Linux-Noob Forums - PCLinuxOS

Introducing PCLinuxOS 2010

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 08:33:55 +0200

The distribution itself comes on a single live CD which kicks off with a GRUB boot menu. The GRUB screen gives the user the ability to boot normally, into the live environment, into a console or via various safe modes, or to perform a media check. Additional menus along the bottom of the screen offer support for additional languages, screen resolutions and kernel options.

[img]/monthly_04_2010/post-1-12717452298278.png[/img]

Booting into the live environment presents the user with a blue-themed KDE desktop. The root and guest account passwords are displayed at the top of the screen and the application menu is displayed in the classic KDE style. Icons on the desktop provide short-cuts to the command line, the user's folders and the system's installer. Along the taskbar are icons providing the user with links to various tools to configure the desktop and to configure the computer (more on the differences between those two shortly). There are also launchers to browse the user's files and start the package manager.

The installer starts off by asking the user to partition their hard disk. The partition editor has an interesting approach to its job, where almost all the controls are either buttons or sliders. While this took a few moments for me to get used to, the layout will probably appeal to less experienced users. Once the disk has been divided up, the installer formats the drive and copies the necessary files over from the CD. This happened without any confirmation, taking me a bit by surprise as generally an installer will warn the user before wiping a partition. Once the copy process is complete, the installer asks the user to configure the boot loader. After configuring the boot loader, the installer locked up for a minute and, finally, showed me a screen asking me to "halt computer".

more > http://www.osnews.com/story/23176/Introd...nuxOS_2010

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DSL

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 02:31:02 +0200

You can get DSL (Damn Small Linux) and boot from CD/USB pen. it impressed. because it runs so fast and really small size.

30 days with PCLinuxOS,

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 19:53:56 +0100

Day 23

Well what better way to start the last week with a screenshot of my beautiful Desktop

[img]/monthly_02_2008/post-1-1201978431.jpg[/img]

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30 days with PCLinuxOS

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:14:53 +0100

Day 18

was playing around with Gimp earlier and I've noticed that since adding the 1GB of ram that gimp is practically fast !, so once again if any of you are experiencing slow response from your linux distro then upgrade your RAM !

Well hung !

I started up Openoffice calc today to make some updates to a spreadsheet I'm working on, I made a few edits when suddenly everything just hung completely (except for the mouse, that worked), i had a few things running in the background (3 terminals, xchat, pidgin, firefox with 8 tabs). The capslock key did not show the capslock LED (always a good test) and ctrl_alt_backspace did not restart X, pressing the power button did not gracefully shut the computer down either so i held it and did a dirty shutdown.

After that, I powered on again and one lost inode was deleted during the reboot.

Quote:[root@localhost anyweb]# dmesg |grep inodeext3_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 260623

EXT3-fs: hda1: 1 orphan inode deleted

Once I logged in to KDE again, I started up openoffice calc again and tried to re-edit my file, openoffice in turn told me that the file was locked and I had the option of recovering the document, i chose to do this and it loaded up the document, however the changes i was making to the doc were all but gone, luckily it wasn't a weeks worth of work (more like 5 minutes).

Now that I was working again I tried the internet, but no wireless. No ip address, hmm, as root in cli i issued my iwconfig commands again followed by dhclient and a few seconds later i had internet. To hopefully resolve this on every boot i added those two lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.local (executes scripts in there on every boot).

Compiz is working now !

I changed DM back from KDE to Gnome, and then decided I wanted to try compiz again. I enabled Compiz (using the Configure your computer icon) and then through trial and error found a fix for my lack of window-decorators (as I now know they are called).

If you click on System, Administration and then select the Compiz Fusion Icon, it will load that icon into your system tray (blue box with a white arrow..). I then right-clicked on that box and chose Select Window Decorator, it was set to GTK and I set it to Emerald. Lo and behold, borders around my windows !!

[img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1201528962.jpg[/img]

Great, I found out how to get the window-decorator's showing up on all my windows (which was essentially making Compiz unusable for me before I figured this out).

[img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1201534305.jpg[/img]

Next up i wanted to add the avant dock, but a bit of googling didn't throw up any extra repository for it (like i had with Ubuntu), so instead i hopped over to here http://code.google.com/p/avant-window-navigator/ and that website told me to go here > https://launchpad.net/awn so I did and then I grabbed the tar ball.

once done, I uncompressed the file

Code:
tar xvf avant-window-navigator-0.2.1.tar

then change directory into the newly extracted folder

cd avant-window-navigator-0.2.1

followed by ./configure

which told me the following error

Quote:checking for headers required to compile python extensions... not foundconfigure: error: could not find Python headers

So back to synaptic, I searched for libpython2.4-dev and installed it, now I got a new error

Quote:checking for PYGTK... configure: error: Package requirements (pygtk-2.0 >= 2.8.0) were not met:

No package 'pygtk-2.0' found

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you

installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Alternatively, you may set the environment variables PYGTK_CFLAGS

and PYGTK_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.

