Pclinuxos is an independent project, actually I love independent projects since they do things in a different manner and style . Its one of the major Linux distribution which still has roots with Mandrake Linux 9.2, whose successors now include Mandriva linux and OS which I had Reviewed earlier on my blog like Mageia and Rosa linux / Alt linux. Its an interesting mix of Mandrake Linux stuff and Debian like command line ,other linux goodies remaining in PCLinuxOS .
On their website,
Actually I was thinking of reviewing their full monty kde 64 bit 2013.07 edition , what I love about this edition as lots of useful software comes pre-installed . The iso were downloaded past night the recent iso 2013.07 kde full monty edition and kde 64 bit edition and then made a live usb of it and even burned dvd full monty edition but it refuses to boot in live mode on my laptop {Dell} it was just not able to boot what's the problem that I didn't understood . so looked in my iso wallet found a old copy of 64 bit kde by texstar 2013.04 edition . so burned out a dvd of it and fired on dell laptop and started the installation process wizard. From installer noted that the installation steps haven't changed from previous versions, so I'll skip that part.Thus pclinuxos installed on my system fine as ,it all takes about 10 minutes to install for me ,
After reboot steps like creating a regular user account with a password. and then we are brought to a colourful graphical login screen greeted with a message as shown below as since its rolling release plz update uor repos .
PCLinuxOS supports ext3, ext4, JFS, XFS and Reiser file systems .It gives an option to choose LILO or GRUB as our boot loader and change its settings as provided and also set up a system user password on our boot menu after reboot .Let's just say the process was fast, easy to understand by novice users.So actually by installing pclinuxos old version ie 2013.04 kde edition got a chance to test rolling updates and upgrade to 2013.07 kde edition how os fairly handles it so started the upgrade process as shown by synaptic package manager as shown around 844 mb updates so started installing the stuff.
Here kernel image of os installed in kinfo centre before upgrade .
For more installation detail look at this article link old but still similar install process which can be understood easily . http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-pclinuxos-2010-kde
After installation now screen I get from Grub to login gui in 1 minute . As surprise my display screens weren't configured properly by default, display shown was around 1024 x768 somewhat smaller so changed ie to 1366 x768 and rebooted my lappy but again it reverses to 1024 x768 screen ? this is happening after every reboot.
I didn't understood but avoided it to see that after rolling upgrades and updates whether my problem solves or not let see and here update process seems to be almost finished writing from pclinuxos desktop .
Even used terminal command actually its a mix bag of debian like terminal line up and rpm packages like mandrake into one .
while upgrading got stuff like this
So I configured card which is default set to intel graphics card as shown below.Now I configured to 1366 x768 monitor screen as shown below
My mention of above problem of display still exist it reverts to 1024 x768 but it should be 1366 x768 its not solved , this is only issue I am facing, hope it solved and taken note by developers ,that my screen to use a lower resolution than what I just wanna say vertical space of my screen is used, but large portions of the right and left as shown above on my problem stuff is left blank . so I visited KDE System Settings panel which allowed me to change my resolution and then it worked flawlessly but after reboot problem lies as it is .
PCLinuxOS repository Package management is through Synaptic package manager. Ubuntu or Deepin Software center like stuff should come up in Pclinuxos as just it will appeal more newcomer linux users. Advanced users, however , hardly care about synaptic or any software center and rely more on terminal for their work . here seems synaptic package manager used its very old but by performance it worked well as compared to ubuntu synaptic package manager ie 0.75 .
Now my upgrade has just finished lets see how rolling update delivered my desktop .
Now you can see its updated to kde 4.10.5 but linux kernel is not upgraded or no pop up nothing to upgrade linux kernel by default that suprising to me .It should by default upgrade to linux kernel 3.4.55 but its not .So now once again fired up my synaptic manager and searched kernel to see is there any option for linux kernel 3.4.55and installed it as shown below .
