Long-Term Review: Chakra 2013.02 "Benz"

I did this long-term review on my normal UROP desktop computer with the 64-bit edition of the OS. Follow the jump to see how it fared. Also do note that there are more days logged because I intend to use it for about 60-80 full hours of work, which is the equivalent of 7-10 full days in the summer, though now I am working on a part-time basis as classes have started.

Featured Comments: Week of 2013 March 24

There were two posts that got a few comments each, so I will repost most of those.

Review: Linux Mint MATE 201303

Reader Gary Newell said, "This is a good in depth review. I am currently using the Mint 14 Cinnamon release (Ubuntu base). If you have a powerful enough PC then Cinnamon is the best desktop as far as I can tell. I prefer the Consort desktop used by SolusOS to the MATE desktop and if I have an older PC I actually overall prefer to use XFCE and so tend to run Xubuntu."
Commenter Juan Carlos García Ramírez had this to say: "I still prefer xfce :D so linux mint 14 (Nadia) xfce for me".

Review: Pardus 2013 KDE

Reader Megatotoro shared, "I tested Pardus 2013 as well. In my case, I could test the repositories using Synaptic and could download the localization file for my language. I did notice that even so, some programs were still in Turkish (VLC, Synaptic). I have the Release Candidate installed on my laptop and it is greatly stable."
Commenter Mechatotoro had this bit of support: "@Prashanth, Thank you for your time with Pardus and your review. Good luck going back to school! @Mega, I just came from your blog and recommended you to read this review. I guess you are too fast :-)"

Thanks to all those who commented on those posts. I am back on campus now, and the semester isn't about to wait for me to settle down, so it will be back in full swing any minute now. This means that my post frequency will once again decrease through the rest of the semester. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Review: Pardus 2013 KDE

My spring break is coming to an end (I only have 1.5 more days), so I figured it might be nice to do another review while I still can. Today I'm reviewing Pardus 2013.

Main Screen + KDE Kickoff Menu

Pardus is a distribution developed at least in part by the Turkish military. It used to not be based on any other distribution and used its unique PISI package management system, which featured delta upgrades (meaning that only the differences between package versions would be applied for upgrades, greatly reducing their size). Since then, though, the organization largely responsible for the development of Pardus went through some troubles. One result was the forking of Pardus into PISI Linux to further develop the original alpha release of Pardus 2013. The other result was the rebasing of Pardus on Debian, abandoning PISI in that regard. Now Pardus 2013 is a distribution based on Debian 7 "Wheezy" that uses either KDE 4.8 or GNOME 3 (whatever version is packaged in the latest version of Debian, though I'm not sure what that is).

I reviewed Pardus on a live USB made with MultiSystem. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

Featured Comments: Week of 2011 February 27

I was scared again that this post wouldn't happen this week, but thankfully I was able to write 2 posts that ended up getting a handful of comments.

Review: AUSTRUMI 2.2.9

Interestingly enough, all the commenters on this post have been anonymous.
One reader asked, "Am I blind or there is not even 1 (one!) link to the AUSTRUMI web site? What kind of review is this?" Yeah, sorry, I'm not in the habit of doing that. I'll try to do it from now on, though.
Another commenter said, "If you push the tab button at the boot-splash and type in lang_en as a boot parameter you will find the desktop is in English and will stay that way"
Another reader had this to say: "Were you able to get connected wirelessly? I have tried the last 10 releases, and none connect wirelessly for me. Also, did you try to open a thumbdrive? Have not been able to do that either. This is a great looking and very fast distro and I would love to be able to use it. P.S. I tried posting in the unofficial English Austrumi forum, and even though the moderator answers quickly, concise answers seem unobtainable. Thannks for the review."
Another commenter was a bit more flattering: "I´ve been using wifi with an intel 3945, a Ralink 2500 and a RT8187, but I do recall it failed on other laptops (none with Broadcom 43xx). Still, since it can work from RAM, it frees the CD drive, which is VERY usefull booting laptops with faulty Windows installations. Plus, it absolutely flies on an old 1000 Mhz PIII Dell, which is now out of the garage and working very well in a Charity Org. Now it´s using Opera and LibreOffice I must check out the latest ISO. Cheers to the Austrumi devs!"

