PCLinuxOS delivers where others failed

This is a follow-up post to "A real-distro-hopper-stopper".

One of the reasons why I said PCLinuxOS is "A real distro-hopper-stopper is its ability to auto detect your devices. I have read elsewhere that mostly, only branded tvturner cards can work with linux. To my surprise, this is not the case with tvtime, the native tvturner software in PCLinuxOS and I guess it is available out-of-the-box on every versions of PCLOS (excellent job guys!).

This software (tvtime) is so easy to use. Just right click on it and a menu will pop out for you to select a task. To get your tvturner working, simply click on "channel management" then "scan for signal" and start watching your favorite tv show!

I need to install at least three things to get my tvturner card running on windows (driver, media center & remote utility). Got no luck running it on other linux distros either. :(

As I said, PCLinuxOS is "a real distro-hopper-stopper". Do you think I got the reason to say so?? Try running it to check it yourself!

You can safely check tvtime out by getting your Live copy of PCLinuxOS from this mirrors.

A real distro-hopper-stopper

 

pclinuxos-lxde-2010-beta2a

Above is the screenshot of the new PCLinuxOS with LXDE as native desktop environment. This baby is still in beta stage but compared to its predecessor, this version is almost complete. Having Firefox 3.6 with built-in flash as browser - watching videos via youtube and the likes is a breeze out-of-the-box.

The printer manager is also easy to use. Just plug-in your printer and it's automatically detected.

CompizFuzion is also out-of-the-box. So if you've got a decent graphics accelerator you'll be up and running the most advance desktop in the planet. :)

Cube with 3D, gears and transparency in action!

Take note that this OS also auto-detected my PCI tv-tuner.

I have tested few LXDE distros this past week and I am very delighted that PCLinuxOS rolled-out this beta version. BTW, here's the link  to PCLOS mirrors for Beta 2 releases.

Here's a list of some cool features of pclinuxos-lxde-2010-beta2a:

Internet: Firefox 3.6, Thunderbird 3.0.3, Pidgin 2.6.6, Xchat 2.8.6
Sound: Audacity 1.3.10-beta, LXMusic 0.4.0
Video: Imagination 2.1, MPlayer, TVTime Television Viewer

It also got the Synatic Package Manager so that installation of new applications to satisfy your needs is just a click away.

Boot baby... boot!

Could you imagine a usable operating system that is only 29 mb with a Firefox browser built-in? Imagine a sleek window manager and desktop environment that only uses a small fraction of your RAM and CPU! An old computer running latest softwares? Your kidding me man!!!

But nope! I'm not kidding! What you can see in the picture above is the screenshot of a customized SliTaz GNU/Linux operating system. It does not contain under the hood some basic tools to keep you up and running and do some computing task but it also got more than 2000 easy to install packages with its SliTaz packages manager.

I've been playing around with linux distributions for some considerable time already but SliTaz really impressed me. It uses LXDE as its desktop environment - what makes RAM and CPU usage very minimal. It runs completely in RAM meaning you can run your computer even without a hardisk. By default, hard disk and partitions are not mounted which I believe is a very beautiful thing because the user is to decide whether you wish to have partitions mounted or not.

If you know how to play around Linux and LiveCDs... why not give SliTaz a try and be amazed on what something so small can do. :)