Fedora 7 & PCLinuxOS 2007 - Quick Review

[clivesay]

Sidux is good! It lacks desktop "wow" factor like a Fedora or Mint but it is snappy and has a great infrastructure for running Sid without the worries of borking your system. The du-fixes script by h2 keeps everything smooth. I don't have a Gnome/KDE preference but can tell you that the KDE desktop in Sidux is way faster than any other KDE-based distro I've ever tried.

Definitely a project worth exploring for ideas.

Chris

[madjr]

Stay with Ubuntu and stay with Gnome.

Some people can't stand kde.

The biggest user base is with ubuntu, most guides off the net, most websites, etc.

If ubuntu falls you may switch, but not now that it's gaining more and more popularity.

I know many people that use mint only because it's based on ubuntu. They wan't the best of both worlds.

People wan't an ubuntu on steroids an "ultimate edition that fits on a CD" and this exactly what they find attractive in mint.

Having too many mint distros based off different distros is not a good thing. Focusing our energies on one or 2 is the best choice to actually make real improvements.

[Sorensei]

Some people can't stand kde.

When you're definitely right concerning the above, has it occurred to you that the opposite is equally true?

Not trying to start a war there, just stating a fact...

But regardless of the WM, I agree that one single base distro is the way to go, if we want to have consistent Mints...

[aapiethaaap]

the First time configuration wizard. is a good idea it would be great!

But i believe mint should still eb based upon ubuntu because now i can just google: my problem+ ubuntu and find a solution that wil work!

ubuntu has the biggest network for taht kind of stuf.

[capricornus]

Clem
I too love the visual consistency of Fedora7, but not the rest you mention: you based Mint on Ubuntu reps and I think that makes it trustworthy: everyone heard of Ubuntu by now, and Mint would just be like the extra you get when you order a MintGulip...flavour.
I of course tried out many of the Mint competitors, included Dream and Elive and SAM, and PCLinuxOS. Imagine that CrossOver didn't run on the first two, and that browsing with the latter two was frustrating: I think it was a video problem, but I don't experience any scrolling visual defects when using Mint.
As St.Paul said: try everything and keep the better. And a nice combination of green to blue would do amazing things for my eyes.
Thanks and thanks again for a nice going OS.

[Husse]

Just made a test install of Fedora 7. Really nice artwork! The installer seemed ok, but it destroyed grub..... It's also the first distro I managed to install where I could not connect to the internet (wired network)
Grub is repaired, but I can't start Fedora..... it's using some non standard grub, so I can't figure out (yet) what to do.
Seems that it's a wise decision to stick with Ubuntu...

[Boo]

non standard grub?
what you talking about willis?

it has always worked fine with me. The installer just is not smart enough to add the boot options for other linux's. It assumes every MS partition is an os and if you add another os to the list in the installer it assumes it is MS too.

post your Fedora grub if you want.

[hairy_Palms]

1 simple unavoidable reason for not basing on fedora, RPM is a dog, seriously its awful. its why i still use debian based distros.
yum, urpmi arent much good either, both are slow as turtles and urpmi especially breaks too much .

as for the guy who thinks fedora broke grub, fedora stores its config files in /etc/grub.conf rather than /boot/grub/menu.lst other than that its the same.

[Totally Infected]

I saw a review of Mint 2.0 - Casandra KDE the other day - it was old, but new to me... and it was ragging on Mint a little bit as being marginalized by the improvements of Ubuntu 7.04 - saying the innovations mint was bringing to the Ubuntu platform were great BEFORE, but not needed anymore. I don't know that I agree with that, and I'm not looking for anyone to comment on that either.

I just was wondering if that's where the whole should-mint-switch question originated?

[Husse]

@Boo
I have 6 distros and 10 partitions on a single drive...
I added my distros manually in the install, but when I tried to start anything but Fedora7 I got an error (unfortunately I didn't write it down) about something looking like a chainloader
//edit june 29 by husse/
My short time in Linux has played a part here. You could add the other OS you have when you install - but of course (?) the installer isn't smart enough to look into the boot folder of these to make the right adjustment to its menu.lst and just adds a chainloader. The Mint/Ubuntu installer does this...//
I repaired grub according to the new wiki http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... _your_grub
(author husse ).
Then I booted Bianca and studied the boot folder in Fedora - its menu.lst is a "Link to unknown"...
So I can't look at it and see which lines I should add to Biancas menu.lst to start Fedora (tried a few alternatives)
This I call non standard

@hairy_Palms
/etc/grub.conf
Thanks, I'll look into that when I've finished answering
Yes, that did it - copied from there to Bianca's menu.lst and booted Fedora7. No success with networking though - it can't even connect to the broadband router, the same router as I use right now to write this. Won't do much about it......

[AlsaPhil]

I have 6 distros and 10 partitions on a single drive...

Clem, LET'S GO!

sorry Husse, just a private joke

[Husse]

sorry Husse, just a private joke

Yes - just joke about me - uahuah
Just joking :)

[mrB]

One thing I found extremely annoying during the Fedora 7 installation process was the "building dependecies" part (if you try to customize your package selection). How come building those dependencies take so much time? Tools like apt or pacman do it in seconds, not minutes. But then again this could be related to fedora's package manager and not anaconda.