After updating kernel got like this stuff in kinfo and its upgraded to linux kernel 3.4.55- pclos1 as shown below .
So again rebooted my system it took around 15 minutes to show gui desktop kde , so again rebooted but there seems to be some lag in this kernel its taking longer time around 3 minutes to boot into kde gui , ? this happening that I dont seem to understand . True to its performance its updated the system well nothing seems to be breaking everything fine had same issue what were there before.When we open the application menu there are many sub-category, each one packed full of software. Many of the programs supplied out of the box are KDE applications, but PCLinuxOS also supplies packages which are inbuilt just works fine as shown
Taskbar contains a menu icon, a series of quick launch icons and in the bottom right a system tray with system icons and a clock.
From left to right you have the icons which brings up the menu, show desktop, configure your desktop, configure your computer, a file manager and virtual desktops.In the system tray the icons are for network settings, klipper , sound, desktop notifier, kwallet, korganiser and notifications and also clock calender.
Beauty and aesthetic
Pclinuxos kde has lot of customization for folks who love customizing their distros . It has normal standard kde wallpapers and application icons are very pleasant but only wallpaper with pclinuxos theme was one.Actually as its independent distro it would have added wallpapers according to os theme but still you have to satisfy with one more wallpaper with os logo will not increase size of distro .
Applications available in pclinuxos are lots more as in usual kde edition than other distros .
More software is available in the project's repositories, but I suspect many people won't need more than what is provided for us at install time. Application wise it is having healthy list of course firefox browser preinstalled but if you need chromium or other browser it can be found in repos Since I use smplayer but vlc can be found in default system so look how media plays in default Dragon media player and vlc media player .Dolphin 2.2 is much improved over it's predecessor and is definitely one of best file managers around.
PCLinuxOS provides codecs for music, videos well with the start of the distro .Indeed, PCLinuxOS ships everything you need and successfully played Youtube Flash videos and my mp3 music in my favourite clementine music player .
It comes with an classical default application launcher according to Pclinuxos theme .
Pclinuxos control centre is a nice feature but still it has another system kde setting manager to set various thing to customize distro .PCLinuxOS Control Centre, a setting manager which makes it easy to find and launch applications designed to handle specific fields of system management Here.
From above its seen that its
allowing us to configure network services, manage user accounts and working
with hard / external devices , work with the firewall ,security controls, change boot settings and set
up network shares.I had issue when going through Indian language websites as It couldn't read it as shown so installed Gujarati fonts which are found in repos and see how it looks and how Indian language fonts look below.
It played my language sites well.
It doesn't have inbuilt cloud application but you can use dropbox ,spideroak ,yandex etc .Only dropbox is Pre-installed in os others you will have to download from their sites respectively.Also to see how it handles third party repos installed comodo antivirus and wuala using rpm installer , comodo installed properly but wuala just refused .
Hardware integration
I ran PCLinuxOS on my laptop {dual-core 2 GHz CPU, 4GB of RAM, Intel video card and atheros wireless card }and found the distribution tunned well with my hardware. Bluetooth ,wifi , touchpad , sound card ,graphic card etc worked well within my use for days and seems it has been well configured hardware integration for use and everything work out of box for me .Nvidia drivers are available in repos.Also brightness and volume keys worked out of box for me .
If you setup the internet while running the live session , PCLinuxOS then connect set up automatically and network card on my laptop was picked up straight after installation .
Wireless connection differs everywhere so you have to change the wireless connection clicking the network icon in the system tray which brings up a screen similar to the one displayed above and as you can see I had two networks available for me.
Actual performance of cpu while nothing runs in background .Performance wise it consumes around 1gb ram actually nothing running in background.
Some other screenshots .
HERE
KDE Full Monty,Minime , KDE version
Apart fom that you can also get LXDE and XFCE, which are also nice editions.
