PCLinuxOS 2007 Beta 1

I have had a chance to play a bit with the Beta 1 of PCLinuxOS 2007. This is not a complete exhaustive test of the distribution, but, the major things I work with on my current Linux machine. I was working off of the CD and from what I see it is the same high quality product as PCLinuxOS V0.93.

The test machine was a Dell D610 laptop with 512Mb of memory. The distribution detected all of the hardware without a problem and launched smoothly. I plugged in my USB memory stick and it launched Konqueror showing the contents of the drive. I launched OpenOffice and GKrellm as they are two other packages that I regularly use. To save the screens I used KSnapshot. This was a smooth system even when running from a CD and so far no glitches.

It asks a number of questions when starting the CD and the following are how I answered:

• Keyboard = US;
• Timezone = Ontario;
• Date/Time= Hardware;
• NTP = ON, allservers;
• Connection = Ethernet, Automatic IP, Allow users to manage connection.
  

The last test was using FireFox and a Java based game. The reason I was testing this that my daughter plays an online game with friends and it works in V09.3. The only thing it has problems FireFox has is that the game will not spawn an external window showing the world map. This is not a problem with the Windows version so I know that it is a problem with the site handling Linux. The 2007 version has the same problem, but, it still plays the game. I actually prefer it on the Linux version as it appears to be sharper and cleaner rendered than in Windows.

At this time the team making PCLinuxOS are working on another beta for testing. I don't know what the problem area(s) are, but, they have delayed the release. From what I see and tested the disto appears to be rock solid and I didn't have any problems. I will be trying out the next beta and will be testing other things (CD burning and scanner), but, I am looking forward to upgrade our current boxes at home to use this distro.