PCLinuxOS 2010 mini review

The much awaited PCLinux OS 2010 was released in beta yesterday. Time for another celebration and another install test. PCLinux OS (PCLOS) is all I wanted, a stable KDE distro with the latest KDE 4.4.1 and Firefox 3.6. I spared no time and tried the beta on my Virtualbox setup.

Look & Feel

The heavily modified KDE theme strongly personifies PCLOS. But most of its elements and layout remind of its mother Mandrake (now Mandriva). The theme is no stranger to all of us who have tried/used PCLOS. The bluish theme is inviting and soothing and at the same time characteristic of a unique distro. The selling points of the distro, the PCLOS control centre, synaptic package manager and the KDE control centre are neatly displayed on the "quicklaunch" bar. The menu is old KDE style instead of the kickoff menu which I prefer. The system settings are also as expandable trees (just like KDE3) instead of icons which is the norm in many other distros.



Applications and Multimedia

The choice of applications is very apt in my point of view. For example, Imagemagick is installed by default in the graphics category , DVD slideshow maker is installed in video, and system cleaner and unncessary file cleaner are installed in file tools category. These are programs which one does not use often but they are very important for productivity and maintaining the system. The default install took around 2.6 gb. The full set of KDE games are installed by default. Interestingly, Wally the desktop wallpaper changer is there. As if to mock Ubuntu's decision to drop it from the default install, Gimp is installed by default in PCLOS. Obviously, due to space constraints Openoffice is not installed by default but can be easily installed by using a shortcut from the menu.

As expected flash worked out of the box (though its a version older than in Adobe's site). Firefox played Apple trailers with mplayer plugin. In many distros just installing the right plugin does not play Apple trailer movies, you have to tweak firefox user agent to let Apple play its movie trailers on your computer. Amarok (2.2.2.90) is the default music player and Dragon handles all video files.



Conclusion

If you are looking for a Linux distro specialized for the common everyday desktop computer then PCLOS is the number one choice. Like the much advertised MacOSX, PCLOS is ready to do every fun stuff, like watch online videos, download files using torrents, do some photo editing make DVD slideshows etc., right after install. PCLOS 2010 is the first release featuring KDE 4 as default desktop. Despite using KDE 4, the PCLOS architects have managed to maintain the original and unique style of this great distro. Though KDE4 series is radically different from KDE 3, an average Joe user who installs PCLOS 2010 wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I think this would greatly help in KDE 4 adoption among more and more people. I am looking forward for the final release to install on my ASUS Nova lite mini desktop at home which is currently running PCLOS 2009.

Kubuntu Lucid Review

I am an early adopter of KDE 4 and I welcome the radical changes it has made from earlier versions. I have been using KDE 4 from 4.0 release and has been following its growth from simple & buggy to feature-rich and mature. The fifth installment of KDE 4, KDE SC 4.4, released on February 9th caused a lot of excitement among KDE fans like me. I could not wait for the shiny new packages arrive in a distro near me.

Kubuntu seemed to be the winning choice because I have seen early KDE 4.4 reviews state that Kubuntu was the easiest and less buggy path to 4.4. In this article, I will be reviewing both Kubuntu Lucid Lynx the new KDE SC 4.4. I chose the 32 bit version of Kubuntu Lucid Lynx alpha 2. The test machine was Compaq Presario V3000 series (V3624AU) with AMD Turion 64 X2 @1.8GHz cpu, 3 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce Go 7150 integrated display card and Broadcom wifi card.

Installation

The install was a routine Kubuntu ubiquity based install, but very polished (inspite being an alpha release). Soon after the install, I upgraded to the latest packages. The inclusion of open source Nvidia Nouveau drivers in the mainline kernel 2.6.32 has led to crisp fonts and perfect detection of screen resolution in comparision to earlier Kubuntu versions. As with other Kubuntus, I had to connect wired internet to allow Jockey download and install Broadcom wifi driver. After installing the Broadcom STA wireless driver I could easily go online wirelessly. There was a minimal glitch that the Nepomuk strigi indexer complained about missing virtuoso server which was solved by installing Openlink Virtuoso open source edition. Hopefully this problem would be solved in the final release.

Boot-up time

After the final install/upgrade the bootup time was noticeably faster as promised for Lucid Lynx by Ubuntu developers. The bootup time was as follows: grub to login, 20 secs; Kdm login to fully loaded desktop, 19 secs; Total: 39 secs. I feel this speed is pretty impressive.

The default Oxygen theme and the default wall paper (Ethais) by Nuno Pinheiro was elegantly stunning and in my view truly rivaling Mac OSX.

