Source: Michael and Mary's
Many eons ago when Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva Linux) was the king of Linux distributions, a certain person called Texstar, used to prepare RPM packages to improve Mandriva Linux. Texstar, then forked Mandriva Linux and this fork became PCLinuxOS. Texstar's experience, devotion, and perfection to his task, shines through even today in PCLinuxOS.
I installed PCLinuxOS 0.92 on the following hardware:
PCLinuxOS 0.92 is available in four different versions:
Installation
PCLinuxOS boots from a Live CD to a fully usable KDE desktop. To install on to the hard disk, login as root, with the password root and then click the Install icon on the desktop. The installer is fully graphical and is very easy to follow. Like Ubuntu, the PCLinuxOS installer does not allow package selection, but in my opinion installs fewer software packages than Ubuntu desktop. The installer detected all my hardware perfectly.
Post installationOn reboot, PCLinuxOS starts with a graphical boot up. I logged in with my regular user name and password and was greeted by an attractive KDE screen. However, my screen resolution was set to 1024x768, instead of 1280x1024.
To fix this, I opened the excellent PCLinuxOS Control Center (K Menu - Configuration - PCLinuxOS Control Center) and adjusted the display resolution (Hardware - Change the desktop screen resolution).
Next, I reconfigured my eth0 device to use a private static IP (Networking - Reconfigure an existing network interface) and configured my pppoe connection (Networking - Create a new network interface). I then configured the firewall (Security - Set up a Personal Firewall).
I then changed the sound card driver for my sound card from ALSA to OSS. The reason I did this, is because Skype and ALSA do not work well together. To change my sound card driver, I opened the sound card setting (Hardware - Configure ALSA or OSS drivers for your sound card) and selected the driver as emu10k1.
My next task was to reduce the number of services that are started at boot up. To do this, I opened the services editor (System - Configure the system services) and adjusted the services. To view information about a service, click Info, to disable a service from starting at boot, remove the check mark from the On boot option, to enable a service to start at boot, check mark the On boot option, and to start or stop a service immediately, click Start or Stop, respectively.
Satisfied with the configuration, I closed the PCLinuxOS Control Center.
PCLinuxOS Control Center thus provides a one stop centralized control facility to configure critical functions of the system - like setting up networking, tweaking hardware and setting up the firewall, to name a few.
I then turned my attention to Synaptic - the graphical package manager.
Synaptic (K Menu - Configuration - Packaging - Synaptic Software Manager) allows you to easily add or remove packages and to update the system.
Using Synaptic, I removed some packages like madwifi, koffice and kdegames. I then proceeded to update the entire system. Once this finished, I added the MS fonts package (msfonts and msfonts-style), Azureus (azureus), and Open Office (OpenOffice, myspell-en_US, and myspell-hyph-en).
Next, I installed an older version of Skype and not the new version, since the new version has a bug that causes sound to be blocked after every call. You can download the old version here.
To install, open a terminal and execute the following commands as root:
tar -xvzf skype.tar.gz
cd skype
mkdir /usr/share/skype
cp -Rv icons/ lang/ sound/ /usr/share/skype/
cp skype skype-callto-handler /usr/bin/
You can then add Skype to the KDE menu, or open a terminal and start Skype as a regular user by executing the command: skype.
I then proceeded to customize KDE to my liking using the KDE Control Center (K Menu - Configuration - KDE Control Center). I disabled the KDE effects, disabled the sound system and tweaked KDE. My desktop is shown here.
Next, I installed some firefox extensions such as adblock, downTHEMall! and greasemonkey along with some greasemonkey scripts.
Then, I speeded up firefox using my custom firefox settings. I saved this file as user.js into /home/michael/.mozilla/firefox/s78tfng6.default/. I restarted firefox and noticed an increase in browsing speed.
Last, I tweaked my system as mentioned here to get good audio performance.
I finally reboot the system to ensure that everything comes up properly on boot. PCLinuxOS booted fine, my screen resolution was the one I set and everything worked properly.
I tested a few flash driven sites, tested my java plugin, watched a quick time trailer and since PCLinuxOS includes a number of multimedia and browser plugins [including playing back non-free formats such as Quicktime, MP3 and Windows Media formats], everything worked out of the box. You can check the plugins installed with the firefox browser, by typing about:plugins on the URL bar.
You can view screenshots of PCLinuxOS here.
ConclusionPCLinuxOS is an extremely easy to use, user friendly distribution that is perfect for Joe and Jane users from the Windows world. The developers have taken the utmost care to ensure that the distribution functions perfectly and that it meets the needs of a large section of Linux users. The out of the box support for non-free formats is a huge plus for this distribution. The drawback, however is that encrypted DVDs cannot be played out of the box. This is easily remedied by installing libdvdcss2 using Synaptic. PCLinuxOS comes as a Live CD, which means that would be Linux converts can try it risk-free and run the entire OS from the CD before they decide to install it.
I heartily recommend that all Linux users and would be users try out PCLinuxOS. You might be hooked as I did.
Written by Michael R.M. David
Michael and Mary's
