Review: PCLinuxOS 2007, GNOME and MiniMe

Great review. If I didn't already have it on my lappy I sure would try it after reading the article.

Like S_R there was no joy in Gnomeville for me either. I ended up just installing the KDE version and then apt-getting Gnome. There are some really good KDE functions that I like having on hand. It is not Debian but PCLOS installs better than Ubuntu and so far the updates don't break my system like Ubuntu.

Quoting:...I sure would try it after reading the article.

It was more like a book, but I agree it was a good review.

Minime is on my Toshiba which I had to loan to my sister. I installed it in about 20 minutes on evening just before we went to dinner. The wireless ipw3945 worked right out of the box which made me happy. The only minus was the boot up sound which reminds me of unreliable proprietary operating systems (POS).

I've had PCLOS on my Thinkpad T61 for several months now. It's been stable and peppy and nice to use. The only downside is occasionally I run into some application that's not in the PCLOS repos. But not very often, and it's usually some weird new thing I need to test for work.

> It was more like a book...

There's just no pleasing some people. :)

Quoting:There's just no pleasing some people. :)

Hey, I said it was a good article! I also think 'War and Peace' is a good book, but there's a lot to be said for brevity. 8^)

Yesterday at FOSDEM, I encountered yet another 'new' BSD I was unaware of, called MirOS BSD or MirBSD. It's both a bit NetBSD and OpenBSD. They 'stripped' some stuff desktop-users are not using from OpenBSD.

Steven, you like to test it, or should I? I'm a bit in lack of time, there are still about 18 little pieces of paper full of FOSDEM-notes waiting for me along with to-be-pimped (or should I say Gimped?) photo's. But probably my audience is sick of my excuses, and right so. So let me know.

I believe your quest to try a lot of Linux-distro's is hard enough for the moment.

I just might take a look at that one. So far, I am quite impressed with how relatively easy it is to run OpenBSD on the desktop. I haven't tried the same things with NetBSD or FreeBSD (except for DesktopBSD and PC-BSD), but I'd like to start sampling all of them.

Don't know about know, but 3-4 years ago, FreeBSD was pretty easy to run on the desktop -- IF you already had a comfort zone from using FreeBSD on the server.

Ditto that. I worked at a FreeBSD-centric company for about seven months, and thanks to Ports (one of the Ports guys was a colleague), I had a working GNOME desktop right there.

But IIRC both FreeBSD and NetBSD don't run on Steven's hardware (VIA C3), but OpenBSD does. Therefore, I assumed MirBSD, being derived from OpenBSD, has a bigger change of running than FreeBSD or NetBSD or its derivatives. That's why I thought about Steven's efforts when I came across an OpenBSD derivative (the only one not aimed at 'network stuff' I'm aware of). And the other reason I was interested was because the leaflet's title was 'WTF is MirBSD?' which was exactly what I was asking myself when I came across it.

For some reason, I've been having better luck with NetBSD and FreeBSD lately. I've gotten the newest versions of both to run -- NetBSD 4.0, and FreeBSD 6.3 and 7. I had trouble with NetBSD 3.1 and FreeBSD 6.2. But whether intentional or not, support for the early VIA C3 Samuel CPUs has improved greatly. (Later VIA C3 Nehemiah CPUs don't seem to have these problems.) And I've got a few more computers to try this stuff on, too.

That's weird, I was 'once' waiting for the new C7{,M} (till I discovered the price of the CPU's and mobo's), so I had the impression the C3 is almost 'antique'. Anyway, great to hear the old C3's are supported too these days.

They're still selling C3's ... but now that Intel is in the mini-ITX market and is killing VIA on price and performance, who knows where it will go.