bareego

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Just tried thisone out, awesome eye candy indeed.

The best presentation of a distro based on enlightenment yet. Also on late 2.6.5 kernel and some bleeding edge packages.

Download is pretty small, just make sure you get it from a mirror, not from ibiblio. You really have to see it to get the awesome factor. Installed it's just a bare 1GB. Also features reiser4 which seems not to use as much overhead anymore, nice.

Also it now runs from a compressed loop on the CD so it's on the way to a live CD, haven't tried out that feature yet, though.

You want to know about partition naming, otherwise the install is pretty straight forward.
Good hardware detection thanks to kudzu and late kernel. I will write a longer review once I've used it for a while.

UPDATE
Seems there are issues installing this on any CPU lower than i686 (eg K6/2s etc). Some smaller things still have to be ironed out. Mplayer works fine for me. If you don't want to use mysql, make sure you stop it from starting, speeds things up considerably.

bareego

akshunj

Test system:
AMD Athlon-XP 1700+
Shuttle mobo w/ VIA chipset
512 MB RAM
Pioneer DVD
Plextor CD burner
NVidia GEForce 3 video
SB Live! sound

Hmmm, where to begin. First, the good:

I had this thing installed and cranking in under 15 minutes. No software choices, just a few questions about where to put it and some hardware config. The splash screen (the Matrix) is sweet! And Mozilla came FULLY loaded with java, flash, and the MPlayer plugin! This is a BIG point for me. Adding plugins to Mozilla is mindless busy work, IMHO. Also, the fonts are GREAT! How can I get these awesome fonts onto Slack??? I REALLY want to know...

Now the bad:

Who in the heck is the target audience here? I am a confessed Slackware geek. I have Slack 9.1 on the box with my cutting edge hardware that I tinker with, and a Mission Critical box that I dual-boot with Windows 2000 and PCLinuxOS. I love tinkering with Slack, but I can appreciate the desire for a home-desktop friendly version of Slack; not dumbed-down, but rather a bit more "tailored" for home use (ala Mozilla plugins, XMMS plugins, etc.). From what I read on the Peanut Linux psychadelic website, it was a "geek's distro" with some eye-candy and the latest bells and whistles, but in reality it's more like Frankenstein's monster.
The installer (based on Slack) did not give me the chance to spread the distro over more than one partition. I like to have / on one partition, and home on another. Not a huge problem since I did this by hand, but an irritation. Next the "kudzu" auto detection was worthless. It didn't configure squat, and this box has FAR from exotic specs. Slack does a WAY better job. I ended up configuring sound and ethernet by hand. Also, I have a DVD drive, as well as a CD burner. The config program would only let me configure one. Now, I don't MIND doing this stuff by hand, but why have a hadware config GUI if it is so easily broken. Then, LILO did not install properly. It was installing over a previous LILO, and I've never had the problem before. After a reboot, X seemed to work properly, as well as the rest of my hardware, but I was welcomed by XDM. XDM sucks. After all the Matrix eyecandy, I was expecting a neat GDM theme, but..... I decided that since the distro touted that it was lightweight, XDM was the logical choice. But when I logged on, I was shocked at the dozen or so applications (some redundant) that were running and waiting for me on the Enlightenment desktop. Seven or so epplets showing time, the moon, app launcher, disk mounter, uptime, mini-XMMS, and more! And then there was GkrellM, with monitors all showing the SAME thing! And let's not get into the default (and only) wallpaper. Gharish does not begin to describe it. A giant moon, the night sky, the "Gimp" cartoon fox hiding behind the moon in the sky, a starburst on the horizon, nebulae, and a giant cross in the foreground. Huh?! And a GkrellM theme to match! AND, Enlightenment tooltips enabled by default! I know some people don't know how to use Enlightenment, but the jarring tooltips won't help ANYONE! And what's with the bubbly fish on GKrellM?!

Well, since most of this is just cosmetic, I delved into the packages to see what I had. Hmmm, no KDE. I'm sure the website said KDE. Well, off to find the package manager. Surely a small distro like this had a package manager that would auto-download additional packages, perhaps resolving basic dependencies. Nothing fancy, more like Swaret maybe. NOPE!!! Nothing! The website recommends using KPackage to install, but without KDE you can't even do that! But hey, I was raised with Slack, I know how to use the CLI. I downloaded a few packages, rpm -i. and BAM!, dependency hell. And the needed packages were NOT on Peanut's FTP! WTF?! Now, I know that Peanut's days are limited, but I want to test out a couple of things besides Mozilla that I already had installed. MPlayer, right. Wrong. Here's what I got with my favorite multimedia player:

$ mplayer
MPlayer dev-CVS--3.3.2 (C) 2000-2004 MPlayer Team

CPU: Advanced Micro Devices Athlon 4 /Athlon MP/XP Palomino 1469 MHz (Family: 6, Stepping: 2)
Detected cache-line size is 64 bytes
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 1 SSE2: 0
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 3DNow 3DNowEx SSE SSE2

Reading config file /etc/mplayer.conf
Illegal instruction
***CRASH***

Again, I say, WTF?! I could download and compile the latest version myself, but that's why I got Peanut and not Slack. So, after the MPlayer crash, I decided to do one last task on Peanut. And here it is...

Man, and this whole ordeal began because I was getting tired of waiting for PCLinuxOS Preview 6. Shows me the value of patience...

--Akshun J

galen

Let me declare right from the start I support PL and I've donated time and web space to keep this worthy distro alive.
Pl has been around for awhile and it has slipped in ratings as super distros come out. PL is a solid mature and highly efficient slackware based distro.
PL was bold to introduce gcc3 gtk2 and 2.6kernel early on, and that has caused problems and that is the price of adopting new base software.

I've used many distros and continue to try several each quarter.
Where I find PL shines is in having loads of apps and services to choose. Great depth of applications, smooth fonts and speed.

PL is certainly a worthy distro as at least your 3rd distro to have on hand, think of it as a glass of milk in the midst of the cola (distro) wars


PS giving this distro a 3 rating is plain a-hole-ish

Okie

is there any official torrents? i have a broadband connection and once downloaded i can let this box seed torrents for days or weeks, i once gave Peanut a spin (aLinux now), i liked it fine it is a good distro...