Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
this poor pengiun should have listened to Linus when he told him CDs aren't fish.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
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.
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.
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?
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'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.
If one is petrified, how does one take anything other than what is given?
Nurse, pass me my gloves and lubricant, and that huge turnip shaped mandrake root ...
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.
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.
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.