PCLinuxOS .93a The Official flatfish+++ review

Based on my email, several of you have been waiting for my review of this release of PCLinuxOS so here it is.

As most of you know, I am a PCLinuxOS fanatic and maybe I'm a wee bit the zealot when it comes to this distribution because *FOR ME* and *MY* requirements, .92 has worked extremely well.

I have not had a single problem in the months that I have been using PCLinuxOS .92 on 3 different machines with different hardware.

In preparation I Ghosted my Linux drive just in case but I also tried a new technique to see if it would work.

I backed up myhome folder completely to DVD, after cleaning out the junk. This, at least in theory, should have my Opera settings, kde, pan, firefox etc as well as any data I have saved.

Alright so I boot the install CD and when it boots I choose "Install" from the desktop.

I use existing parbreastions and choose to re-format them all.

It churns away for a while, I lost track of time because I was doing other things, but it was not a long time before it came up with the first prompt which I believe was for Lilo. This found my Windows FAT boot drive as well, but when I said "Save" it coughed up some oddball error.

No problem, I chose Grub instead and it continued on it's way. First boot was clean and everything seemed to work.

However trying to boot my Windows parbreastion failed with a Grub 15 hang...

ok, I hit the edit key on the Grub boot screen and noticed that there were 2 entries for my Windows drive.

breastle windows root (hd0,0) map (0x81) (0x80) map (0x80) (0x81) makeactive chainloader +1

If I remove either the first map line OR the second map line Windows boots fine.

I dunno, but it works.

BTW what happened toetc-grub.conf?

Man grub says this stuff should be in that file but I found this stuff inboot-grub-menu.lst instead?

Anyway bug number one down...

Next problem, I have no sound after a reboot and notice that alsa does not load.

Going to the PCLinuxOS control panel and looking at services, Alsa is not started.

Hmmm...I try to start it and sometimes it works other times it does not.

According to chkconfig, alsa should start at runlevel 2:

alsa 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

It doesn't start and I don't see any messages in logs or dmesg. Real weird.

Trying alsaconf and alsactl store makes the sound work until the next boot where it fails again.

I asked in the PCLinuxOS fora but got no bites.

Doing an lsmod shows all kinds of USB audio stuff loaded?

Hmmmmm...I don't have a USB audio device, but I *DO* have a USB MIDI interface.

Bottom line, Alsa gets confused if that device is plugged in. No sweat. Unplug the device and now I have sound.

Ok so now let's put back .opera, .pan, .kmail etc and see what happpens.

I couldn't believe it but everything was there!!

My mail, my bookmarks, all my newsgroups etc just as if I never moved to a new distribution.

This is VERY IMPRESSIVE to me because it saved me a ton of time.

I'd love to see Windows work like this. With DLL's spread all over the place I doubt it is even possible.

I went to synaptic and loaded Nvidia, msfonts (not that it needs them, this thing is GORGEOUS) and a few other oddball stuff I have.

So how about the system now that everything is working?

SPEED,,,SPEED and MORE SPEED.........

I dunno what texstar did to an already fast PCLinuxOS .92, but this thing hauls!!

For all practical purposes it is just as fast as DSL on this machine, really!

OpenOffice Writer loads in 5 seconds...That is fast!

The gui is quick, clean and VERY sharp looking.

The fonts are gorgeous, really they are.

And once again, like .92, things just work......

I could go on for pages, but this is yet another fine version of Linux and despite the grub and alsa problems, it's super clean and ready for prime time....

Try the LiveCD (same one is used for hdisk install) and see for yourself.

Read here for information (Thanks to Roy) and I agree with this article completely.

flatfish+++