See the pkg-config man page for more details.

I googled a bit and found a reference to the same error above (more or less, it was on an Ubuntu system), and the suggested solution in that case was to install python-gtk2-dev so I searched synaptic for that and got no results. Using my head I simply searched for pygtk and could see that a package called pygtk2.0-devel was not installed, I selected it and chose to apply, that popped up an error in one of the 25 required packages, but as I had been using apt-get in another cli I decided to 'reload' my synaptic cache. Now it installed the pygtk2.0-devel and its 25 dependancies with no fuss and indeed ./configure got further !

and then stopped with another error

Quote:checking for AWN... configure: error: Package requirements ( glib-2.0 gobject-2.0 gtk+-2.0 gdk-2.0 libwnck-1.0 gnome-desktop-2.0 libgnome-2.0 gnome-vfs-2.0 gconf-2.0 x11 xproto dbus-glib-1 libglade-2.0 xdamage xcomposite xrender) were not met:

No package 'libwnck-1.0' found

No package 'gnome-desktop-2.0' found

No package 'libgnome-2.0' found

No package 'gnome-vfs-2.0' found

No package 'gconf-2.0' found

No package 'dbus-glib-1' found

No package 'libglade-2.0' found

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you

installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Alternatively, you may set the environment variables AWN_CFLAGS

and AWN_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.

See the pkg-config man page for more details.

ok then, that's quite a bunch of packages to install

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30 days with PCLinuxOS,

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:54:14 +0100

Days 8-10

sorry for not doing any updates on this over the weekend, but I was just using the distro instead of writing about it, and to be honest now that I've installed gnome I've been very happy with it, it's just working very nicely. The firewall crashing incident is down to a bug on the firewall most likely and I havnt done any more testing with that, other than to completely clear the firewall's cache.

After using PCLinuxOS now for over a week I am definetly getting to like it, it took some time but i am adjusting to it and liking it, and that's a good thing.

I'm stilll waiting on my order of RAM for this laptop, once it arrives i'll start using the computer intensively to see if performance improves as right now it's a bit sluggish on 256mb of ram (caching to swap).

30 days with PCLinuxOS

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 21:59:32 +0100

As some of you may know I have already tried 30 days with Suse linux Enterprise Desktop 10 and I've covered Ubuntu 7.04 for 30 days to get a decent overview of thosedistros and now it's time to try another one, this time it's PCLinuxOS.

[/url][img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1200084863.png[/img]

Day 1, starts today, January 11th, 2008.

so here's the first screenshot (after booting from the LiveCD which I downloaded from here > [url=http://www.pclinuxos.com/index.php?option=com_ionfiles&Itemid=28]http://www.pclinuxos.com/index.php?option=...s&Itemid=28

if you go to http://www.pclinuxos.com and choose 'getpclinuxos' you'll get the options to buy, download or try out the community remasters. As I wanted to get stuck in, I chose the download option and burned the ISO to CD. That CD was a PCLinuxOS 2007 liveCD which you can boot off and end up with a nice KDE based desktop.

while i'm not particularly fond of KDE (ok I admit it, k3b rocks !) I moved onward to see how this distro would progress in my hands.

As you can see below from the default livecd bootup, there's a nice KDE desktop with at least one thing some Windows users are used to, and that is the FireFox icon.

[img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1200085126.png[/img]

My first surprise occured while browsing through the 'PC' menu, and then choosing Internet followed by Remote access. While I expected to find a 'terminal' program I was instead blinded by a familiar Windows Icon (for anyone that uses both Windows and Linux and ssh) called putty. I clicked on it and putty started, I was impressed but also confused, I guess I need to find out exactly what market PCLinuxOS is aimed at (I'm guessing Windows users with some limited linux experience).

[img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1200085860.png[/img]

Anyways, it was getting late in the night and it was a long week so I decided to get started by clicking on the 'Install PCLinuxOS' icon. that action brought up a Draklive-Install Enhanced wizard, which for Mandrake sorry Mandriva users should be familiar enough, so I did the predictable and clicked on \next'

[img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1200086527.png[/img]

followed by choosing 'Normal Hard Drive (ide,sata)' and then next. This now gave me the option of removing the Windows Installation that was already there, or for dual booters, use the free space on the Windows partition and why doesn't it spell this out as dual boot.

[img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1200086979.png[/img]

I chose to dual boot (second option) and after clicking next was given a warning which stated

Quote:WARNING!DrakX will now resize your Windows partition. Be careful: this operation is dangerous. If you have not already done so, you first need to exit the installation, run "chkdsk c:" from a Command Prompt under Windows (beware, running graphical program "scandisk" is not enough, be sure to use "chkdsk" in a Command Prompt!), optionally run defrag, then restart the installation. You should also backup your data. When sure, press Ok.

As this was a test machine and I didn't care about the installation of Windows that was currently on it (Windows XP sp2) I clicked next. Now I was given the option of how much space I should reserve for Windows, as this was a 40gb hdd, I chose half or approx 20gb.

