bjoernvold.com

With Mandriva in a bit of a limbo, atm, for me and others, also wrt PWP, I spend some free time looking at live disks from other distros. BTW, I see Jim Beard on cooker ml seeming to discover PWP doesn't have a certain IDE driver that is in 2011 Official, suggesting that might be why so many are having problems with it. Storage controller drivers have always been something on my radar with the hardware I use, so that's interesting.

Anywho, I found a torrent for pclinuxos-kde-2011.09.iso over where Texstar still does his thing, running that now:



The livecd booted relatively quickly but the resolution was too low for the display. I found the PCLOS version of MCC to be quite easy to use for changing this, then restarted X for the changes. Next, Dropbox is one of the features in the PCLOS description of this release and dealing with Dropbox funcionality has given me quite a few psychic scars in the recent past, so I wanted to test that.

Starting Dropbox from the menu walked me through registration to my existing account, a trouble-free registration of this particular instance of my machine at the website, and the icon showed Dropbox was downloading all my files to my local Dropbox folder. That was fine but I was not able to get the Dropbox link in the Dolphin or Konqueror file browsers. In Mandriva 2011, there is a cool menu add-on for konqueror that I like but I am forced to use it as I can't get the normal Dropbox icon and it's functionality to work.

I know there is something about Nautilus that has the capability to retrieve the Dropbox url for shared files from the file browser but I did not see Nautilus in the menu. That brought me to Software Management, which is Synaptic in PCLOS:


I searched on "nautilus" but there did not seem to be any hit on the file browser. Looking at the sources and clicking around in there, Synaptic prompted me to "Reload" which brought in the files list. PCLOS is using rpm as the package format, here. So, then I could install nautilus but that was not enough to get Dropbox links in the context menu. I went back to Synaptic and got nautilus-dropbox, then restarted nautilus, as Synaptic had told me was necessary. Oddly, even though the machine was syncing my account, when I opened the Dropbox icon, it prompted to install the daemon. After that, I was able to get the links, as the above screenie demonstrates.

The relative ease of getting Dropbox working is very impressive to one such as myself. Another thing that is borked for my Mandriva 2011 install is the network manager applet. Here, my ethernet dhcp internet is configured automatically (not so rare, these days) and the applet is functional.



So, this is very superficial but promising as an optional backup. Not rpm5, yet, which is coming, I believe, but all in good time, perhaps. One more thing, perhaps apropos of Jim Beard's detective work and my legacy difficulties finding support for storage controllers, I can see all my disks in PCLOS kde-2011.09

Thanks for the report.
I seem to remember that PCLOS always has been a "looker" and quite functional.
But I believe you do not get 64 bit in PCLOS?

I do not see 64-bit over there. While MIB is fanatic about it and I have been trying to use it, I'm not convinced it's worth the trouble, at this point.

Well if it is functional it is worth having a look. I have never been fanatic about Synaptic and Apt but it comes highly praised. I am updating My VB Mandriva 2011 now (129 updates) just to check.
As a fresh install it has worked just fine so far. Update is not possible unless you are a rocket scientist (or maybe a Guru-Berserk).

But I believe you do not get 64 bit in PCLOS?

They are working on it.
There is a big 32 bit partisan camp there and indeed for a very long time there was no 64 bit version.
It didn't bother me since I also use only 32 bit on whatever distro but it did bother some newcomers...possibly many gave up on PCLinuxOS because of that.
Anyway, Tex got fed up with the external criticism about it and decided to build for 64 also.
So, WIP.

Yeah paitience is a Berserk virtue
I have always heard that Texstar needs to be worshiped and that the community is expected to do some serious grovelling.
"Tex got fed up" , "Tex has decided" etc - that is the word (Don't get me wrong; If he does all the work he deserves some serious recognition). What is your impression?
What happens to the distro if Tex dies or gets a job at Microsoft?

