Review: Pardus 2011

Installation DVD Boot Menu

Wow, what timing! Just yesterday I took another look at Pardus 2009.2 "Geronticus Eremita", and today Pardus 2011 is out! Incidentally, I previewed a beta release of Pardus 2011 to disappointing results. However, a few months before that, I did declare Pardus 2009.2 the winner of a 5-way comparison test, so I figure it's only fair to give Pardus another shot now that the newest official release is out in the wild.
For those who don't know, Pardus is a distribution developed primarily by scientific and military organizations in Turkey for their use, but is also reasonably popular among the general Linux-using populace in Turkey and abroad. It's not derived from any other distribution, and it uses KDE as the desktop base aiming to be newbie-friendly.
Unfortunately, given Pardus's failure to load on a MultiSystem-created multiboot live USB yesterday, I didn't do that today. Instead, I tested the installation procedure and installed system in VirtualBox on a Linux Mint 10 "Julia" GNOME live USB. I allocated 1 GB of RAM to the guest OS as always.
With all that, follow the jump to see what the newest iteration of this Anatolian leopard is like.

Installer Partitioner

After creating the virtual machine (which, incidentally, took a little time because at first VirtualBox didn't have the necessary user privileges to access the installation DVD located on my installed Linux Mint system's home folder) and starting it up, I got to the boot menu, but the machine kept aborting. I tried tweaking a couple different boot options at a time, but to no avail. Finally, I tried to only boot with failsafe graphics, and that worked well. After the boot menu came a well-designed Plymouth boot splash, followed by the initial installation screen.

Installer Slideshow

The installer is very well-done — it's up there along with Ubuntu's Ubiquity and Chakra's Tribe installers. Everything is broken into multiple steps so that new users will never feel overwhelmed by the information and choices. The disk partitioner is fairly standard, with the choices of using the entire disk, using free space, resizing other partitions, or using a custom layout. I chose the custom layout, as usual. It's not as friendly as in Ubiquity, but it's certainly not like the CLI "fdisk" program. After that came the options of installing GRUB (the screen of which, incidentally, featured a KDE logo that looks suspiciously like the Microsoft Windows logo) and a couple other things. Following that came a confirmation screen, after which came a nice slideshow showcasing the various features of Pardus (along with a progress bar detailing what's being installed and configured). The slideshow is well-done, though it's apparent that the developers aren't native English speakers, because present in the slideshow are a few spelling, grammar, and syntax issues. That's not a big deal though; overall, it's very well done. The installation itself took about 15 minutes, which isn't the fastest I've seen but it's still relatively quick. After that I rebooted.

Post-installation Setup

When booting from the virtual hard disk, I again loaded with failsafe graphics. After the boot splash came a few more configuration things, including adding default user and setting the root password. I like the fact that Pardus does in fact separate the user and root passwords and doesn't allow the default user password to be used for root actions. After that came the desktop.
At first, I was a little disappointed to see that Pardus hasn't especially customized the look of the KDE desktop, but then I saw Kaptan automatically run. I changed the menu to the Lancelot menu instead of the default Kickoff, the icons to Milky (the Pardus 2009.2 and prior default icon theme) instead of Oxygen, and the desktop view to folder view, and went on my way. I also then changed the KDE icon for the main menu to the old Pardus icon, because typically distributions that primarily use KDE put their own icon for the main menu, as Pardus did before version 2011. Though I picked the Milky icon theme, some of the icons (especially the "trash" icon) look kind of weird/ugly. Oh well, it's easy to change again.

Main Screen + Kaptan

Mozilla Firefox is present at version 4 (beta 9). This was my first look at Mozilla Firefox 4, and I have to say that it feels a lot snappier and cleaner than version 3.6. I'm looking forward to using it! (In the picture Mozilla Firefox has the compact menu button. Please note that by default it uses a traditional menu bar; I have just customized it a little.) Most codecs appear to be installed out-of-the-box, as YouTube worked fine (as did a few other sites). When Mozilla Firefox 4 comes out officially, I'll try to have a review up soon after.
LibreOffice is also included, and that was my first look at that as well. Just as I expected, it's essentially indistinguishable from OpenOffice.org (from which it derives, anyway).

Main Screen + Lancelot Menu + Customizations

Some other nice applications are included too, including digiKam, Clementine, showFoto, and some KDE games. That's always nice.
The package manager is Pardus's own PiSi (which apparently means "kitten" in Turkish and has an icon to reflect that). It seems to work OK, except that all the packages from Pardus's default repository are already installed, and there aren't any other repositories available, so there's nothing else that can be installed. I read on some Pardus mailing lists that the "contrib" repository (where applications like Cheese Webcam Booth and Skype, both of which I need) will be discontinued in favor of having all applications present in the main repository. I hope this means that applications like Skype and Cheese Webcam Booth are uploaded to the repository soon! Plus, the installation slideshow promised things like alternative browsers (e.g. Chromium, Opera) which aren't present, so these will need to be uploaded quickly so the developers can keep their promises.
Pardus 2011 uses KDE 4.5, and not once did KDE crash in any way. In fact, KDE felt smooth and quick the entire time. That's good news.

Mozilla Firefox 4 + LibreOffice

Well, that's all I have to say about Pardus 2011. It's stable, smooth, reasonably quick, and extraordinarily newbie-friendly. Plus, it has goodies that most people would need on a daily basis. That said, there are a lot of applications that will need to be uploaded to the repository soon. Otherwise, I can only recommend this to people who will only be surfing the web and creating documents (and nothing else).