Question: how do you make a fool of yourself?
Answer: claim that PCLinuxOS 2009 doesn’t exist, hours before it’s officially released.
So, after that rather embarassing faux-pas, I decided to download it, and try it out. Keep in mind I haven’t actually installed it yet, I just used the LiveCD on my girlfriend’s Dell Inspiron, and had a look around.
I have mixed feelings about the looks. You can see some screenshots in this blog post, and at first glance, everything looks clean and professional. However, those windows buttons (minimise, maximise, close) look very familiar, don’t they? Also, I think the window borders themselves are a bit too dark. They could have matched the taskbar better.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m nitpicking, because everything else was very much to my liking. The wireless card was detected, my wireless network too, and I was online in a matter of seconds. Internet speed was good too, something that’s a problem at the moment on that laptop using the default XP installation.
The XP partitions could be seen in Konqueror, mounted without issue, and Amarok could play the mp3s there instantly. Nice.
My last “test” was to visit apple.com/trailers and Youtube. No issues with the mplayer plugin and/or flash, and I really want to see that Star Trek movie.
I was planning to install this on the old test-pc, but PCLinuxOS is very impressive. I think I’ll use it to replace the Windows 7 beta that’s on my main system. It’ll be a nice backup OS for Arch.
San
Celettu's Weblog 
I am not quite sure why there should be much buzz about pclinuxos anymore? I took a quick spin of Gnome version (on Dell Inspiron laptop as well) and Mandriva One 2009.1 (RC1). They feel about the same, but on top of pclinuxos Mandriva has mouse pad scroll areas and laptop media buttons working out of the box.
Also (in LiveCD mode) Firefox in pclinuxos would not render tuxmachines home page correctly. Kind of funny that a linux distro would not be friendly to a web site dedicated to linux ?!
I also share some mixed feeling regarding defualt color choices. Some areas are difficult to read. At least it is easy to change it.
The other thing I disliked about both: they spinned CPU at max speed by default. I think “on demand” CPU freq mode would be a better default.
I am loving it. Tuxmachimes displays fine here on three different setups, on hp notebook. On thew HP the cpu/fan run normal, not sure what you mean about the CPU at max speed.
[…] As I mentioned yesterday, I first tried the LiveCD out on my girlfriend’s Dell laptop. At that moment, everything still smelled of roses: wireless card was detected and configured, mp3s played effortlessly, Youtube played its content without issue, and even the notoriously difficult trailers at apple.com provided no problem for PCLinuxOS. Everything looked OK. […]
I switched from PCLOS 2007 to Mint, 8 or 9 months back. I’ve been waiting for 2009 and installed it in a vm today. Sweet, vbox additions pre-installed. The KDE feels the same, solid. Checking under the hood will take some time. The installation didn’t even ask for time zone and somehow go it right. The devil is in the details and it looks like they’ve worked on the functional details. I tried KDE 4 in SUSE and am not a fan. KDE 4 looks pretty but that’s about it.
[…] Quick look around PCLinuxOS 2009.1 I was planning to install this on the old test-pc, but PCLinuxOS is very impressive. I think I’ll use it to replace the Windows 7 beta that’s on my main system. […]
@weric:
I am goin to reiterate that it was LiveCD experience. If I did HD install it might have been different.
I ran it on 4 year old Dell Inspiron laptop (pretty mainstream), so I expected no surprises.
By “CPU at max speed”, I meant CPUfreq/powersave was set into “preformance” mode. So the CPU ran at max clock speed available all the time (thus greatly reducing battery life). “On-demand” would allow it to work at lower speeds (longer battery life + CPU would be a couple degrees colder).
The tuxmachines; that’s a weird one. Instead of their background image on upper left side (where logo with penguins is), I see an image of my own desktop with “computer” icon. It happens only on the home page, not other pages, but it happens all the time.
So, I am NOT loving it. Like I sdia before, it felt like Mandriva One 2009.1 was a step ahead.
very very thank you