This gotta be the one stop destination for all you guys looking forward to switch to Linux. I think Suse will still be second no matter how close it might look to Windows. Its almost an year that I had my first date with PCLinuxOS. I was pretty comfortable with it from day 1. It came well bundled with a host of applications, both Geeky and non-Geeky. But what steals the show is Synaptic, the package manager. For those who had miserable time on Fedora unwrapping RPMs from the command line spending sleepless nights wondering about the missing libraries ( missing dependencies, thats what you call them..right? ) PCLOS comes as a dose of relief. I agree these days all distros come with a package manager but man what I mean here is THE THING REALLY INSTALLS IT!!!. There are ample applications already in the distro and I promise you need not install anything extra for at least the first 4-5 weeks of usage.
OK...Editors First. Well, Since I never went beyond the vi editor before, Kwrite proved to be a blessing. Highlighted keywords and support for various languages meant I never had to look at anything else. It was fun going through some build files when opened up with kwrite ( Well actually I had quite a bad time on DOS/XP...). I was looking around if there was a Latex editor too but guess you need to look into the package manager and download that. There aren't many development environments though, one reason could be the target audience being home users who are mainly concerned with office applications, multimedia and the Internet.
The Internet, I must mention, is the most important or rather most indispensable part of the experience. And make sure you connect to it well. I don't think the Package manager would have made much sense had I not had Internet. I have an ISP that uses a private proxy ( which is also the DNS ....named 172.16.1.1 ) connected to a public proxy. So all I had to do was to install a client for my machine that provides an authenticated connection to 172.16.1.1. I managed to get a client software after long and successfully connected to the Internet. I dont think it was a piece of cake but PCLOS makes it sure that you are just 2 clicks away from all sort of network settings. If you are using PCLOS and unable connect to internet, feel free to share :-)
Office applications, its better I speak least about :-(. Though it has the Open office application pack but dont expect much from it. It wont open your MS Office files properly and add unwanted renderations that would be a pain in neck to correct. Online Office packs arent that great either and despite being a complete non-MS user I still agree docx actually rocks! I would post my discovery in CAPS if I ever come up with office application that can do me good.
Multimedia is the best thing here, especially if you have used other Linux distros. You have Amarok audio player and a host of video players like KMplayer and Kaffiene ( these two might suffice ) that play all sort of file formats on earth. VLC could be added later if that was your favorite player on Windows, but guess you might not need it. The quality of sound though is not as good as what you might find with ITunes or Windows Media Player 11 but the fact that it plays proprietary formats like wma and licensed mp3 gives it a certain edge over rest of the distros. And if you're thinking of putting Amarok on your Fedora and claiming you could do the same from there, man you're certainly inviting those dependency errors you might have already got used to by now :P
System Admin tools are comfortably accessible from the KMenu from the desktop and even the most naive could make out how to configure file servers, web servers and even remote desktop. Archiving and compressing may not be a very comfortable experience. While you may literally need to run scripts to compress/decompress rar archives, you better keep your fingers crossed while writing a DVD with K3B. The result could swing either ways :P. CD burning is something K3B does with poise, DVD exactly the other way.
A host of command line tools ( Now with every distro ) adds a lot of functionality that may not be evident to a home user but thats what Linux distros are best at. The "mkisofs" command could help you take a backup in an .iso format which you might agree is a good utility given that you switch your distro every month. I suggest one should make a habit of opening a shell prompt at bootup and try commands like -help and "man" quite regularly to get used to the command prompt. Trust me, No book can teach you Linux, only manual pages can :-)
Ardent Internet surfers like me always look for a Torrent Client, a P2P transfer application and some LAN connectivity tool. I got the very best of 3 in PCLOS. Ktorrent and Frostwire is something I use very often. There are instant messaging clients unlike many other distros, so you could log on to yahoo and AIM. Jabber support is there but for Gtalk you still need to use your browser. Samba could make sure you can connect to a Windows machine with a cross cable. I may post more on Samba later. I love it from the very depth of my heart. Was very helpful taking backups :-)
Thats all you need to know to go for your own first hand experience with PCLOS. I aint quite a Linux freak but I truly love this particular one. It used to give me "syslog" messages when CPU got overheated and would work from RAM when my Hard disk would accidently get disconnected ( Now you might be wondering how the hell can HDisk get disconnected..Well, trust me, in my case it happens quite regularly :P I'll send you a video of how that happens :D ). PCLOS gave me a Nirvana feel, a constant companion I would never wanna give up for the rest of my life.
P.S - If you have queries regarding PCLinux or any other distro please feel free to share with me at Amey.Khalatkar@gmail.com
OK...Editors First. Well, Since I never went beyond the vi editor before, Kwrite proved to be a blessing. Highlighted keywords and support for various languages meant I never had to look at anything else. It was fun going through some build files when opened up with kwrite ( Well actually I had quite a bad time on DOS/XP...). I was looking around if there was a Latex editor too but guess you need to look into the package manager and download that. There aren't many development environments though, one reason could be the target audience being home users who are mainly concerned with office applications, multimedia and the Internet.
