PClinuxOS 2007.0 Review

I am a Kubuntu user since version 6.06. However, that hasn’t made me blindly consider (k)ubuntu to be the best linux distro; I am always open to newcomers. In recent days, PClinuxOS 2007.0 was released, and quickly hit the top of of the distrowatch charts. I decided to download it and give this relatively new distribution a text run on my Acer Aspire 5050 laptop, nicknamed the geebee.

The first thing a user of the liveCD notices is the beautiful boot artwork. The login manager is even prettier, I might even have to get this theme for my Kubuntu installation. But before one can arrive at the KDM login screen, he must go through a series of configuration questions. Some of these questions are very useful, such as network configuration. You can even import a windows driver for use with ndiswrapper for wireless networking. However, some of the configuration options are quite useless, such as time configuration. I do not think most people care if their time is correct on a LiveCD. Of course, these settings are later used for the actual installation, but IMHO its better to specify them there. No biggie, and its probably just a personal preference.
Once logged in, I began exploring. The first program I went to was the
highly acclaimed PClinuxOS control center. My favorite feature of OpenSuse was its Yast control center, and PClinuxOS’s control center is pleasantly similar. Options for everything from network settings to boot splashes are easily configurable. Synaptic Package manager is also a very well chosen app for its crucial job. Even in Kubuntu I use Synaptic for my package manager of choice. One thing missing from PClinuxOS’s Synaptic is the ability to generate package download scripts. However, this is a feature of Ubuntu’s synaptic and it may not have been sent upstream yet.
Hardware detection was also very good. My realtek HD sound chip was properly configured, as was my video card and monitor; things I have found finicky in past distros. The Synaptics touchpad was also configured perfectly with side-to-side and up-and-down scrolling working.
The hotkeys and media shortcuts were not detected,but I can simply map them to Super+hotkey to get the same functionality.

Overall,I liked what I saw, so I decided to install to disk. Seeing as how I have a 120GB drive, I figured I could spare about 10 GB of my Ubuntu / for PClinux OS, so I selected “manually partition” in the installer. After shrinking the partition, I hit “done”. It formatted the partition and…..then….quit. I had to restart the installer, and then select the partition to load it on. Why did the installer quit after formatting? I have no clue, but recovering from it was easy enough. I then left the installer to do its duty for 30 minutes.When I came back, it was asking for more information about users. While this took very little time, it may be better to ask this information right off. Upon first boot, I noticed that it had not automatically detected my Ubuntu installation, so I had to add its entry to the menu.lst file. PClinusOS did detect my Windows partition, however.

A quick check of my music showed that all necessary codecs were pre-installed, VERY NICE! After applying my normal sound fix the sound worked properly. The quality even seemed slightly better. A quick plugin of my camera showed that not all was well in this department. Even after some more configuring, both in Kcontrol and digikam, the camera refused to be detected. This camera has worked in Ubuntu, Suse, and Gentoo.
Everything felt very fast, start up was speedy, and shutdown was even more so. I timed a couple apps start-up time between Kubuntu Fiesty and PClinuxOS.

Firefox:

PClinuxOS: 9 sec.

Kubuntu Fiesty: 12 sec.

Open Office Writer (with new document):

PClinuxOS: 17 sec.

Kubuntu Fiesty: 12 seconds

Other things felt faster, such as konsole startup.

The one feature blatantly missing was an option to suspend or hibernate. I don’t know if this is not supported by PClinuxOS at this time, or if there is simply no tool to do it with. Suspend to RAM is a very crucial funtionality for me.

While PClinuxOS is based on RPM’s, it can not install RPM’s from Suse, redhat, or even mandrake. Therefore you are limited to the ~5000 packages provided on the official mirrors. These packages, however, should be sufficient for most. The packages that are included are very well chosen on the most part, Firefox, Thunderbird and Amarok. I’d prefer to have Kate instead of Kwrite and GAIM instead of Kopete but since these are in the repositories its no big deal.

I was very impressed by this wholly volunteer made distribution, despite several of its flaw. The artwork and icon set were very nicely done. I am tempted to compare it to kubuntu, and quite favorably. I think PClinuxOS’s shortcomings in relation to kubuntu (camera and suspend2RAM) can pretty much excused by the fact the the PClinuxOS developer force is predominantly unpaid, whereas Ubuntu has several full-time paid developers working on such things as suspend scripts and hardware plug-and-play functionality. Overall this is a pretty slick little distribution, and I am looking forward to seeing what will happen to it in a year. Give me a volunteer distro any day.

Linux on the Acer Aspire 5050

First of all, the specs:

Processor— AMD Turion X2 TL-50 (1.6ghz)
Ram——-1 GB DDR2
Hard Drive——-120GB Western Digital 5400 RPM
screen———14.1 in WXGA
wifi——Atheros AR5005G
Graphics—–ATI Xpress 1100 chipset

Processor:

Works great with frequency scaling (1
step to 800mhz).x86_64 works great (I tested it, but 32 is easier)

Chipset:

The Xpress1100 is simply a Xpress 200
chipset with support for Turion X2’s and DDR2. It supports ACPI 2, and as
a result of this and Fiesty’s great ACPI support, suspend to RAM is
working as well as all of the hot keys on the
keyboard.

Graphics:

Working with the open source Ati
driver. It also works great with the fglrx drivers, albeit with some pretty bad performance

Wireless.

Wireless is a common problem with
laptops. Mine was no exception. Ubuntu ships the madwifi-ng
drivers which should support Atheros card. however Atheros support is
broken for the AR5005G in Ubuntu. After 2 weeks of fighting with
madwifi drivers, I just caved in and used ndiswrapper. With NDISwrapper, the software wireless switch on the front of the computer even works.

Sound.

I had problems at first with getting the front speakers working since they are controlled as a separate audio channel. However there was fix (As Jim Hague, who found it, explains):

Hi,

I've been putting Debian onto my new Aspire 5051AWXMi. It has mostly similar 

hardware to yours.

I have a fix for the sound problems on my machine; perhaps it will work for 

yours too. They seem to have the same device. You need to give the 

snd-hda-intel kernel module a parameter. I created a 

file /etc/modprobe.d/sound containing:

alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel

options snd-hda-intel index=0 probe_mask=3 position_fix=3

Explanation:

'index=0' just means 'make this the first sound device'. Unnecessary, really.

'probe_mask=3' indicates which codecs the driver should probe for. I found 

that the driver was finding 3 codecs on my hardware. The first is the modem, 

and the second is the audio. The third I think is spurious, and it's the 

cause of the problems. The probe mask makes the driver just look for the 

first two codecs. 'position_fix=3' suppresses a driver warning about its mode of operation not 

working by setting the mode to a mode that works for me. Again, you can 

safely leave it out.

Battery.

I’m getting appoximately 3:00 of
battery life as opposed to approximately 3:15 in Windows. The
inability to turn off WiFi? in Linux is probably the prime suspect in
this difference. An interesting tool to monitor power usage while
configuring powersaving features is “cat
/proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/usage” this will tell you amps and volts
being drawn,which you can multiply together to get watts.

Hello World!

#! /usr/bin/python

print “Hello world!”