Revisited: Pardus 2011

Reader tharanitharan had this to say: "tried it skype does work.. but i reverted back to linux mint..not much packages ti play around with in pardus 2011"

Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's posts. I should be a lot less busy this coming week, but I don't actually have a whole lot planned. Well, scratch that: openSUSE 11.4 is coming out this week, so I plan to review that when that happens. Remember, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Revisited: Pardus 2011

Last time, when I reviewed Pardus 2011, I was really impressed by its ease of use and its selection of default applications. One minor issue that I had was that repositories weren't enabled by default, so I couldn't install any new software. The other issue with the review itself was that because I had trouble with Pardus 2009.2 "Geronticus Eremita" on a live USB, I was hesitant to try Pardus 2011 on a live USB as well, so I chose to review it in VirtualBox. This meant that I had no idea how Pardus would play with my computer's hardware.
Well, now I have a bit more time and I'm willing to give it a try. I made a multiboot system with AUSTRUMI (which I reviewed yesterday) using MultiSystem and went on my way. Please note that as I do not have a spare computer and am not willing to allocate space on my hard drive for distributions other than my main ones (Linux Mint 9 "Isadora" GNOME and Microsoft Windows 7), I have tested the live DVD, not the installation DVD. Also do note that as I have already reviewed Pardus 2011 with a plethora of images there, I will not be including any new ones in this post; if you want to see pictures of Pardus 2011, please refer back to the original review. Follow the jump to read the rest.

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.

Revisited: 3 Newbie-Friendly KDE Distributions

A few months ago, I did a comparison test between 5 KDE distributions that aim to be friendly to newbies. These distributions were PC-BSD 8.1 "Hubble" (which is technically a distribution of BSD, not Linux), PCLinuxOS 2010.07 KDE, openSUSE 11.3 KDE, Sabayon 5.3 KDE, and Pardus 2009.2 "Geronticus Eremita" (live CD). (I also tested Chakra Alpha 5 "Panora", but that wasn't compared to the others due to its pre-release nature.) I did all these tests on my old Sony VAIO desktop. I intended to make live USBs out of all of these using UnetBootin, but only Sabayon and (surprisingly, given its origin and its developers' previous statements about using UnetBootin in this particular case) PCLinuxOS cooperated. The others required that I make a live USB using the "dd" command, which wipes all existing data off the flash drive and writes the ISO file onto the USB with a primitive filesystem type that can't coexist with other partitions. This didn't look good for me, because I didn't want to keep erasing and rewriting data on the flash drive. Thus, I tested all these distributions in VirtualBox. The downsides to this were that as my old computer only had 1 GB of RAM, I could only allocate 448 MB of RAM to the guest OSs, which in some cases was clearly too little, and that I couldn't in some cases properly test things like hardware detection and installation of programs in this limited virtual environment.
Then, a couple weeks ago, I found a program called MultiSystem, which I wrote about promptly. This program allows writing a live multiboot setup to a USB drive partition without destroying other partitions. Plus, it supports distributions like Mandriva (which I tested shortly after the original comparison), openSUSE, and Pardus which otherwise require the "dd" command. (Unfortunately, it doesn't support either PC-BSD or Chakra, the latter of which is surprising in its omission considering that distributions like Arch, ArchBang, and CTKArchLive are all supported.) Clearly, this was what I needed. Now I could go back and test Mandriva, openSUSE, and Pardus as live USB systems with direct access to all my computer's hardware without issue. And that's exactly what I've done and that's the subject of today's post.
Please note that I'm not including any screenshots with this post because the relevant screenshots have already been put up in the previous comparison. Next, I'm not actually comparing these distributions to one another, as that's already been done — I'm just seeing if each one on its own will cooperate with my computer's hardware. Also, I realize that because I'm testing these on a much better computer than before (and I'm using Mandriva 2010.2 instead of version 2010.1 that was previously tested), the methodologies may turn out different results than before. With all that in mind, follow the jump to see how each one fares.

Featured Comments: Week of 2010 October 17

There were only 2 posts that garnered comments this past week, so I'll post most of those comments.

Will KPresenter and Gnumeric Please Come Forward?

Reader murray has this to say about OpenOffice.org Calc and Gnumeric: "I tried to use gnumeric instead of openoffice, due to the fact that I need to load 40M DBF's each month, and that where incredible slow in openoffice (more than 10 minutes). More, if you take in account that gnumeric loads it in 30 SECONDS. Lately, openoffice calc gets way better, taking 2 mins. The thing is, that in gnumeric, decimals gets lost, and later I realize that was global locale settings that affects the way gnumeric interprets numbers. Thats incredible for me, and more, the way to fix it via some obscure global (reeeeealy hard to discover) command-line setting before execute gnumeric is a shame".
Commenter twitter advised against using spreadsheet programs for real heavy-duty number-crunching: "Gnumeric is a nice spreadsheet but spreadsheets are not adequate for real science. When your data goes beyond a few kilobytes, it's time for shell scripts and the specialized tools available in good gnu/linux distributions like Debian."