The Internet, I must mention, is the most important or rather most indispensable part of the experience. And make sure you connect to it well. I don't think the Package manager would have made much sense had I not had Internet. I have an ISP that uses a private proxy ( which is also the DNS ....named 172.16.1.1 ) connected to a public proxy. So all I had to do was to install a client for my machine that provides an authenticated connection to 172.16.1.1. I managed to get a client software after long and successfully connected to the Internet. I dont think it was a piece of cake but PCLOS makes it sure that you are just 2 clicks away from all sort of network settings. If you are using PCLOS and unable connect to internet, feel free to share :-)
Office applications, its better I speak least about :-(. Though it has the Open office application pack but dont expect much from it. It wont open your MS Office files properly and add unwanted renderations that would be a pain in neck to correct. Online Office packs arent that great either and despite being a complete non-MS user I still agree docx actually rocks! I would post my discovery in CAPS if I ever come up with office application that can do me good.
Multimedia is the best thing here, especially if you have used other Linux distros. You have Amarok audio player and a host of video players like KMplayer and Kaffiene ( these two might suffice ) that play all sort of file formats on earth. VLC could be added later if that was your favorite player on Windows, but guess you might not need it. The quality of sound though is not as good as what you might find with ITunes or Windows Media Player 11 but the fact that it plays proprietary formats like wma and licensed mp3 gives it a certain edge over rest of the distros. And if you're thinking of putting Amarok on your Fedora and claiming you could do the same from there, man you're certainly inviting those dependency errors you might have already got used to by now :P
System Admin tools are comfortably accessible from the KMenu from the desktop and even the most naive could make out how to configure file servers, web servers and even remote desktop. Archiving and compressing may not be a very comfortable experience. While you may literally need to run scripts to compress/decompress rar archives, you better keep your fingers crossed while writing a DVD with K3B. The result could swing either ways :P. CD burning is something K3B does with poise, DVD exactly the other way.
A host of command line tools ( Now with every distro ) adds a lot of functionality that may not be evident to a home user but thats what Linux distros are best at. The "mkisofs" command could help you take a backup in an .iso format which you might agree is a good utility given that you switch your distro every month. I suggest one should make a habit of opening a shell prompt at bootup and try commands like -help and "man" quite regularly to get used to the command prompt. Trust me, No book can teach you Linux, only manual pages can :-)
Ardent Internet surfers like me always look for a Torrent Client, a P2P transfer application and some LAN connectivity tool. I got the very best of 3 in PCLOS. Ktorrent and Frostwire is something I use very often. There are instant messaging clients unlike many other distros, so you could log on to yahoo and AIM. Jabber support is there but for Gtalk you still need to use your browser. Samba could make sure you can connect to a Windows machine with a cross cable. I may post more on Samba later. I love it from the very depth of my heart. Was very helpful taking backups :-)
Thats all you need to know to go for your own first hand experience with PCLOS. I aint quite a Linux freak but I truly love this particular one. It used to give me "syslog" messages when CPU got overheated and would work from RAM when my Hard disk would accidently get disconnected ( Now you might be wondering how the hell can HDisk get disconnected..Well, trust me, in my case it happens quite regularly :P I'll send you a video of how that happens :D ). PCLOS gave me a Nirvana feel, a constant companion I would never wanna give up for the rest of my life.
P.S - If you have queries regarding PCLinux or any other distro please feel free to share with me at Amey.Khalatkar@gmail.com
The Elegant Kmenu
The Colorful Shell Prompts
8 comments:
Yup. Pclos is really one great distro. As a main debian user, this distro does rpm's right. Not only using the apt system for installing packages, it's also based off of mandriva. Why use pclos? Faster than mandriva, apt, does rpm's good. The only limit to pclos is that they're repos don't have nearly as much stuff as the debian repos do. The reason i went back to debian. If pclos had more stuff in their repos i'd stay with it. Pclos was really great while i used it.
@shamil
Yeah...I think you quite hit the bull's eye. The repos truly arent that good. Infact there aint seem to be much development going around in PCLos these days. Thanks for putting up the comments :-)
he he...looks like you're having some trouble with the commands..k/ubuntu rocks btw!
@anonymous
Yeah I got a free CD recently. Looks awesome as expected. Time to triple boot ( I have got CentOS too :P )
Has anyone heard when the next PCLOS is suppose to come out?
@ anonymous anonymous
Well yeah. I downloaded a 690 MB PCLOS 2008 Gnome version ( I work on 2007 version ). I am looking forward to explore it. The looks didnt appear that good the first time I ran it. Moreover I dont have a beryl supporting video card. Will sure post once I go through the apps :-)
The repos are not as large as ubuntu, but there are 7000+ apps there. If you havent seen recent development its because you dont know where to look. They are constantly adding updates and new packages to the repos. As for the new release I heard
May 08 but it will release when it ready, as they say. For now if you get PCLinuxOS MiniMe 2008 and install the apps you want that is pretty much the latest release from PCLOS.
Thanks for the comments gentlemen.
@anonymous
Posting the appropriate links would be helpful.
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