TheTrenchcoat Chronicles

Tag: PCLinuxOS

  • PCLinuxOS MiniMe

    Yesterday I complained about PCLinuxOS and how I thought it was a buggy and ugly distro and how I couldn’t even get MiniMe to boot to my laptop. On the urging of a commenter (which is rare around here), I gave PCLinuxOS, specifically MiniMe, another try.

    I found the command I needed to get it to boot properly fairly easily. When I got it installed and changed the ugly ass wallpaper it started looking like a cool distro. I love the fact that it uses Synaptic as a package manager. Synaptic is a lot better than Mandriva’s package installer. So it’s got that going for it.

    However, MiniMe did one thing that no Linux Distro has ever done on my laptop. It froze. That was a dealbreaker for me.

    But in its defense, MiniMe has convinced me to give the full PCLinuxOS distro another try.

  • My Linux weekend

    Ok, so I spent most of my weekend trying out some new Linux distros. New to me anyway.

    First up was PCLinuxOS and their 2007 release. I don’t know why PCLinuxOS is so highly touted. I found it to be clunky, buggy and ugly. Then I realized I’m supposed to be trying PCLinuxOS MiniMe. I couldn’t even get that to boot on my laptop. Not even halfway through the boot process it would lock up and cause my caps lock light to blink then it would freeze.

    Then I tried DreamLinux. It really wants to be Mac’s OS-X. What attracted me to DreamLinux was its shortcut bar down at the bottom just like OS-X. I’ve never used OS-X so I don’t know how it actually compares. What I didn’t like is that the shortcut bar wasn’t customizable at all and half the tools on it I would never use anyway.

    I finally settled on Mandriva’s latest release, Spring 2008. I liked it so much I installed it on my main hard drive. Dual booted with Windows of course. I got addicted to the KDE desktop and I’ve adapted to using RPMs. I also thought that Mandriva was more aesthetically pleasing that PCLiunuxOS. Now, this isn’t a knock against Linux Mint my former distro of choice. I just get bored after 6 months or so and I need a change. I would recommend Linux Mint to anyone who asked what the best Ubuntu based distro was.

  • OpenSUSE

    So last night I gave OpenSUSE a try. Trying Linux distros has become my new smoking. Anyway, I didn’t care for it. I couldn’t get past the start menu, or quickstart, or whatever it’s called. I’m too used to not having to click on a start menu to get it to drill down. If someone could tell me how to drill down just by hovering the cursor then I may be willing to give it a second try.

    However, I am starting to come around on Mandriva and I’ve officially become a KDE konvert. (See what I did there.) It hasn’t replaced Linux Mint as my main distro yet but I’m becoming highly addicted to Mandriva.

    I tried PCLinuxOS too but now I can’t remember why I didn’t like it. I’ll have to give that another shot. I just remember something it did pissed me off.