On their website,
PCLinuxOS "So Cool Ice Cubes are Jealous"
.Actually I was thinking of reviewing their full monty kde 64 bit 2013.07 edition , what I love about this edition as lots of useful software comes pre-installed . The iso were downloaded past night the recent iso 2013.07 kde full monty edition and kde 64 bit edition and then made a live usb of it and even burned dvd full monty edition but it refuses to boot in live mode on my laptop {Dell} it was just not able to boot what's the problem that I didn't understood . so looked in my iso wallet found a old copy of 64 bit kde by texstar 2013.04 edition . so burned out a dvd of it and fired on dell laptop and started the installation process wizard. From installer noted that the installation steps haven't changed from previous versions, so I'll skip that part.Thus pclinuxos installed on my system fine as ,it all takes about 10 minutes to install for me ,
After reboot steps like creating a regular user account with a password. and then we are brought to a colourful graphical login screen greeted with a message as shown below as since its rolling release plz update uor repos .
PCLinuxOS supports ext3, ext4, JFS, XFS and Reiser file systems .It gives an option to choose LILO or GRUB as our boot loader and change its settings as provided and also set up a system user password on our boot menu after reboot .Let's just say the process was fast, easy to understand by novice users.So actually by installing pclinuxos old version ie 2013.04 kde edition got a chance to test rolling updates and upgrade to 2013.07 kde edition how os fairly handles it so started the upgrade process as shown by synaptic package manager as shown around 844 mb updates so started installing the stuff.
Here kernel image of os installed in kinfo centre before upgrade .
For more installation detail look at this article link old but still similar install process which can be understood easily . http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-pclinuxos-2010-kde
After installation now screen I get from Grub to login gui in 1 minute . As surprise my display screens weren't configured properly by default, display shown was around 1024 x768 somewhat smaller so changed ie to 1366 x768 and rebooted my lappy but again it reverses to 1024 x768 screen ? this is happening after every reboot.
I didn't understood but avoided it to see that after rolling upgrades and updates whether my problem solves or not let see and here update process seems to be almost finished writing from pclinuxos desktop .
Even used terminal command actually its a mix bag of debian like terminal line up and rpm packages like mandrake into one .
while upgrading got stuff like this
So I configured card which is default set to intel graphics card as shown below.Now I configured to 1366 x768 monitor screen as shown below
My mention of above problem of display still exist it reverts to 1024 x768 but it should be 1366 x768 its not solved , this is only issue I am facing, hope it solved and taken note by developers ,that my screen to use a lower resolution than what I just wanna say vertical space of my screen is used, but large portions of the right and left as shown above on my problem stuff is left blank . so I visited KDE System Settings panel which allowed me to change my resolution and then it worked flawlessly but after reboot problem lies as it is .
PCLinuxOS repository Package management is through Synaptic package manager. Ubuntu or Deepin Software center like stuff should come up in Pclinuxos as just it will appeal more newcomer linux users. Advanced users, however , hardly care about synaptic or any software center and rely more on terminal for their work . here seems synaptic package manager used its very old but by performance it worked well as compared to ubuntu synaptic package manager ie 0.75 .
Now my upgrade has just finished lets see how rolling update delivered my desktop .
Now you can see its updated to kde 4.10.5 but linux kernel is not upgraded or no pop up nothing to upgrade linux kernel by default that suprising to me .It should by default upgrade to linux kernel 3.4.55 but its not .So now once again fired up my synaptic manager and searched kernel to see is there any option for linux kernel 3.4.55and installed it as shown below .
So again rebooted my system it took around 15 minutes to show gui desktop kde , so again rebooted but there seems to be some lag in this kernel its taking longer time around 3 minutes to boot into kde gui , ? this happening that I dont seem to understand . True to its performance its updated the system well nothing seems to be breaking everything fine had same issue what were there before.When we open the application menu there are many sub-category, each one packed full of software. Many of the programs supplied out of the box are KDE applications, but PCLinuxOS also supplies packages which are inbuilt just works fine as shown
Taskbar contains a menu icon, a series of quick launch icons and in the bottom right a system tray with system icons and a clock.
