PCLinuxOS Minime - 2008

GNOME has irritated me out of my wits yet again. Looks like I just cant use the same desktop environment for more than like 10 months. So for now I'm back to KDE on PCLinuxOS Minime. Now now, I know I wrote a "highly appraising" review about Ubuntu Gutsy earlier, but this piece of distro kicks balls! Although I dont understand why they dont use more spaces. As in PC Linux OS would have made much more sense than PCLinuxOS.

Anyways, the minime version comes with almost no pre-installed packages and libraries (which means it's as small as around 250 MB) which gives you the choice to customize as you like it from scratch. All I had to do was download some 400MB of stuff through the Synaptic Package Manager and so far the system is working perfectly fine except for a few minor problems including-

1) Pidgin wasn't working for Gmail and MSN due to absence of any SSL libraries. So all that needed to be done was to install the libnss and libnspr (development) libraries from Synaptic.

2) Sound was almost absent from all apps. No gstreamer plugins was the obvious fault and that got fixed easily too.

3) There were some minor display related issues, which again were easily corrected.

So far the only "un-solvable" has been the NTFS-3G Configuration Tool which just refuses to work, although ntfs-3g can be simply configured through the shell.

Here is a text copy of my Synaptic Package Manager Log- Link

This include packages ranging from amarok, pidgin, opera, firefox, picasa, vlc player, aKregator, ktorrent, frostwire, and smplayer to kdeadmin suite, kdeutils, kdegraphics etc. along with the basic libraries and plugins.

A funny message I got on entering the wrong root password in the shell was-

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.
#2) Think before you type.
#3) With great power comes great responsibility.

I did try Kubuntu 7.10 first, but the adept-installer frustrated me so much that I didnt give it another look. Maybe I'll try it sometime later. After the next release perhaps. Till then, I think (and I hope) I've found a spotless config.