pclinucOS
 

Thought i would give my views on pclinuxOS, Texstars "spin-off" of Mandrake Linux. pclinuxOS comes on a live cd ala knoppix, and can be installed to the hardrive using the live-cd installer wich has a mere 6 "next" clicks plus setting up root password and users. so how does this live cd Differ from Mandrake and other live cd's? well although the kernel isn't a cutting edge 2.6.x kernel (2.4.x) if u install pclinux os u can easily upgrade the kernel later (more on that in a moment). First to the "goodies" you do get that you don't in Mandrake (i mean as standard from the install as u can easily download these for mandrake), Nvidia drivers compiled and ready to run (was pleasent surprise seeing the nvidia splash screen on X start-up) , java is install as is flash player and real player (all embedded for Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox and Konqueror) yes Mozilla Firefox is included as well, if you are in to file shareing you get apollon (uses both fasttrack (kazaa) and gnutella servers) and you get limewire and also bittorrent all configured and ready to use. you will also find the menu's are well sorted, Texstar Knows what a desktop linux should be like. as you will see about 4 mins after you install the cd. Rpm managment is through apt-get and synaptic or kpackager, apt get seems to work as it does in debian based distro's and has yet to provide me with any install issues with dependences. you may get the feeling i like this distro... I do, so much so that i replace my Mandrake 10 Official with this distro.. altho it must be said that this distro is heavily mandrake based and uses all your favourite "drak" tools to configure your desktop pleasure. and uses the drakconf control panel with the exception of package management mentioned earlier. OK thats the upsides.. no for the niggles... and they really are nit picking... if you are going to dual boot Windows XP and this distro 2 things to tell about 1. when lilo installed to the MBR (assuming u installed to /dev/hdax) it leaves out windows... you reboot and only pclinuxos is listed.. this is easily fixed in drakconf however. 2. i'm not sure if it was me or not but i could not get the partition manager to resize a NTFS partition. i had to do this first by using mandrake 10 official cd1 (letting mandrake installer get as far as package selection b4 rebooting). other issues are the time from insertion of the CD to the Gui altho this is basically booting a fully fledged Mandrake desktop this is easily forgiven next... ok i'm thinking... i'm thinking... nope can't think of any :D anyway i've typed enough... so i'll leave you with the system specs on the hardware used (although no windows is installed on home machine used for this the compaq evo310 crap at work was the one with lilo and partition issues)

Amd Duron 1200
512 MB SDram (pc133)
1x80 gig WD ide HD
1x40gig IBM ide HD
48x12x48 Lite-on-it CD/RW
8x DVD rom
Nvidia Geforce mx440 128MB video

hope u enjoyed my mini review on what is an excellent distro

oops i put this post in wrong place.. should have been distro reviews... i'll remember for next time

Let me join in on the cheering, this one is just super. So far I've tried Suse 9.1 personal, FC2, Mandrake 10.0 Official, Knoppix, Kanotix, etc. etc. and this one just blew me away. It's easy to install like you said, only problem for me was the automatic partitioning, which didn't work on an empty disk, but cfdisk fixed that.
And networkcard wasn't detected, but MMC fixed that. Crap about the graphics driver though, since I own an Ati card, but maybe some day. What else........no nothing yet, but I just installed this, so it needs a little more probing.
But for the windows user, who is looking for a switch to Linux, should really go for this one. It's a ceeper. And the fact that it is a LiveCd makes the switch easier, so you can test it before installing.

Atle

yea sorry about the ATI drivers i mis-read a post b4 i downloaded it, and as i have an nvidia card i didn't notice ... but i still like it... there are a few items to sort like pygtk having an odd version number which means me installing, uninstalling (repeat as necessary) gyach-enhanced as it looks for <=1.99 and 0.8.x.mdk for pygtk:)) apart from that i'm happy