PCLinuxOS

Just wanted to share with the list my take on the latest version of
PCLinuxOS-0.92. I haven't played with PCLOS for about a year and the
improvements are impressive. I don't know why they still call it a Beta
version, because this is the prettiest, most polished distro I've ever used.
For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's a live-cd that easily
installs to the harddrive. While some live-cds break or lose their hardware
detection once you install them, PCLOS was designed from the beginning to be
installed.

The package list is trimmed down to the best few for each category, making it
a very well thought-out 1-disk installation. It has Mandrake's disk
partitioning and Control Center tools. It's RPM-based and uses Synaptic for
package management.

Installation is probably the easiest of any distro I've ever used. Once the
partitioning is out of the way it's just a matter of two or three clicks.
After installation I was able to go online without doing any configuration at
all. I can pop in a data CD and it mounts and displays automatically in
Konqueror. It sees my memory stick automatically. It didn't autodetect my
serial printer, but it was easy to tell it what printer to use.

The default desktop is KDE, but it also has Fluxbox. The KDE defaults are
sensible and the menu is well organized. If it has any disadvantage, it's
that it's a little slower to launch some tasks than Slackware and Debian- but
not by much and not enough to be a dealbreaker, IMO. It's also not for older
machines. It needs at least 256 MB of RAM.

This is a distro that you can give to people who've only used Windows, and
they'll be productive right away. Everything just seems to work without
needing to do a lot of tweaking. One very nice touch for beginners is the
"New User Guide" that's on the desktop. There's also a good support community
and forum. I highly recommend this distro for beginners or advanced users
alike.

I'd be very interested to know how it does on laptops with wireless
connections. I think it would be a great distro to use at the installfests.
It has all the "easy" features of Mandriva or Suse, without the bloat, and
it's easy to know if it sees all the hardware before installing it. For
people who like the idea of Ubuntu but prefer KDE over Gnome, try this one.

http://www.pclinuxonline.com/pclos/

Siri Amrit
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