PCLinuxOS 2007 : Has the power of command line been sacrificed for GUI ?
 

Hi,
I had heard a lot of good things about PCLOS 2007 and decided to go it a go on an spare machine I was given. Installation and configuration were all fairly straightforward and there are plenty of easy GUI methods to configure and maintain your system. The question is that has the power of command line been reduced in PCLOS ? By that I mean have they reduced the command set and the number of arguments one can pass to the various commands ? I noticed this was done in DSL where one could not pass various arguments to specific commands. I prefer using command line and was wonder if in PCLOS this has been sacrificed so not to be as full or robust as in the other heavyweight Linux distros.

Thanks,
Uncle

Can't say that I've noticed. The best way to test this would be to try issuing a command with arguments.

Generally, on Linux the GUI is simply a simplified way to access existing commands via the command line. The command line tools should all still be there.

Thanks. I guess with DSL being no more than 44Mb in size one had to expect some down-sizing.
Overall PCLOS seems very impressive. Challenging Ubuntu perhaps ?

All good wishes,
Uncle

Maybe if it had the same kind of media exposure!

For whatever it is worth, I noticed what you are talking about. The only example I remember right off was certain firestarter commands (/etc/init.d/firestarter status) didn't return the expected info as with other distros. (And yes I had to manually configure it because Shorewall is the firewall of choice there - so I may have done something weird). There were other instances but I can't remember specifics. I think they try to make stuff really easy for newbies and they succeed very well at that. I got the impression that you'd have to know a little about Linux in order to undo the distro's "default" settings, i.e. it seems like things are "locked" for lack of a better word at least for someone new to Linux. Anyway, I thought it was just me so.........?

PCLinuxOS is based off Mandriva, so some of its oddities are a result of using the Mandriva base. The commands available are quite similar to those in most Linux distros, but you also get a lot of nifty GUI tools from Mandriva.