There was an article in LinuxFormat, a British linux magazine, comparing PCLinuxOS with Knoppix. I thought it gave PCLOS a raw deal, implying that (a) it was not meant for installing and (b) it was not easily updateable/upgradeable once installed. It also suggested that PCLOS was not a good live-CD because it lacks certain rescue tools.
I think they missed the point of PCLOS. It is an installable distro which is distributed as a Live-CD so that would-be users can test it first. Anyway I sent them a response and here it is:
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Let me start by saying that I did not send this earlier because I did not
receive my March copy of LXF until after I got the April copy!
I think David Coulson's review in LXF64 is unfair to PCLinuxOS. He criticises
it for not doing things it was never meant to do. It is not a repair disc. It
is not a disc to "demonstrate" Linux as such. Worse, he implies that it is
not specifically designed to be installed, but that is exactly what it is. He
also implies that it is not easily updated, he is totally wrong: PCLOS has
its own software repositories, and both updates and loads of other software
not on the live-CD is available, with all dependencies taken care of.
PCLinuxOS is a Desktop distro forked from Mandrake. Those who used to use the
9.x versions of Mandrake, will remember one of the software repositories you
could add by visiting the PLF's "easy urpmi" site. It was called Texstar. You
would often get new KDE builds well before Mandrake released their own, and
they were often superior, too!
I later discovered that Texstar is in fact one person, and he also helped run
the Linux forum at
http://www.pclinuxonline.com . This letter is not the
place for the ideological problems between Tex, this site, and Mandrake, but
PCLOS was conceived as a new distribution at this site. Texstar was joined by
Tom Kelly, who is behind the software used in Mandrake to master Live-CDs,
and they designed PCLOS.
You can see Tex and Tom's Mandrake history from much of PCLOS, but differences
are emerging as time goes on. An important one is that the "apt" system is
used for software updates. This is the version that uses rpms instead of deb
files. It means that (a) synaptic is used as a graphical front end, and (b)
it should be possible in future to gradually upgrade to a new version without
having to re-install the OS, (a problem for users of Mandrake and other
RPM-based distros,) something they aim to do when version 1.0 finally
arrives.
So why is it a live CD? It is a "try before you commit" thing. People possibly
migrating from Windows won't be using the CD to test networks, they'll be
seeing how good Linux is on the Desktop. In that respect, a comparison to
Knoppix is that PCLOS has a gentler, less "in your face" KDE desktop, and it
also has a start menu which is more straightforward and certainly not
overburdened. PCLOS comes in three flavours, vanilla, NVidia and ATi. _For
someone thinking of switching to Linux on their desktop, first impressions
matter.
The installation of PCLOS is about as easy as it gets, OK the repartitioning
is fraught but there's no way around that! In use, I've never seen such good
integration of things like Realplayer with Firefox. In fact, integration
generally is what's good about this distro.
PCLOS is not a "recovery method". It is a full distro in its own right,
stable, integrated, regular updates with a large software repository. It is a
drop-in replacement for Windows. Yet it is good enough for this Gentoo user
to be impressed with it as well, triple booting both distros with Win98SE. It
has a friendly forum where your problems may well be answered by Texstar
himself.
Knoppix is the "traditional" Live-CD. As such its community has asked for
rescue stuff to be included. PCLOS's priorities are different. It is made
primarily to be installed. I see it more as a much-improved version of
Mandrake.
