Another Opinion Among Many

Some of you who have been wanting to try Linux but haven’t known what to go with the first time might be in for a treat if you install PCLinuxOS. This distribution has been well put together from the beginning. Now, I haven’t tried every release, but I’ve worked with about 6 updates and have never had any serious problems using it. Information can be found here. The download page on the PCLinuxOS website is “offline” at the moment, which likely means Test Release 3 soon. We’llbe seeing a “Release” soon, at the rate.

Before getting into anything, I’ll let you know that I installed on my Frankensteined computer. Here are the relavent specs:

• Intel P-III @ 1000mhz
• Asus CUV4X-C Motherboard
• Realtek 8139 based ethernet card
• C-Media CM8738 based sound card
• Smallish Seagate U-series hard drive capable of ATA66 (UDMA4)
• CD Rom out of the old Sun UltraSparc 5 (and the power switch, too)
• 256MB SDRam (commodity Azenram PC-133, if you care)
• ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 128MB
• Underpowered power supply from a Compaq

Its nice to see that the boot is getting to be faster, considering that this is primarily a Live CD. Who wants to wait 5 minutes while your snazzy CD operating system gets itself configured? Not me!

Like most Linux Distros produced, PCLinuxOS offers a few boot options. I’ve always liked the way that Textar presents a hybrid between the Knoppix-style boot, where you can tweak the bootup with a copious number of flags, or just pick the first default, or second without the framebuffer. The boot messages started flying up the screen an, after a few seconds, I was presented with a screen to select my keyboard layout. Because I have an english one, I chose the default US English (although I bet there was one that would enable the “Window” keys as well). I was then asked if the time on the computer was to be considered local time or UTC. I chose Local and picked the Atlantic timezone. I was then brought to a smart-looking login prompt.

The choices for users were “root” or “guest”, with passwords that were the same as the user name. If I was just playing around and wanted to to surf the net or whatever, I would have selected “Guest”, but, as I was already sure that I was going to test the hard drive install, I logged in as Root. I must say, that even on a CD, the log in was pretty quick. It reminded me of a prelinked system.

There was a reasonable amount of “eye candy” set by default, but my aging computer didn’t seem to slow down or be sluggish, like with many other Live CD Distros I have tried. The desktop was clean with only 3 icons on it – Home (my /home directory where all my stuff gets saved), My Computer (a list of all available block devices), and Trash (a place to drag items destined for deletion, like Windows™ Recycle Bin). The taskbar is partly transparent.

One thing that Textar has done with the menu is to organize it, like Mandriva has done. For new users who are looking for an application, the task-based categories will be welcome. A peeve for me is that it seems to be a bit too subdivided, meaning that I have to go into a submenu of a submenu to open the app that I want. And subdividing the “Games” menu in the “More Applications” menu might put off a few kids at first. Of course, games are what doesn’t come installed by default. Most everything else does, though. There’s an office suite, graphics editors, text editors, internet tools, like browser, chat, and IM clients, as well as sound and multimedia tools.

I have some preferences and favorites as far as software goes, so I fired up the package manager front end, Synaptic and started shopping for goodies. I’ve installed a few extra pieces of software, like the Win32 codecs, so that I can play whatever there is out there, regardless of format. I also got a healthy dose of games, including a few that had challenged the X-server before. I have installed Open Arena (as should everyone, unless you’re against shooting and blood and guts), Planet Penguin Racer (a free offshoot of the wildly popular Tux Racer), and Frozen Bubble, all of which require 3D accelleration to work properly to be playable.What to my wondering eyes should I see but smooth playing of the above mentioned games. They were sweet (as well as I could play them – I’m in no way a gamer, at all). There were no hard lockups, causing a reboot from the power switch! Whatever Texstar and the team have done with the configuration to get my 9500 to work is great!

After more use, I find that the 3D rendering problems that I had encountered on other distros is still not present. No lockups yet. The volume was set properly for the sound card. Other distros would not produce any real amount of volume at all, which is strange. Perhaps the PCLinuxOS team has a member who tweaked the driver for his/her own card. Whatever works, as far as I am concerned!

