wrong week to stop drinking... err sniffing glue... err snorting cocaine...
Texstar did an absolutely admirable job of packaging fabulous RPMs to fix some of the atrociousness that came with out-of-the-box Mandrake back in 9.0/9.1 (and 8.2 if I remember properly). Check out the default font configuration on 9.1 to see an example of what I'm talking about - I couldn't look at the desktop, it pained my eyes. Between Texstar's RPMs and the PLF RPMs, you can actually make Mandrake 9.1 into a usable system.
If Texstar is going to build on Mandrake and take a 95% distro and make it into a 100% distro out of the box rather than distribute piecemeal patches fixing the things Mandrakesoft screwed up, then by all means, more power to him. That's fully in the spirit of the GPL and of Linux in general. And I should again point out that Mandrake got its start as basically a bugfixed/patched up version of RedHat - anybody else remember their first releases when it looked like they had just done a Find/Replace on "RedHat" and typed in "Linux Mandrake"?
Actually no, Texstar's livecds were out a good month before mandrake released their move. Maybe longer. And mandrakemove can not compare to the completeness and beauty that is PCLinuxOS.
Holy shit.. he's comin' right at us!!! (jumps out of window)
OSDisc.com is a bit pricey if you have to pay the $4.75US international shipping rate.
See my site for CDs at $5 Canadian/distro shipping included.
I'm not running a real business, just trying to provide a source for cheap media for those who don't have highspeed.
This is my way of contributing back. $5 pays for the CDs, a padded envelope and shipping by whatever method I can afford with the remaining money.
Texstar has proven himself to be more than honest and trustworthy time and time again. From his selfless help in the newsgroups and forums, from endless hours compiling applications for users for no more than a thank you, to now providing a viable alternative to any linux distro and still hasn't charged anything for it. I just wonder how many hours he's spent making rpms and now on this livecd for the community. So, yes, I would trust Texstar to the ends of the earth. What does it matter where he's living?
Please mod this up!
.rc/.conf files in the user's home directory -- which can be stored on a USB key, along with your favorite text editor. (They should be stored on a USB key in this manner -- so you can use the same home directory key across different live CD distributions ;) )
In addition, almost all of what you're referring to can be configured by
WTF?
Bitch.
Not at all, check your facts right. As texstar honestly mentioned it, he used the mklivecd script that was added in the development branch (cooker). He just had to use it and tweak some things. But most of the work would not exist without Mandrake team and other contributors.
I see, i probably did the (font) work myself then ;). Geeky me.
still reading?
sorry to crack this one open but it only takes 10 min to make a mandrake livecd . It here :
..
.. but it's NOT mandrakesoft that does 99% of the work on this one.
http://livecd.berlios.de/
The hard work is tuning it. cloop makes u for nice compression but getting mysql and apache in there is a bit harder. I've made one too
So if you have time to spend , maybe spend it on a home-brew live-cd ?
The steps:
* install mandrake
* install busybox and cloop
* get the script
* run it with some additional flags
* burn the iso
It's also wurth to do for pursonal use. Like, config a clean mdk9.2 with all your preferrences, like mozilla links and mail config and whatever. then burn the iso you freshly made and you can do all your stuff at work on any pc without filding with the settings eatch boot.
sorry to say this anonymous
If you want a LIVE-CD of Mandrake then go to their website and download MandrakeMove. They just released it. Two things: it is built around the USB Key and it is available through MandrakeClub.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
On my P2-300 with an ATI Mach-somethingorother, it booted up, X11 failed to start, and then it quit! The message as to why it failed scrolled off the screen, and it didn't leave me in command-line mode or anything useful.
OK, so maybe it can't figure out my video card but why can't it come up in VGA, or at least command-line, mode?
I'm still dowloading PC Linux on my laptop. I'll let you know this afternoon: (a) if PC Linux works on my P2 and (b) if MandrakeMove works on my laptop.
Airmail is available for Canada and Mexico for $2.75. Its not listed on our "shipping info" page (it seems to kill our other international sales), but it is listed on the second page of the checkout form.
:)
Still cheaper to pay your $5 though
"Mandrake is for the WinTel crowd"
I wish we could stop parroting this old canard. It's a smear of all who run Mandrake, without any thought behind it.
Dude, I for one run Mandrake on my machines, because, after struggling with Suse's bugs for 4 years, I'd wasted enough time on bit-twiddling. Not to mention that Suse9 is simply busted.
Time is an important factor these days. I don't run Linux, just to spend endless hours fiddling with scripts and researching stupid mistakes. I need to get actual work done. Most things in Mandrake work, without troubleshooting; and I can tell you that is refreshing.
Campaign finance reform is national security.
I have been using it as the first distro that completely replaced Windows. I was given help from the forums for silly problems and there were only two of those. The box worked faster then I can imagine. I will be using debian for a long time. URPMI is no APT-GET.
I'm a Mandrake user, and regularly use Knoppix to access my email (in fact, I'm using it right now since I'd forgotten my Slashdot password).
I'd taken a look at MandrakeMove, and was very unimpressed - it's basically stripped of anything useful except for a few office tools, and doesn't come with enough codecs to handle multimedia in a useful manner. In contrast, I've already burned several copies of PCLinuxOS for my coworkers - it's quite good.
Knoppix still seems to have better hardware detection. For example, on my home machine PCLinuxOS didn't seem to properly initialize the sound card, or find my second CD ROM - both of which Knoppix does properly. And it doesn't seem to have as many developer tools, although I didn't get a chance to fully explore it. For a "normal" user, the selection seems complete, though.
I also didn't see any way of setting up a permanent data store (like Knoppix's Persistant Home Directory). But this is a preview release, and I may have simply missed it.
PCLinuxOS is basically everything that MandrakeMove should have been, but wasn't. Where MandrakeMove feels like crippleware, PCLinuxOS feels like a full version of Mandrake on CD - with all the eyecandy. The look and feel is awesome. I'm looking forward to the full release.
I've just donwloaded the ISO and booted my wifes Toshiba Satelite A30 laptop from the CD, and it correctly detected the graphics, sound, network card and USB mouse. The distro does everything that Windows XP does, and more besides.
You can tell that the creators of this distro have put a lot of work into the user interface. Just about everything is configurable through the configuration tools, allowing 'users' to fully configure their system without having to understand where the operating system keeps it's configuration files.
This distro looks like a real Windows beater on a home desktop system, and my wifes laptop will almost certainly be running this distro in the very near future.
Posted from the world's only 2.6-ready-OOtB Linux distribution: Mandrake 9.2. Running 2.6.0-1mdk as I type. Also running XFree86 4.4 recompiled (rpm -bb) from Cooker with no issues: if I was any more leading-edge, people would be throwing chunks of frozen foam at me. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
BWhaHAHhahaahAHHAAHhahahaah
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING
Should read "from the I-cant-believe-it's-not-knoppix dept."
I got it; i guess i was not familiar with the term itself, but I know what are you talking about.
Thanks!
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
OK, this post is a little old. I ended up d/l'ing this live CD. It worked GREAT on my KM266 (integrated everything) based system - Knoppix doesn't get the video (fbdev works though) or sound properly. PCLinuxOS 2K4 picks it all up. Very nice. (This probably applies to other recent Via integrated chipsets too)
how sweet