These days, I have settled on one distribution for my laptop: PCLinuxOS. I recommend this to anyone who wants to leave Windows or Mac OS-X. This is one of the easiest to install and maintain of all distributions I have tried over the years.
PCLinuxOS started back in 2004 as a derivative of Mandriva, which was itself originally a derivative of Red Hat Linux (now the Fedora Project). Over the years, Texstar (as the founder of the distribution wishes to be called) has made various improvements to the point where PCLinuxOS has now surpassed its parent distribution in terms of popularity.
PCLinuxOS is distributed as a Live CD to try out on your laptop, desktop, or a netbook (if you have an external DVD/CD drive connected). When you are ready to commit PCLinuxOS to your machine, simply back up all of your data first to whatever medium you have available, and then run the installer (using Mandriva’s LiveCD installer utility), and follow the instructions that appear on the screen.
What sets PCLinuxOS out from distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE, and Mandriva, is the wide range of hardware that is supported out of the box, and ready to configure, namely many wi-fi adapters, 3G and 4G modems, printers, and video cards.
You can also install PCLinuxOS to a USB flash drive, useful when installing PCLinuxOS to a netbook without having a CD/DVD ROM drive attached, or when you want to take a usable PCLinuxOS installation with you, and boot it on another desktop or laptop without disturbing that machine’s software installation.
PCLinuxOS comes in several flavors, depending on which desktop environment you want to run.
For Windows users, I recommend the original PCLinuxOS flavor with the K Desktop environment. The desktop has the look and feel of Windows 7, but once you install this on your machine, you may never look back.
For Mac OS-X users, I recommend either the GNOME or XFCE flavors. The desktops do not exactly have the look and feel of Mac OS-X, but they can be made to look and feel that way.
If you have an older machine such as a Pentium III or Pentium IV, and have at least 384MB of system memory installed, I recommend XFCE, LXDE, Fluxbox or Enlightenment. These desktops are lightweight as far as the use of memory goes. The Enlightenment desktop provides the best desktop effects with very little memory usage.
PCLinuxOS does provide support through their friendly forums, in addition to an online (and downloadable) magazine (of which I am a contributor).
With all the support available for this distribution, why have another support site?
Like any Linux distribution, if you have the skills and the time, you should be able to modify your installation any way you wish. This is provided for in the GNU General Public License (version 2 and version 3). Keep in mind though that there is one correct way to keep PCLinuxOS up to date and still be supported through the forums.
Texstar does not encourage the installation of third party software (i.e. software not available through Synaptic and the PCLinuxOS repositories). This does not mean you cannot do it though. If you do, you should use extreme caution and take care not to interfere with the official software packages. For this, I recommend using the /opt, the /usr/local, and your home directory to install such software.
One reason for doing this is to install special drivers needed to get certain devices working on PCLinuxOS.
Another reason for support here is if you cannot configure devices using the provided tools. One example I have come across is the configuration of my Epson Stylus NX-415. The correct drivers are available for printing and scanning through Synaptic, but PrinterDrake does not recognize the printer.
In this case, I configured the printing for the NX-415 using a technique for configuring printers under Slackware. Open http://localhost:631/ in a web browser and configure the printers that way.
Advertisement
Like this:
Be the first to like this post.
This entry was posted on 2010/12/21 at 1:09 pm and is filed under General Commentary . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
PCLinuxOS supported here
These days, I have settled on one distribution for my laptop: PCLinuxOS. I recommend this to anyone who wants to leave Windows or Mac OS-X. This is one of the easiest to install and maintain of all distributions I have tried over the years.
PCLinuxOS started back in 2004 as a derivative of Mandriva, which was itself originally a derivative of Red Hat Linux (now the Fedora Project). Over the years, Texstar (as the founder of the distribution wishes to be called) has made various improvements to the point where PCLinuxOS has now surpassed its parent distribution in terms of popularity.
PCLinuxOS is distributed as a Live CD to try out on your laptop, desktop, or a netbook (if you have an external DVD/CD drive connected). When you are ready to commit PCLinuxOS to your machine, simply back up all of your data first to whatever medium you have available, and then run the installer (using Mandriva’s LiveCD installer utility), and follow the instructions that appear on the screen.
What sets PCLinuxOS out from distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE, and Mandriva, is the wide range of hardware that is supported out of the box, and ready to configure, namely many wi-fi adapters, 3G and 4G modems, printers, and video cards.
You can also install PCLinuxOS to a USB flash drive, useful when installing PCLinuxOS to a netbook without having a CD/DVD ROM drive attached, or when you want to take a usable PCLinuxOS installation with you, and boot it on another desktop or laptop without disturbing that machine’s software installation.
PCLinuxOS comes in several flavors, depending on which desktop environment you want to run.
For Windows users, I recommend the original PCLinuxOS flavor with the K Desktop environment. The desktop has the look and feel of Windows 7, but once you install this on your machine, you may never look back.
For Mac OS-X users, I recommend either the GNOME or XFCE flavors. The desktops do not exactly have the look and feel of Mac OS-X, but they can be made to look and feel that way.
If you have an older machine such as a Pentium III or Pentium IV, and have at least 384MB of system memory installed, I recommend XFCE, LXDE, Fluxbox or Enlightenment. These desktops are lightweight as far as the use of memory goes. The Enlightenment desktop provides the best desktop effects with very little memory usage.
PCLinuxOS does provide support through their friendly forums, in addition to an online (and downloadable) magazine (of which I am a contributor).
With all the support available for this distribution, why have another support site?
Like any Linux distribution, if you have the skills and the time, you should be able to modify your installation any way you wish. This is provided for in the GNU General Public License (version 2 and version 3). Keep in mind though that there is one correct way to keep PCLinuxOS up to date and still be supported through the forums.
Texstar does not encourage the installation of third party software (i.e. software not available through Synaptic and the PCLinuxOS repositories). This does not mean you cannot do it though. If you do, you should use extreme caution and take care not to interfere with the official software packages. For this, I recommend using the /opt, the /usr/local, and your home directory to install such software.
One reason for doing this is to install special drivers needed to get certain devices working on PCLinuxOS.
Another reason for support here is if you cannot configure devices using the provided tools. One example I have come across is the configuration of my Epson Stylus NX-415. The correct drivers are available for printing and scanning through Synaptic, but PrinterDrake does not recognize the printer.
In this case, I configured the printing for the NX-415 using a technique for configuring printers under Slackware. Open http://localhost:631/ in a web browser and configure the printers that way.
Like this:
This entry was posted on 2010/12/21 at 1:09 pm and is filed under General Commentary . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.