It's PCLinuxOS.

[vakkotaur]

I tried PCLinuxOS on belgian and ran into the very same error as I did with Kubuntu. This time, though, there was a "safe boot" option which worked. Researching just what that did led me to the solution for both Kubuntu and PCLinuxOS: turning off APIC. That left me wondering if should give Kubuntu a shot after all.

A few things shot that idea down. Xubuntu started acting flaky on percheron and it seemed that the screensaver, of all things, was the thing causing the lock-up. Using Kubuntu I found that the default KDE settings were annoying which is not a show stopper but is a minor irritant. Also, Kubuntu wouldn't shut down nicely when running from LiveCD.

I decided to give Linux Mint a try. Mint is a variant of Ubuntu and supposedly fixed a few things. Evidently they were fixed in the veterinary sense as I could not get Mint to boot on belgian (kernel panic) or on percheron (blank screen hangs - even with the 'safe video' option). So as nice as Mint might sound, it's right out.

PCLinuxOS comes right up, only stopping to ask some very reasonable questions (time zone, preferred network settings) and it also shuts down cleanly. KDE is the window manager, but the defaults have been changed to be non-annoying (no silly bouncing icons and fading effects). PCLOS also has the various codecs already included. I can view youtube videos while running the LiveCD, for example. Also, once the hard drive was mounted I could view saved videos even if they were .wmv files. The only problem is that it's just a bit too eager - simply highlighting a file in Konqueror causes the audio to play.

Letting PCLOS run, it didn't lock up or doing anything weird. It does have synaptic for simple package management. There are some cases where things are not in the repository and an rpm must be applied directly. I'm not thrilled with rpm, but at least it's minimized. On Wolvix I still need to apply a .tgz and on Xubuntu I still need to apply a .deb at times, so this is hardly unique.

The PCLinuxOS installer is a bit awkward at the partitioning stage and I wound up using a GParted CD to handle partitioning and then telling PCLOS to use the existing partitions. It also took too long to figure out just how to get it to display at the correct resolution (set up the video card and tell it that I have 32M and not just 4M of video RAM) - unfortunately it's easy to not see the need to configure the card when the card selection is correct. I did have to spend some time getting it to recognize my external FireWire drive and I'm not entirely happy with the solution. It recognizes the drive but KDiskFree forgets it exists as soon as it is unmounted and the HAL setup doesn't give me a desktop icon. Desktop icons are things I normally do not like, but for removable devices they are actually useful. I still have to figure out how to get Opera to use Nedit for viewing source as Nedit needs some help due some weird display issue. I recall having that problem before, but I've since lost the solution. I also need to tweak the color a scheme a bit more. I already did, but I was in such a hurry to away from the wretched retina-searing white-hot backgrounds that I probably made things just a bit too dark.

Despite all that, most things work right off and quite well. Having synaptic is a big win and something rpm-based distributions should have had long ago. It is also so nice to not have to fiddle with codecs. They're there and they just work. I installed Opera and Flash worked right off. Kaffeine can even play .flv files. Audacity could save .mp3 files right off. So far I haven't found a file type that could not be displayed.

I started out with Mandrake and then moved to Fedora Core and now I'm sort of back. PCLinuxOS is a Mandriva (Mandrake merged with Connectiva some time back and became Mandriva) derivative. It does feel familiar and I think that's more than just from having KDE as the window manager.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

And here I thought you were a dedicated XFCE user. KDE? Ewwww.

I have yet to see any distribution with a fancy GUI installer that gets it right even just more than half the time. And that's why I still use Slackware by preference. It has no pretensions. You know you'll have to configure some stuff yourself. And because you've done it before, you get it right the first time usually, where those GUI installers ALWAYS get it wrong, at least in my opinion.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

I prefer Gentoo, mainly because you get real package management (which Slackware STILL doesn't have). I would no more run Linux without a real package manager than I'd try to maintain MVS without SMP/E. It doesn't have a GUI installer either.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I agree that package management of some sort is a good idea, and Slackware has a long way to go in that department. However, Gentoo just really offends my conservative notions about using CPU power. Fine for those who have really high powered hardware, but I never do. It would take so long to boot here that I'd find myself going back to Windoze, and that's saying something.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

These days, Gentoo offers prebuilt packages for most stuff for x86 and x86_64, and maybe other architectures - so you don't have to build anything you don't want to. The base install has been from prebuilt binaries for a long time.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That seems like quite a shift in philosophy for them, but it's true I haven't even looked at Gentoo for a while. It seemed so crazy last time I did that I wrote it off as fringe stuff.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Gnome was right out, and I am used to KDE. I use Xfce for lighter things and I might well go as far as IceWM for the laptop. I recall DeLi using IceWM and making a 90MHz Pentium-I seem, if not snappy, at least not sluggish. I will agree that KDE is bloated. There are some "toys" that are actually useful in all that. And the one thing that KDE does that XFCE so far has not, is easily let me change all the window manager colors. I am typing this into a text box with a proper gray background rather than a retina searing white-hot background. I have yet to get around that issue with XFCE.

Sure, there are XCFE themes and I've no luck at all trying to make my own. So my choices there are either retina searing white hot text boxes, or an excessively dark PUT OUT THAT LIGHT!! blackout theme.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Hmm. That sounds odd to me. I've not messed with themes at all, but the background for text entry defaults to a sort of creamy beige on all my machines. Obviously I have some setting somewhere that does that, but I don't think I did anything deliberate to cause it. I suppose it might be the web browser itself (I use Firefox, not Opera or Konqueror.)