Packages

As soon as I logged in, I installed Firefox (FF 3.6) with the firefox installer (yes, you can notice, Yahoo is the default search). As soon as I fired up Amarok (ver. 2.3 beta 1), it prompted to install all the necessary codecs, which was also done smoothly. Amarok 2.3 shows a lot of cosmetic changes. I could play youtube videos, but in Full HD 1080 P or HD 720 P videos were extremely choppy. So again I fired up Jockey to install the latest (as recommended by Jockey) Nvidia driver and restarted X. I tweaked the settings in Nvidia control center and the fonts, graphics and youtube videos were pixel perfect. Openoffice installed was version 3.2 RC 4. Chromium browser is in the repos, so I could easily apt-get install it and it worked perfectly. (Chromium will be my browser of choice because of its better looks). Skype (2.1.0.81 beta) from the official site worked flawlessly.

KDE 4.4

KDE 4.4 shows lot of improvement in terms of speed, robustness and maturity. There are lots of subtle changes which a seasoned KDE 4 user will notice. Oxygen theme seems even more polished. A few of the new features are tabs within windows, the destop widgets shown as a strip above the task bar, hovering the mouse over a minimised window in taskbar showing motion in youtube videos (just like Win 7). Folders show the content within, the system tray can be expanded or collapsed, the USB device manager has moved to the system tray. As a result of the "semantic desktop", searching the KMenu also shows the files related to the search term (again as in Win 7 or Mac). There are lots of features which remind of Windows 7 like double clicking the window title bar expands it to full length. Composting and window transparency is done wonderfully well (provided there is a decent graphics card). Overall I am very much satisfied and happy with KDE 4.4 release and it could easily make Gnome and other DE fans jealous, let alone Windows 7 and Mac OSX users. I would not agree to anyone claiming that KDE 4 is still buggy and sluggish.

Conclusion

Though in early stages of development, Kubuntu Lucid Lynx, proved to be robust and efficient in showcasing the newest KDE. I did not encounter any major problems so far except that I could not mount the NTFS partion from Dolphin and access the files (I got an error: org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.PermissionDenied: Refusing to mount device /dev/sda3 for uid=1000.).

This level of perfection reflects on how good the final release version is going to be. I would recommend Kubuntu Lucid to any serious KDE user instead of the current stable Karmic. I would rate 4/5 stars to Kubuntu Lucid Lynx at this stage. Take the plunge and enjoy KDE 4.4 with Kubuntu Lucid. Here's a link to more screenshots from my Picasaweb album.

Kubuntu_Lucid

Simply Mepis 8.5 beta4 review

Despite being a self-confessed distro-hopper, I have dwelled for a long time with Sidux. As a hardcore KDE fan, the obvious choice was to test Simply Mepis 8.5 beta 4. I carry a high opinion about Simply Mepis since I have used it some 5 years ago. It was a perfect desktop and the reason for my liking towards KDE. Later I have hopped to Kubuntu, Debian testing and finally to Sidux.

Sidux, though a wonderful distro, has its own minor irks. Firstly, the font rendering is very bad in Iceweasel. Secondly, though they claim that Iceweasel is just a renamed Firefox, I don't like its ugly looks in terms of the skin, progress bar etc. (probably a problem of Debian's tendency of having attractive looks). I am using a 64 bit install and I can't find a suitable 64 bit Firefox binary in Mozilla's website. Since the browser is inevitably the most important program in an OS, I ventured to lookout for solutions.

Mepis was particularly attractive because it has Firefox inspite of being very Debian underneath. I tested out the 32 bit version of Simply Mepis 8.5 beta 4 on a virtual machine giving it a mere 512 MB of RAM.

After upgrading all the packages to the latest ones, Mepis proved to be a real winner. KDE was at version 4.3.4 and Firefox, the default browser in Mepis was at 3.5.6. As expected with Mepis, flash worked out of the box but it was not the latest version available in Adobe's site. After tweaking the fontconfig-config and enabling antialiasing from the KDE control centre, fonts were rendered beautifully well. I installed Skype from the repos, and Google Chrome from Google's website. Both worked flawlessly. OpenOffice was at version 3.1.1, packaged by Debian developers. Okular was missing so I could not open PDFs in the default install.

Support for Google gadgets was installed by default and I could easily add my favourite feeds and read the full articles in Firefox. Even Konqueror worked fine and had the best font rendering as expected of a browser well integrated into KDE. When I set the brower identification to Firefox 2 for google.com, Gmail also worked well.

Overall Simply Mepis 8.5 is a joy to use. The choice of fonts, window decorations and wallpaper, though not jazzy, is professional and elegant. The maturity and stabilty of the OS is contradictory to the beta tag. Anyway, I wish to see the latest KDE SC 4.4 and Firefox 3.6 enter into the isos before the final release. Simply Mepis is feature-rich distro that can be totally trusted to accomplish to your day to day computing tasks with pleasure.

Though I would love to install Simply Mepis on my work desktop, I wish to try out another contender Mandriva 2010 before I come to any conclusion. Here's a couple of screenshots of my Simply Mepis experience.