Thursday, December 22, 2005

PCLinuxOS - Part 2

Two days ago I converted my wife's machine. It was a snap and she was up and running in one hour with all her files restored from backup. She does not see much difference, but, noticed that it seems to have better performance. I installed the extra games as she likes to play games when she is bored.

I also found out that Beep Media Player can handle streaming internet music. I have had it running for several days now. I put a skin on it so it looks like XMMS. It tooks a bit of digging to find this out, but, the online groups are a great help.

Monday, December 19, 2005

PCLinuxOS

I have now been playing with PCLinuxOS V0.92 for a week now. So far I like what I see. It is very easy to add/delete/update my system with the control centre. It is very much like Mandriva so that there is little change.

The only thing I had to do was to change from DHCP to Static IP as the P2P programs would not properly connect to the servers. I also had to make a firewall change. Once that was done I could start to download files without a problem.

There is still one problem. When I try to stream music through XMMS it won't connect and play. I have no problem with Realplayer or the MPlayer plugin. Realplayer is somewhat slow and skips at times when I am working which I don't like hearing. The MPlayer plugin to Firefox is nice, but, I have to keep the browser running. I probably will be going to the PCLinuxOS site later and see if anyone else has a problem like me.

A few fixes I had to make:
  1. Machine name changed from 'Localhost'. I had to manually tweak that. There is a setting somewhere, but, I have not found it yet.
  2. DHCP to Static IP for P2P to work properly.
  3. Firefox popus. I had to add a new 'Integer' for variable privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins and set it to a value of 2. I also set privacy.popups.policy to a value of 2. That seems to stop the popups.
  4. KDE uses CTRL-TAB CTRL-SHIFT-TAB to move between desktops. Firefox uses that to move between tabs. I had to change KDE so that I use that key combination for Firefox.

Friday, December 16, 2005

New Linux Distro Installed

I am trying a new distro on the machine at home. PCLinuxOS V0.92 was installed. It went smoothly taking about 1 hour on a 1GHz machine. It appears to be a stable as Mandriva and it comes on one CD. It also has everything that Mandriva has and the best part is that it is a livecd that you can try before installing.

There are a few things that I like.
  1. XMMS comes with the package. I prefer this app over Amarok.
  2. Kontact & KPilot work reliably with my palm pilot.
  3. It feels more responsive than Mandriva.
  4. System management has a similar look/feel to Mandriva.
  5. It automounts my USB memory stick and Harddrive like Mandriva.
  6. One CD vs three when installing.