[img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1200087448.png[/img]

After clicking next, I was informed that because of resizing the partitions, my next boot into Windows would encur some filesystem checks (chkdsk), the next screen that popped up worried me as I can imagine that noobs would not know which window to click on or may panic and give up.

One window told me that a new medium has been detected (20gb Media) and the window directly behind that had a BIG warning symbol on it with

a warning in red which said 'The partition/s you have selected will be formatted. All the data will be wiped. I clicked on next.

[img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1200087951.png[/img]

This allowed me to click next again to install or to quit (cancel), however the 20gb Media (KDE ....) window was still present in the background.

PCLinuxOS started copying itself from the LiveCD to my computer.

[img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1200088354.png[/img]

after some time it finished its job and presented me with yet another wizard choice, this time for grub. Strangely the programmers didn't bother to consider long 'hard disc serial' names (look at boot device) so I ended up with a scroll bar which makes the wizard look.... unfinished. Anyway, I went with the defaults but before doing so I clicked on the 'bootloader to use' option only to see that grub was offered with graphical, text and also lilo was offered. Cool.

[img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1200091208.png[/img]

After this I was displayed with a list of entries on my boot menu so far, which included

Linux

Linux-nonfb

failsafe

windows

I clicked on the Finish button.

[img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1200091436.png[/img]

Well obviously finish didn't mean 'the end' so the wizard asked me another question, this time it was to set the all important root password

[img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1200091724.png[/img]

so I set my password and clicked next. After that I was prompted for a user, I entered my real name (anyweb) , and my real password (yeahright).

clicking on accept user, got me to the next stage...of enter a user.

I was done with that so I clicked on 'done'.

Although I was led to believe that the PCLinuxOS team were based somewhere in the US, the 'final' screen I saw in the wizard was a bit weird.

I was told to

Quote:'Please halt your computer, remove your live system, and restart your computer.'

[img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1200092008.png[/img]

If anyone knows how to do the above pelase tell me. While I scratched my head I clicked on finish.

After pressing the power button and being greeted with a reboot option, I chose it. Cool. After the reboot I was indeed presented with a grub menu similar to what I saw in the installation, so I chose windows to boot. This option did get windows to start chkdsk so the PCLinuxOS had described things correctly. Once done checking, windows rebooted, and PCLinuxOS itself, booted (as I made no further selection within the next grub that appeared.

However once it loaded, I could immediatly see that my desktop was set for a really small screen (640x480 perhaps ?)

have a look...

[img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1200092986.png[/img]

Ok a big Firefox window, close the tab and you can see some pclinuxOS info.

Great, now at least we remember what OS this was.

[img]/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1200093141.png[/img]

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What I think of PCLinuxOS

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:49:37 +0200

I have been using linux for awhile now, I still not perfect ofcourse since I've quited for awhile, in the past 4years I tried alot of distro's such as (Slackware 7.0 - Mandrake - Fedora core 1 & 2 - ubuntu - knoppix - and then gentoo) I liked each one of them but mostly for me i liked gentoo the most, that was all 4yrs old, then I quit'd internet since i joined the army, few weeks ago i'm back, casually using windows which sucks, I only like windows for games, but then it accures to me that I liked linux & #Linux-noob on irc, so then i went to distrowatch and checked that PCLinuxOS is taking #1 there.

Then i was like "uh new distro? at least for me" What is PCLOS?? I never heard of it Then i thought i want to give it a shot, and it happens 5days ago I've downloaded PCLOS and installed it, it went very smooth.. I'll tell you this, the smoothest linux distro install i ever had. and i kept trying everything in linux just to remind myself, and get all of my memories because I totally forgot everything, and it's really awesome. I even like it more than any other distro i've tried.

If you read this, and haven't try PCLinuxOS, I'll tell you this "Give it a shot" its easy configurable & synaptic (Package manager) is really awesome. in general a word from a noob "easy to use"

have fun.

-vmlinuz in #linux-noob

new section added

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 22:15:04 +0200

well dudes,

it seems this is a thriving linux os,

currently on distrowatch.com its number 1

beating Ubuntu !

check it out (screenshot)

do any of you use this os ? I think i'll give it a test run and maybe a review

Quote:'PCLinuxOS was originally based on another distribution under the name of Mandriva and shares many features of Mandriva such as the Control Center and the Draklive Installer. Texstar and team would like to thank the developers, contributors and others associated with Mandriva who may have indirectly contributed to the PCLinuxOS distribution.

In addition to Mandriva, PCLinuxOS would also like to thank the developers of the Gentoo, OpenSuSE, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu as we also use patches and bugs fixes from those distributions."

cheers

anyweb

[img]/monthly_09_2007/post-1-1190060101.png[/img]

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PC-LinuxOS

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 22:14:07 +0100

See these:

[/url]http://www.tuxmachines.org/gallery/pclos2007b2

and see the WEBSITE:

[url=http://www.pclinuxos.com]http://www.pclinuxos.com