LinuxQuestions.org - New Turkish Distributions Pardus 1.0

Just tried it.

No bad at all. Installed into hdc30 so it broke the 137Gb barrier. Debian, Knoppix and possibly Fedora will have a job to be installed at such a high partition No. 30 and need an all-out effort to be booted from this position. I can see the Sata at installation time too.

I am using its Firefox.

Absolutely no problem in the installation.

But couldn't boot up itself though!

Fault : (Possibly only in English part of the installer)

Grub claimed a file could be found and this is its original /boot/grub/menu.lst

title= Pardus 1.0
root (hd0,29)
kernel (hd0,29)/boot/kernel-2.6.14.4-15 root=/dev/hdc30 video=vesafb:nomtrr,pmipal,ywrap,1024x768-32@60 splash=silent,fadein,theme:pardus CONSOLE=/dev/tty1 lang=en quiet
initrd=(hd0,29)/boot/initrd-2.6.14.4-15

The = shouldn't have been there! I proceeded to boot Padus up first time with a Grub floppy, use cat command to see Grub's menu.lst and manually boot it with the following commands

root (hd0,29)
kernel (hd0,29)/boot/kernel-2.6.14.4-15 ro root=/dev/hdc30
initrd (hd0,29)/boot/initrd-2.6.14.4-15
boot

cause I couldn't be bother with the parameters. I edited the = out but still it couldn't boot itself. I omitted the parameters to do a grub-install into /dev/hdc30 but the same fault persisted. I noticed that Grub has been doctored because I couldn't find its version number which has been covereded or truncated. May be an older version of Grub was used or the "re-mastered" Grub has a problem booting beyond the 137Gb barrier.

Minor Comment A : I think the installer should allow the boot loader to be installed into the root partition, as it is essential if a user is afraid of losing the Windows MBR. Pardus hasn't got this alternative at the moment. I put it in the MBR of the 2nd disk hdc but it failed to boot because the = ( I used the Grub floppy to boot hdc's MBR).

Minor Comment B : I am an old school and believe all kernel should be named starting with "vmlinuz" but Pardus uses the name "kernel". From the record I keep only Ututu uses the name "kernel" too and Lunar 1.6 has no name except "2.6.4.1-normal". 95 of the others use "vmlinuz". This is not a criticism but Linux is universal and standard names are better if things are not out of control.

Padus is the 98th distros in my box. I have installed a few foreign distros that I couldn't read any of their text but surviving on only the standard icons or familiarity with the installers.

The 98 distros installed in my box originated from 28 countries and 3 different regions. The contributions are from Argentina(1), Asia(1), Australia(4), Austria(1), Belgium(1), Brazil(1), Canada(6), China(2), Czech(1), Europe(1), France(5), Germany(10), Global(3), Hungary(2), Isle of Man(4), Israel(2), Italy(1), Japan(3), Netherland(2), New Zealand(1), Norway(3), Poland(1), Puerto Rico(1), S Korea(1), Sweden(1), Switzerland(1), Syria(1), Taiwan(1), UK(3), USA(32), Turkey(1)

There are some repeats in the above like I have FC2, FC3, FC4 and FC5 all from USA.

Based on my exposure to these distros I would say Padus team deserves a big congratulation, bearing in mind this is version 1.0.

Padus does have a feel of a totally re-mastered system and a good quality desktop. I like it.