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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.
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?
most likely /. discussing threads will be modded down, but her goes it anyway. /., a couple of weeks and it'll be over.
it's the holidays, when those lamers have nothing to do but spam
I wonder if CmdrTaco can implement some filter for ASCII art, or goatse links, both shouldn't be that hard at all, and in both cases, the post's score is -1 automatically.
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.
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
They're mostly not trolls, they're just crapflooding. Crapflooding takes nearly no skill, unlike trolling. I tend not to troll (intentionally, anyway), but I have some measure of respect for a good troll. Being a crapflooder is about as impressive as being a script-kiddie. No, actually, it's about as impressive as wanting to be a script kiddie, but being too dumb to work out how to download stuff.
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.