I did find, however, that either after an update of some packages, or just something that I didn’t notice before, I had no enabled swap space, although I had a 512MB partition reserved for such a purpose. It was no problem to get it working, but the newbie might encounter a bit of problem with it. With the 256MB of RAM in my machine, I noticed that tasks I was used to doing would grind the computer to a halt, which proves that I need swap with that much RAM. Here’s what would typically overwhelm my machine:

While running KDE with all the GUI goodness that most distros enable for a p-III 1000mhz (about 3/4 to 4/5 of them), including the default transparent taskbar, bouncing cursors, and fancy tool tips, I will have Firefox open, usually with 2 or 3 tabs at least.

In addition, I’ll possibly have Kopete running (on a side note, Kopete is really going places, giving Gaim a run for the money) to chat with my Yahoo! contacts, and sometimes with Amarok tuned to a Shoutcast station (see previous post for which one). I may also have a terminal window open, often Konsole, to do quick and dirty stuff.

That will often run alright at that point. But, for some reason, and this happens on any distro, regardless of version or vintage, opening a session of Konqueror in Super User Mode will bring the machine to its proverbial knees. That’s when swap is nice to have, as this move seems to suck all the remaining RAM into itself and slow the computer to a crawl. I like to play with a sandbox web server with Wordpress to test bleeding edge nightly builds and to hack away at new themes (or elements of this one) without doing it “live” in front of everyone (I still do that once in a while for quick stuff). So, until I get off my duff and learn how to change permissions of the contents of an entire directory at once, using Konqueror to do so by highlighting all files and right-clicking is the easiest way for me now.

So, the newbie asks, how do you get swap if you don’t already? Its actually quite trivial if you already have the partition created and formatted as swap. If you don’t have that already, you’ll have to take a few extra steps, which you can search for with Google or Yahoo! search (particularly some very good Red Hat/ Fedora documentation to the effect). Here’s how to enable swap that you already have. Assume that the partition that your swap space is on is labeled /dev/hda2

• open a terminal window and become root or super user (Xterm or Konsole will do)
• type, as super user, swapon /dev/hda2 and your swap should be enabled. You can verify this by using the free command or top, which should tell you if you’re now using it.
• to enable on the next boot, open /etc/fstab with a text editor. I usually use nano, as its easy to learn and powerful enough for most tasks.
  • nano -w /etc/fstab
  • kdesu kate /etc/fstab from run box
  • gksu gedit /etc/fstab from run box in Gnome

  enter a new line:

• /dev/hda2 swap swap defaults 0 0

Save that and you’ll have your swap mounted on boot the next time. More info on what these parts of the file mean can be found at Tuxfiles and other places.

I’ve been using PCLinuxOS as my daily OS and its not let me down, except for that swap issue. I have yet to seriously try the 3D desktop included in any detail yet. The extent of my test was to see if Beryl would actually work, which it seemed to do. I’ll try it in more depth in the future an, perhaps, either add to this article or create a follow up, relating to Beryl. From what I did see, it was faster and seemingly more stable than I’ve seen on the 3 other distros I tried it on so far. Of course, that may be the issue with the video driver (I’m using the x.org driver, by the way – not the ATI proprietary fglrx driver, as its built against an old version of X).

So, for the summation to now? Get it if you’ve never tried Linux before and want to. Its still polished , complete, and friendly, without cruft. The administration tools that Textar and co have developed are superior to many out there, in my opinion – even Ubuntu’s. If you’re an experienced user, this distro won’t let you down, either. Its the best of Mandriva, pulled off to the side, stabilized, polished, souped up, turbocharged, and presented with great support (the forums are excellent). You’ll like using apt-get and the Synaptic front-end to pull in your packages. I haven’t found anything seriously missing from the mirror, either. Its all good.

Please read the comments to this article. There’s some good stuff in them (some good outside comments – thanks guys!)