Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Friday 12 December 2008, 10:37 AM
Two New Linux Beta Distributions
PCLinuxOS 2009 Beta 2. Although this distribution is derived from Mandriva, they don't attempt to track Mandriva's 6-month release schedule. They have made a few improvements in the installer, the result of which is that installation is even easier and faster than it is with the recent Mandriva 2009.0 release. The best news for me is that it installs flawlessly on my Lifebook S2110, without stumbling over the ATI display adapter as the new Mandriva release does. More good news is that PCLinuxOS includes most of the packages that I have to add manually to other releases, such as Sun Java 6, Adobe Flash and Thunderbird. The bad news is that it seems rather difficult and tedious to install other packages from .deb or .rpm files, such as Gizmo5 and Citrix ICA Client. I hope that will be easier in the final release, because overall I really like the ease of installation and the look of PCLinuxOS 2009.
VectorLinux 6.0 Beta 2. This is another distribution that looks like it could be quite interesting, with one major new advantage and one major old disadvantage. Advantage: they have created their own GUI installer, and it looks really nice and seems to work really well. Disadvantage: they install LILO rather than GRUB (not even a choice between the two). Now, LILO may be an acceptable option in a lot of cases, but I have a LOT of bootable partitions on my S6510, at least five of which are Linux, and all of them use GRUB. I suppose that I could figure out how to set LILO up to boot all of those, but I find LILO to be difficult, tedious, limited and ugly - is that enough reasons not to use it? The alternative, of course, is to set up GRUB to boot VectorLinux, but after a couple of half-hearted attempts at that, and a web search that produced nothing useful but at least one other blog about failure trying to do this, I gave up. Hopefully by the time the final VectorLinux 6.0 release is available they will either have a choice between LILO and GRUB (a couple of other distributions do that), or they will include some simple instructions on booting with GRUB. If so, I'll give it another shot.
jw 12/12/2008
PreviousComments on this post
I use PCLinuxOs on one of my main computers, and have looked at 2009,beta 2. Had problems trying to run the live CD on my Toshiba laptop. The 2008 Gnome version installed on it without a problem. Just downloaded Vector 6.0, and was impressed enough to install it on a spare drive. Just have to find time to play with it to see how it turns out. It does look promising though.
To install rpms in pclinuxos you can do this one of two ways. First, install Kpackage and then right click the rpm and choose to open it with kpackage. Second, install them from the command line which is "rpm -ivh name_of_package.rpm"
PCLinuxOS developers try to keep any app that is needed in the repository and they have a team of packagers that love to help...so an easier way to get the program you want is to request it in the package request board of the PCLinuxOS support forum. Turnaround for most packages is a few days and then you'll be able to use Synaptic to install!
@ator1940 - If I recall correctly, it was one of your positive comments about PCLinuxOS that prompted me to look at it originally, quite some time ago. Thanks.
@devnet - Yes, I tried the rpm command, but the two most important packages that I want to load both have dependencies on other packages, which are also not present. I decided that I didn't really feel like starting on the road to track down an unknown number of package dependencies, and I can try out PCLinuxOS and get a pretty good feel for it in general without those packages. I had read the comments about their philosophy being to use packages from their repository, and the logic behind it makes sense, to a degree. As I said in the blog, I was impressed by the number of things that were available in Synaptic. I will consider submitting the two of them to the request board, as you suggested. Thanks.
jw
I feel _so_ bad being just an Ubuntu Fan Boy and not having the time/inclination/good manners to try out different linux distros!! Thanks for the post, it's good to keep up with what other folk in the same linux boat are doing :)
Hi Jake, thanks for reading and commenting - and I'm pleased to hear that others are benefiting a bit from my posts. It takes a variety of approaches to get reasonable coverage, doesn't it? Some who looks rather superficially at a range of distributions, to at least get an idea of how they install, what they include, who they are target at and such, and some who concentrate on one in depth and detail, so see how it holds up over time, what range of packages it has, how it goes across a range of systems and peripherals, and the like. That's why I always enjoy reading blogs and comments from you, Ator1940, Peter Judge and others here.
I particularly enjoyed and appreciated your recent "Favorite Things" posting. About half of your list matched up with what I use regularly, and the other half gave me an authoritative start on a list of things that I need to look into.
jw
I'd been waiting for a new version of PC LinuxOS. It's not my preferred version (I'm a debian boy) but I've found it often works on machines that have 'issues' with other distros.
@Tezzer - Thanks for the comment. Your mention of using Debian but looking at other distributions seemed quite important to me. I started to comment on in here, but I've written so much that I decided it was better to just make a separate blog post of it. Thanks for the inspiration!
jw
"The best news for me is that it installs flawlessly on my Lifebook S2110, without stumbling over the ATI display adapter as the new Mandriva release does."
How's Mandriva stumble?
Sorry if we covered this before. I don't remember. Frankly, it's Trevor Linden night here in Vancouver and I've had more than a couple of hilariously over-strength Okanagan Springs. *hic*
so, er, yeah, what's the deal? I'm sure we can fix it. Let me know.
Hi Adam... have a couple of those Okanagan Springs for me... I'll raise a glass of Grappa di Barollo for you, and neither of us will pay too much attention to who stumbles and who doesn't! ;)
Seriously, the problem has S2110 (ATI) problem has appeared with the Mandriva 2009.0 distribution, the 2008 distributions installed just fine - and I suspect that is why PCLinuxOS still installs smoothly on it, because it doesn't look to me as if they have adopted much (any?) of the Mandriva 2009 distribution.
Basically what happens is that the Mandriva 2009.0 KDE Live CD will not boot on the S2110. It tries, but it doesn't get very far into the boot sequence and then there is simply nothing. The 2009.0 Gnome Live CD does boot, but it says that there is a problem with the display, and offers to walk through a procedure that will show details and offer alternatives, and if Ijust go through that and take the obvious choices, it seems to discover that there is an ATI display driver, it loads that and then all is well.
In case it is significant, the S2110 specifically has an ATI Radeon Xpress 200 integrated/motherboard display adapter.
Thanks for the interest, as always, and I hope you are doing well and succeeding in finding new work.
jw
Oh. It's probably this known bug with One:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.0_Errata#One_editions_fail_to_boot_to_a_graphical_desktop_.28xorg.conf_not_created.29
if you try the workaround from there on the KDE edition, does it work?
If so, not a lot we can do because the bug's baked into the One ISOs :\. Just have to make sure it's fixed for 2009 Spring. Sorry about that one.
@AdamW - You are, as usual, correct. It is exactly the problem described in the link you gave, and I was able to work around it with the procedure described there. Mandriva One 2009.0 KDE then installed flawlessly on the Lifebook S2110 (AMD/ATI).
Thanks, as always.
jw
