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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.
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?
If you're really impatient, you can Download the English preview-4 ISO here
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.
Well most anyone's that used Mandrake Linux and third-party packages will have heard of Texstar sometime during their package-seeking. Texstar is one of the biggest names in the Mandrake community, and his packages are usually of pretty high caliber. I think he may have even done packages for some other popular distros, as well.
I'm pretty glad, myself, that if anyone was going to be making a Mandrake-based distro, it's Texstar. He seems to know his way around a Mandrake system or two.
"We invented personal computing." - Bill Gates
Things have improved since those days. Firstly, between 2 - 5 new distributions are added to DistroWatch every week, so it is getting increasingly hard for any of them to get to the top 100, never mind to the top 10. Secondly, the number of visitors on DistroWatch has trippled since "Yoper times" (now at over 20,000 visits per day) and it's becoming harder for one person to manipulate the page hit ranking. And thirdly, PCLinuxOS is created by somebody who is well-known in the Mandrake user community and who has a record of providing reliable enhancements for vanilla Mandrake releases.
Yes, the DistroWatch ranking is nothing but a light-hearted popularity contest created for fun (and to laugh at those who take it seriously). In contrast, PCLinuxOS is a serious and promising distro worth watching, especially if you are a Mandrake fan.
LiveDVD's aren't necessary yet. From what I've heard from developers, you can fit around 2 gigs of uncompressed data onto a 700mb CD before you compress it and use cloop to decompress on the fly once the cd is running. Kernel 2.6 has newer cloop-style stuff in it and is supposed to smash things even smaller. Believe it or not, the PCLinuxOS is very full featured and has lots of bells and whistles on the disk.
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.
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"?
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?
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