From left to right you have the icons which brings up the menu, show desktop, configure your desktop, configure your computer, a file manager and virtual desktops.In the system tray the icons are for network settings, klipper , sound, desktop notifier, kwallet, korganiser and notifications and also clock calender.
Beauty and aesthetic
Pclinuxos kde has lot of customization for folks who love customizing their distros . It has normal standard kde wallpapers and application icons are very pleasant but only wallpaper with pclinuxos theme was one.Actually as its independent distro it would have added wallpapers according to os theme but still you have to satisfy with one more wallpaper with os logo will not increase size of distro .
Applications available in pclinuxos are lots more as in usual kde edition than other distros .
- Office: LibreOffice 3.6 suite, Okular Document viewer, Korganizer, Kcalc, KEuroCalc
- Internet: Umtsmon 3G mobile, XChat IRC , FileZilla, Firefox 17, Konqueror, Kopete IM, KRDC Remote Desktop Client, kFlickr, KGet, KGmailNotifier,Choqok Microblogging client, Dropbox ,Krfb desktop Sharing, Ktorrent, Skype 2.2, TeamViewer 7, Thunderbird 17.
- Graphics: AquireImages, DigiKAM, DNGConverter, GIMP 2.8, Gwenview, Panorama batch processor & stitcher, Ebook viewer, ExpoBlending, LRF viewer, Photo Layout manager,Inkscape, KolourPaint, Ksnapshot, ImageMagick, kFlickr,Xsane Image scanning, ShowFoto .
- Multimedia: Clementine,Imagination, Video DVD backup ,Pclos Audio converter & FLV/MP4 player, Juk music player, KsCD, Dragon player, , Kamerka webcam, TVtime television player, VLC 2 , Media info ,
- Accessories: Ark Archiving tool, Konsole, Kwallet management ,Knotes, Kcalc, Kwrite, PCLOS Live USB creator, Klipper, KGpg encryption tool, Kjots notes, nepomuk backup, Q7z 7zip GUI, K3b disk burning, HP Device Manager
- Others: Unetbootin , pclinuxos live usb creator ,Virtualbox .
More software is available in the project's repositories, but I suspect many people won't need more than what is provided for us at install time. Application wise it is having healthy list of course firefox browser preinstalled but if you need chromium or other browser it can be found in repos Since I use smplayer but vlc can be found in default system so look how media plays in default Dragon media player and vlc media player .Dolphin 2.2 is much improved over it's predecessor and is definitely one of best file managers around.
PCLinuxOS provides codecs for music, videos well with the start of the distro .Indeed, PCLinuxOS ships everything you need and successfully played Youtube Flash videos and my mp3 music in my favourite clementine music player .
It comes with an classical default application launcher according to Pclinuxos theme .
Pclinuxos control centre is a nice feature but still it has another system kde setting manager to set various thing to customize distro .PCLinuxOS Control Centre, a setting manager which makes it easy to find and launch applications designed to handle specific fields of system management Here.
It played my language sites well.
It doesn't have inbuilt cloud application but you can use dropbox ,spideroak ,yandex etc .Only dropbox is Pre-installed in os others you will have to download from their sites respectively.Also to see how it handles third party repos installed comodo antivirus and wuala using rpm installer , comodo installed properly but wuala just refused .
Hardware integration
I ran PCLinuxOS on my laptop {dual-core 2 GHz CPU, 4GB of RAM, Intel video card and atheros wireless card }and found the distribution tunned well with my hardware. Bluetooth ,wifi , touchpad , sound card ,graphic card etc worked well within my use for days and seems it has been well configured hardware integration for use and everything work out of box for me .Nvidia drivers are available in repos.Also brightness and volume keys worked out of box for me .