[Husse]

I agree with mrB but it's not a big problem. However I have not managed to get networking started in Fedora - I can't even ping my broadband router.....
Something brake PCLOS so I reinstalled it and played round a bit. Surprisingly I could not find some "update manager" and opened synaptics and tried to "Reload" but nothing happened. It seems that PCLOS has changed address to their repos - I got a "404" when I used a repo adress in Firefox...
But still PCLOS seems easy to use and Fedora very nice looking.

[Caraibes]

My own humble opinion is that Fedora 7 flies much much higher than any other distro today... PCLOS can't even compare, and I am not saying it is not a good product, it is just not on the same level as F7...

[scott6889]

It was a toss up for me between PCLinux or Mint. After comparing the two it came down to the available packages. Mint has Ubuntu's repositories + Software Portal (very nice). PCLinux at this stage of the game is lacking. Mint also seems alot snappier on my system as well... maybe it's because Mint uses Gnome??? Not sure but...

... it's the Mint for this guy!

[Grayson]

I just moved from PCLinuxOS. It's an excellent out-of-the box distro but software is sadly lacking. It's by far the best KDE distro I've ever used. I prefer KDE but I am using Gnome now for one day and it's not bad at all. KDE has always had those little quirks where it would crash for no reason. Gnome doesn't seem to do that.

And no offense (hopefully) to anyone but the Mint forums are much more friendly.

[Sorensei]

Yes, I'm personally also a KDE user, but Mint's Gnome is the one that had me close to switching...

[smidget]

I recently switched to mint from PCLOS also. I think PCLOS is a great distro, but mint is a much better fit for me.

[srturner47]

I thought I might be able to add something to this conversation:

I have been a PCLinuxOS user for a little over a year. I tried LOTS of distros before I settled on PCLinuxOS. With that said, I am certainly not a Linux expert. I can do the basics, and even tinker with a text file or two with help from a forum. But, just the basics.

I just discovered Mint a couple of days ago, and I am very impressed. I'm not quite ready to switch from PCLinuxOS, but I may someday! Here's what I liked about Mint:

- Repositories have EVERYTHING! Ubuntu has a ton of software available.
- mintMenu -- I've always loved SLAB like menus, and this is the best I've ever seen. Awesome! I also love how Beagle is integrated into it. With PCLinuxOS I used Google Desktop, but I prefer FOSS like Beagle.
- mintInstall -- pretty cool. Maybe someday it will replace synaptic, and I like how it can use any repository with no extra work on my end.
- No Gnome-like menus on top of screen. Just one bar on the bottom of the screen with a menu button. I hate that about Gnome. Excluding that, I think Gnome is probably just as good as KDE. (Except I miss Karamba and Nautilus should have a way to type the location of a directory as well as to navigate to it!)
- Pretty Good Control Center
- Automatically handles drives. PCLinuxOS does this too, but many distros don't adjust fstab automatically to make life easy.
- Automatically handles most multimedia keyboard keys like volume keys. KDE doesn't do this. Gnome does.
- Automatic Updates - Love this feature of Ubuntu. Glad you included it in Mint!

Very impressive. I think Mint will definitely continue to grow in popularity.

Now, here's what PCLinuxOS does better, IMHO. I'd love to see Mint get some of these features:

- Stable. VERY stable. Unfortunately, for Mint to be this stable, they'd probably have to maintain their own repos. This kills one of Mint's best qualities: LOTS of software in the repos. I'd rather see Mint stick with Ubuntu's big repos. Maybe they could manage mission-critical stuff and leave the rest to Ubuntu's repos.
- DKMS -- Great for installing things like new kernels and video drivers.
- Control Center -- Mint is good, but probably not quite this good. One of my favorite control center utilities from PCLinuxOS is the GRUB editor. I can change all my GRUB settings without editing any text files. (By the way, I love the xorg.conf editor in Mint's Control Center. Nice touch!) Another thing I'd like to see is a backup program in Mint's Control Center. PCLinuxOS's backup program stinks, but it is better than nothing.
- K3B - I know I can't D/L it from the repos, but I consider this standard software. I'd love to see this included with the distro install CD.
- Photo Software -- Same issue. I can D/L F-spot or some other one from the repos, but I think this should be included on the distro install CD.
- Artwork -- Linux Mint looks really good (better than 95% of distros, frankly), but not quite as polished as PCLinuxOS. This wasn't true of 93a, but 2007 is beautiful.
- Proprietary nvidia drivers from repo automatically change xorg.conf to fix the Windows Decorations problem with Beryl and Nvidia. This is easy to do because Nvidia drivers are a simple package with DKMS. I have to use Envy with Mint and then edit xorg.conf.
- Klipper -- Love this! Why not include Glipper in Mint?

Anyway, I am very impressed! Linux Mint is a great, easy-to-use distro. I hope these comments are helpful, and I may indeed install Linux Mint the next time I reinstall a distro on my hard drive. It's nice to see more desktop Linux distros out there for the average Joe. IMHO, Linux Mint has joined PCLinuxOS and MEPIS as the three easiest distros to switch from Windows to Linux.