I have always heard that Texstar needs to be worshiped and that the community is expected to do some serious grovelling.

Well, personally I don't think he needs that or that he wants it. He's a very nice and funny man...good sense of humor. He is helpful and he does listen to users. I don't know how is able to do all that, building the distro, fixing, patching... be present on the forum helping folks and constantly making jokes or posting funny pictures. He is a kind of supermultitasking man.

I never never sensed the slightest bit of superiority in his tone, not even when we had a couple of arguments. You can argue with the guy without seeing him becoming hysteric. The same thing cannot be said about some of the mods especially, they'll chop your head off if you dare to challenge their God or Distro.
And yes, he is constantly butt kissed, praised and worshiped like a god, but I don't think someone is enforcing this attitude...is just the way things are over there.

"Tex got fed up" , "Tex has decided" etc - that is the word (Don't get me wrong; If he does all the work he deserves some serious recognition)

.
Yes, he is the main driving force behind PCLinuxOS and the benevolent dictator...something like Patrick Volkerding or Warren Woodford maybe.

What happens to the distro if Tex dies or gets a job at Microsoft?

God forbid
My opinion (and that is all what it is, just an opinion ) is that PCLinuxOS will agonize for a while and simply crumble.
Hopefully that will never happen.

Yeah Linux needs people like that. But it is a major argument against using PCLOS in a production environment that it is depending on one man.
Part of any business is the risk evaluation....and that is risky.
That is very much the case for Mandriva and Mageia too, these days. So in the RPM department there is Centos Redhat Suse and Fedora to choose from.
Again if using it as a desktop Centos and Redhat are pretty boring as they are mainly server distros,
Suse has the upperhand from a risk evaluation standpoint. Since they have paid Microsoft protection money, not to attack their customers. And they have a commercial support with a solid company behind it.
Fedora is ok but a bit experimental from a conservative risk standpoint.
Arch is perfect if you have a fit IT department that can take care of things. Because you will be building your own distro....

I guess there are issues with every distro so one might go for PCLOS after all

Production environment...I would go with Suse in this case, they seem solid enough to me.
I'm not gonna search the net to confirm it but I think that Suse (Enterprise) is the main OS deployed on those insane supercomputers. That's kinda a nice reputation

Yes, it's a risk involved when we're talking about a one man show distro like PCLinuxOS.
Still, they manage to resist rock solid for quite a while while other distros shattered (even backed up by companies...like Ma..cough cough)

Yep, I would go with Suse.

Yeah that is what I think every time so I test it every time and then I fall on my back Charlie Brown style - every time.
In 12.1 webin does not work, Oneclick from websites is pure bingo. Adding repos is a nightmare and finding out what those repos contain is even worse.
So I went to the website and copied me the zypper code to make it work - and it was wrong!

I found out what the error was in the code and decided to help out those other puzzled Suse guys by trying to edit the Wiki.
There I needed to confirm my e-mail to avoid spam problems.
OK I am playing along so I was sent to Novell for e-mail confirmation and gave them my data.
Back again and.... still unable to edit the wiki.
So I told the gurus in the forum that they should fix it - and on the second attempt they made it , after first having tried to brush it of as an unimportant typo (Do they even exist in code - aren't all typos important there?)
I am talking about this page:
http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed (It is correct now on the code further down on the page).
Sure Suse has that extra support that could calm down nervous business people and It is surly capable . But you will have to invest some time into it.

I get this suspicion that they are creating an unnecessary big space for commercial support by making things "difficult".
Suse takes time and the quality of the documentation is disappointing (I don't even use it, and discovered the error -first!)

Depending on the personal available I find Arch to be the most stable distro (Well you pick what you need and don't get the bloat) so I would use that for production (desktop -not server).
Just to make sure I would maybe go for the LTS kernel. But even without it Arch is rock solid and works every day even for complete amateurs (Like my wife with no clue and very high expectations ).
Anyway I'll take a new look at PCLOS now...