If you setup the internet while running the live session , PCLinuxOS then connect set up automatically and network card on my laptop was picked up straight after installation .
Wireless connection differs everywhere so you have to change the wireless connection clicking the network icon in the system tray which brings up a screen similar to the one displayed above and as you can see I had two networks available for me.
Actual performance of cpu while nothing runs in background .Performance wise it consumes around 1gb ram actually nothing running in background.
HERE
PCLinuxOS comes in various editions.Full Monty is a 4GB box of wonder consisting almost all application
like a bag loaded with full of useful stuff and the KDE desktop
defaults to workable Activities.MiniME is a lightstuff or stripped down image of full monty edition and the idea of MiniME is to
start with the basics and install what you like .The KDE full version is more than 1gb image that includes a popular set of
applications such as GIMP, Skype, Virtualbox, Okular,
digiKam, LibreOffice,Inkscape etc and
also non free and free extra drivers included in it .
Apart fom that you can also get LXDE and XFCE, which are also nice editions.
The PCLinuxOS Magazine
Now one thing to tell eventhough not using Pclinuxos enjoyed reading this magazine from long time Every month a magazine is released for PCLinuxOS. . I would like to recommend reading the edition for January 2013 http://www.pclinuxos.com/?p=1783
if you are installing PCLinuxOS for the first time and wanted to install it from scratchas it provides a really good tutorial.
TIME TO CONCLUSION
For me
With pclinuxos having issue with related to booting graphics card on my hardware since its annoy me everytime to set resolution to desired mode so I will stay away from it for some time hope that issue related to it is sorted out otherwise seems to be good distro pclinuxos .
For Public
PCLinuxOS aims to please and provide a smooth out-of-the-box experience with everything working . PCLinuxOS is one of the few distributions where the terminal application is not available at starting point and honestly speaking you will never need it. It has very active community support and very good documentation which just makes your life easy. Performance wise it is very smooth to use and visually pleasing .The plus point it has great control centre which is not found among other kde distros and simple to use and doesn't complicate things . Every release comes with a better user interface, and the latest release, 2013.07 is impressively sleek and well-organized .I would probably recommend to skip the live distribution kde standard and just go straightforward to full monty kde option and try this out which is a powerpack kde distro to all new and old linux users .
U can try it using ,
1. usb transfer.
2. suse image writer
3. burn dvd
NOTE
For more information visit their site .
you can download both 32bit and 64 bit Pclinuxos from here.here
At last if you like my review plz comment , plz note comment inspires to write more and keep the blog blooming and you can also like me on my facebook page here
if you are installing PCLinuxOS for the first time and wanted to install it from scratchas it provides a really good tutorial.
TIME TO CONCLUSION
For me
With pclinuxos having issue with related to booting graphics card on my hardware since its annoy me everytime to set resolution to desired mode so I will stay away from it for some time hope that issue related to it is sorted out otherwise seems to be good distro pclinuxos .
For Public
PCLinuxOS aims to please and provide a smooth out-of-the-box experience with everything working . PCLinuxOS is one of the few distributions where the terminal application is not available at starting point and honestly speaking you will never need it. It has very active community support and very good documentation which just makes your life easy. Performance wise it is very smooth to use and visually pleasing .The plus point it has great control centre which is not found among other kde distros and simple to use and doesn't complicate things . Every release comes with a better user interface, and the latest release, 2013.07 is impressively sleek and well-organized .I would probably recommend to skip the live distribution kde standard and just go straightforward to full monty kde option and try this out which is a powerpack kde distro to all new and old linux users .
U can try it using ,
1. usb transfer.
2. suse image writer
3. burn dvd
NOTE
For more information visit their site .
you can download both 32bit and 64 bit Pclinuxos from here.here
At last if you like my review plz comment , plz note comment inspires to write more and keep the blog blooming and you can also like me on my facebook page here
No comments:
Post a Comment