Preview: Pardus 2011 Beta

Reader Sylvain seemed to have more success with Pardus 2011 Beta, linking to his review of it on his blog (in French): "It rox on my computer... First with VirtualBox then in a dedicated Partition. Pardus looks great http://linuxadvantage.blogspot.com/2010/10/presentation-de-pardus-2011.html". It really does look good, so I'm wondering why I had so much trouble with it.
That said, commenter Brian experienced trouble with it as well, though he was able to make it to the desktop, at least: "It isn't too great on my PC either. The alpha release had to use KDE safe node to boot into a desktop. pisi update-repo and pisi update seemed to upgrade the system until I installed the nvidia drivers, then that failed as well.A fresh beta install attempt ends with a slew of partition errors and a traceback report with no viable option to send it back to the developers."

Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's post, and remember, if you enjoy the material, please do subscribe!
On a somewhat related note, I am essentially done with my latest Fresh OS creations, so keep your eyes peeled, for I will probably upload them to the SourceForge project page sometime this week. Please do check them out and let me know what you think!

Preview: Pardus 2011 Beta

Before I get to the review, I want to say that while I tested Pardus 2009.2 on my old computer in VirtualBox with 448 MB of RAM, I have tested Pardus 2011 Beta on my new laptop in VirtualBox with 1024 MB of RAM, so it isn't quite an apples-to-apples comparison. Please keep this as well as the fact that I'm previewing a beta release in mind for the rest of this post.
If you couldn't glean what I'm about to say from the opening paragraph, I'll just say it: the review didn't go well at all. I raved about Pardus 2009.2 "Geronticus Eremita" in my comparison of KDE distributions for its amazing tools designed to make new users feel right at home. Well, I can't similarly rave about Pardus 2011 Beta. Why? It just refused to load the desktop. No matter what combination of boot options I chose at the boot menu, it would fly through the Plymouth boot splash and then display a blank screen and hang there. That's bad. I hope the developers of Pardus get their act together before the official release, because it would truly be a shame to see such a wonderful distribution fall so much from one release to the next.

Comparison Test: Newbie-Friendly KDE Distributions

In anticipation of my new laptop, I decided to test 5 major KDE distributions to see which one could work best on my laptop. As it happens, I ended up testing all of these on my old Sony VAIO desktop and installed Linux Mint 9 GNOME on my laptop. Go figure.
Each of these distributions aims to provide a hospitable and workable environment for the new user/Windows migrant. As such, there are a few features I expect to see included out-of-the-box. One of these is Firefox. A lot of implementations of KDE provide Konqueror instead of Firefox; while Konqueror may be faster and doubles as an excellent file manager, in terms of extensibility, ability to handle pretty much any webpage, and name recognition, Konqueror doesn't come close to Firefox. Along with this, I expect to see proprietary codecs included out-of-the-box. The story is similar for KOffice versus OpenOffice.org, so I also expect to see OpenOffice.org present and integrated nicely with KDE. I also want to see good hardware support (as tested by checking for support of my Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX USB webcam) out-of-the-box. The distribution shouldn't be too sluggish in live mode (but before that, it should have a live mode so that the user can try the distribution out first before taking the shot in the dark that is the installation process). In essence, the distribution should have Firefox (well-integrated), OpenOffice.org (well-integrated), hardware support (as per my webcam), and a reasonably fast live mode.
Although the newest version of KDE is 4.5, all of these distributions come with 4.4, which isn't a whole lot worse as far as I know. The distributions are openSUSE 11.3 (live CD), PCLinuxOS 2010.07, Sabayon 5.3, Pardus 2009.2, and PC-BSD 8.1 (live CD) along with a mystery contender that shall be revealed at the end of this post. Many of these distributions implement KDE specifically to better serve the new user, as many of these distributions are based on other distributions that are notoriously hard to work with.
As I was running low on blank CDs and DVDs at this time, I decided to try to put each of these distributions on my USB stick as a live USB. Only Sabayon and PCLinuxOS cooperated, so I decided then to test all of these distributions in VirtualBox. All of the impressions I have written are from these tests in VirtualBox; Sabayon and PCLinuxOS's performances as live USBs have not crept into this post (I hope).
With these things in mind, follow the jump to see how each contender fared. (NOTE: There are a lot of pictures after the jump, so your browser will probably slow down a bit. Please continue reading, but keep this in mind.)