LincolnBlogs

What a mess!

To recap, I was running Ubuntu 7.04, I believe, and got tired of seeing my hard drive thrash for no apparent reason every so often. I had decided on switching over to PCLinuxOS because I had run it a while back and it worked well, because it was still hanging in there as one of the more popular distributions being downloaded, and because I wanted a very quick and clean install that would give me the general things that I needed for a usable desktop workstation.

Where to begin….:

First of all, loading the live cd takes forever on my machine for some reason (3ghz machine with 1gb ram and a 52x cdrom drive) but after it loads it runs pretty well. After I ran the live cd for a day and tweaked it a bit to my liking I figured I would take the plunge and do the full hard drive install. Well, the installer, in my opinion, can use some real work.

The biggest problem with these live cd’s that I see is that they, for some reason, think that running the installer from a live cd is somehow cool or nifty. What it really is, is ass slow. Painstakingly ass slow, in fact. If you are a developer for a distribution, do us all a favor and for crying out loud PLEASE make a clear/easy way to install your distribution WITHOUT having to use the live cd.

Other than the slowness of the install (I actually took an hour nap during this!) the partitioning setup they have is terrible at its worst and confusing at its best. Basically, you are given 3 options, which are use existing partitions, use the entire disk, and to manually partition. Now I really wanted to use the entire disk and just have it be done, but after picking that option it wanted me to *reboot* and rerun the installer. Well, after having to wait a half hour for the friggin live cd to load there was no way in hell I was going to go through that again. So, I quit the installer at that point and started it again and said I would manually partition. Now this was more like it, except it seems buggy because it said it formatted my 60gb partition in 2 seconds (highly unlikely). So, I quit the installer *again* and just ran fdisk to set up my partitions (now I see why it’s an live cd – so you have access to fix this crap). Anyhow, after setting up my partitions via fdisk, I started the installer again and chose to use my existing partitions and followed through from there. The install took longer than I thought it would, but it was largely unattended and when it was over I rebooted to a running desktop system.

This all brings me to configuration. I have to say that after trying to get things the way I like, or at least functional for me, I almost gave up. There are only a few things I like for a usable desktop install. I like rox-filer, a decent variant of kde with it’s current utils, xmms, firefox and thunderbird. I also would like to have a way to control my mac desktop with the kb/mouse on my linux box – I normally use x2vnc for this. Well, most of this stuff was there with the exception of rox and x2vnc. I hunted high and low for rox and even tried to compile it, but alas that didn’t work. I decided to try thunar instead and I have to say I like thunar. The look and feel are comfortable and functional except one thing. When I decided to reinstall, I backed up my stuff to my nas. Well, every time I used thunar to browse my nas share once it was mounted, it locked up my nas connection and thunar. After a while of getting steamed over that I just gave up and started browsing my nas with konqueror. Well, that did the same damn thing. I was just about to give up and start downloading Slackware 12 when I did one more google search and found that there *is* a way to get rox, by using the “tinyme” repository for pslinuxos. I figured I would give it one more try and grabbed rox, and rox does exactly what its supposed to – just like it always does 😉 Last real quirk was controlling the mac. Since I cannot find x2vnc, nor will it compile (wth is up with this?), I decided to search for an alternative and found that synergy is in the package list. So, I installed synergy on the mac and on the Linux box and after googleing for half an hour on how to configure it (what a pita) it’s up and going. In fact, I am using it right now!

So, my impressions? Well, I like it fairly well so far. Honestly, the majority of the problems I have had with it are the lack of the packages that I actually wanted. That is something that’ll come the more popular it gets as a distribution. It’s very polished and has a nice feel to it and it starts and shutsdown *very* fast compared to Ubuntu. I was initially concerned that it uses rpms for package management, but it also uses apt-get, which seems to work very well. I guess we’ll see what the future holds for this distribution staying on my workstation, but for now, everything seems livable 😉