Saturday, June 13, 2009

PCLinuxOS going to get KDE4

I will not say much to avoid spreading rumors but what I came to know last night from Texstar on PCLinuxOS forums is that PCLinuxOS will be getting KDE4 packages as Tex said:

"KDE4 will be available before the end of June for PCLinuxOS."

How will this update be applied and what changes will be made to current stable PCLinuxOS before and after this update is still awaited.

Hope it will be a good change.

Friday, June 12, 2009

My PCLinuxOS 2009 "MiniMe"


I am not just a big fan of PCLinuxOS rather my computing life becomes difficult without it. Doing my routine home and office work on my computer is always a risky task on Windows and Linux is the best safe alternative for that. My daily Linux experimentation also compel me to have something as a backup and as a "rescuer". PCLinuxOS 2008 "MiniMe" is the best candidate for that and it is always lying on my desk and in my office bag to be handy.

PCLinuxOS 2008 "MiniMe" is quite an old release and it needed to be updated to current 2009 status and I was looking for some perfect way to do it. PCLinuxOS forums are always full of valuable information and there I found what I was looking for .

Texstar says it in his own words as:

How to do full update on clean install Minime 08 as of 5-23-09??


OK here's my steps from a clean install of minime 08 to full update:

1. Install the following:

GConf2
bootloader-utils
dbus
findutils
gtk+2.0
libcairo2
module-init-tools
which

2. Install the following:

kernel-2.6.26.8.tex3

3. Mark All and Click Apply.

I followed these steps and changed the looks of my PCLinuxOS 2009 "MiniMe" by adding a wallpaper of my choice and installing nuoveXT-aero icons and added Opera browser for me and made a new custom iso with "mklivecd" and everything is working perfectly on my PCLinuxOS 2009 "MiniMe". The size of the iso is not true minime as the updates made it bit bigger than actual minime but it is still the original basic minime with changed graphics and Opera added.

Happy home,Office and rescue with with my PCLinuxOS 2009 "MiniMe" is all ready and working great.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Hymera Open Not so easy and stable

My story about this new debian based distro goes like this :: although the DW Hymera page says it is multilingual including en but they installer is only italian and all you have to do during installation is to do a guess work plus the installer is not easy at all as compared to what Hymera people say, and after installation the system refuse to boot at all beyond GRUB:::something related to kernel???

I adopted a different method for installing Hymera:::grabbed a lenny netinstall cd:::installed base system and added hymera repo ( http://mirror.hymera.it/standard/ ) removing lenny official repos and installed full hymera system maintaing ext3 file system instead of ext4 and lenny kernel . You can see my Hymera installed system in these screenshots.

 
Now the repository from hymera has huge packages available but lots of packages are still missing and you have to re add lenny official repos to get a working system despite the warning from hymera team to use only their own repos. Also you have to set keyboard ley out from italian to en.

This distro has potential but needs lot of work and despite the adds given by hymera at DW this distro is not yet ready for its claimed potentials and I am sure not everybody would either think of or adopt an alternate method of installing this distro as I did.

To be honest and not too critical it doesn`t have something really exciting except some latest packages e.g Open Office which is again broken, ext4 file system and latest kernel which gives problem after installation .

The boot loader gets installed to mbr: I checked grub menu to confirm but something is wrong with the kernel that prevents system to boot at all and many has reported this issue on their forum.


Still wish best of luck to Hymera team .