I downloaded and installed the iso into VMWare’s Server. Installation was straight forward, easy, and reasonably quick. No glitches during installation. The resulting installed desktop looks very much like Freespire. I did not encounter any problems running several programs that came with the distro - however, most programs seemed to take longer to open than they did in Freespire or openSuse. This could be the result of the VM server setup, however.

I found it annoying that I could not set up my mouse pointer. The speed was a bit fast for my taste and I found myself clicking wrong places often. The only real deal breakers for me were that I could not set up my HP AIO or my sound card. TV was a no-go as well because the distro did not recognize my ATI TV Wonder card. This is a known issue with linux in general. However, Xandros Linux recognized my TV card and was able to at least set up the channel line up for me - but then failed to produce video.

All in all I found PCLinuxOS a nice distro if perhaps a bit too simplistic for my taste. Hardware incompatibilities still plague Linux and this distro is no exception.

Pros - Clean look. Quick and painless install. Live-CD version. Package installer.

Cons - Lots of hardware incompatibilities yet - my onboard AC97 sound, TV card, or either printer (HP 6210 AIO and Epson Stylus Photo R300), for example. Did not recognize my NTFS partitions. Could not configure my MS mouse or nVidia graphics card. Installing programs not listed in the package installer is not obvious to non-Linux folks like me.

My verdict for PCLinuxOS 2007 - Not quite ready for prime time yet. Not as polished as openSuse or Freespire distros. “Radically Simple” - maybe TOO simple yet. And a VERY hard sell to a WinXP person like me.

If you’re looking for a good Linux distro to migrate from WinXP - it’s not out there yet, in my opinion. But Freespire and openSuse come the closest of the free distros I’ve tried - Xandros was far better than any free version I’ve tried, but even Xandros failed where it counted for me. Don’t bother with PCLinuxOS 2007 yet - Linux needs to grow up quite a bit before it will replace Windows on my desktop.

Hello Joseph,
Thanks for taking the time to write a very good review of the software. It is appreciated.
Regards, Ron

Joseph wrote:

Cons - Lots of hardware incompatibilities yet - my onboard AC97 sound, TV card, or either printer (HP 6210 AIO and Epson Stylus Photo R300), for example. Did not recognize my NTFS partitions. Could not configure my MS mouse or nVidia graphics card. Installing programs not listed in the package installer is not obvious to non-Linux folks like me.

————————–

That’s strange. My sound “just worked” as it did on every machine I installed it on. Basic AC97 sound ought to work. Printers have to be picked from a list in the control centre. I’ve had absolutely no problems reading ntfs partitions, and ntfs-3g is in the repos should you wish to write to them. I also have an MS mouse and it works perfectly. I have an nVidia graphics card (GT-7600) and once I had installed dkms-nvidia from Synaptic and set the correct resolution from the control centre (similar in many respects to what I had to do in Windows), it works great, and no reboots!

Joseph — You say you are a non-linux user, perhaps you were going about getting things working the wrong way. You have to use the control centre for example to make Windows partitions mount by default.

Anyway, if you fancy giving PCLinuxOS another bash, come on over to our forum at http://www.pclinuxos.com we will show you how to get up and running. It really shouldn’t be that hard.

Hello davecs,
Thanks for the comment and your offer to assist joseph.
Ron

My question is not “should I move from WinXP to PCLOS 2007″, but rather “should I move from PCLOS Big Daddy version to PCLOS 2007 ?” !!
My audio,video and TV cards all work just great as it is.
Is there a 64 bit kernel for the 2007 version ?

If 2007 is an improvement over the Big Daddy version,then it must be worth a look-see, because the Big Daddy is near perfect as it is.

Hi Lee,
I personally believe that 2007 is the best version yet. Unfortunately there is no 64 bit version that I saw on the site.
Ron

PS You know the old saying ‘if it ain’t broke’ If your are enjoying Big Daddy and it works well for you, you may just want to stick with it. Another option, if possible, is to try 2007 on a old HD.

I was ready to give up on Linux when I found PCLinuxOS. I tried Linspire, Freespire, OpenSuse and Ubuntu. The only one of those that half-way worked was Ubuntu. When I installed PCLinuxOS I was connected to the internet before the install was complete. All the plugins for Firefox were there. Adobe Reader along with 1000’s of other software packages were available and those folks update and add often. The results are beautiful. Everything works. I can play almost any video or listen to quite a range of music types. This distro is extremely stable and has never froze on me requiring rebooting. Linspire was the worst of the lot, freezing up constantly and trying to send error messages much like Microsoft. Don’t those guys know that’s what we’re trying to get away from. Believe me I am a begininer and have very little technical knowledge of computers. If I can make this distro work, anybody can. I have said goodby to Bill and firmly intend to use Linux from now on. No more spying, inflated prices, error reporting, ad infintium. PCLinuxOS is awesome. IT WORKS - IT JUST WORKS!!! This OS is ready for prime time.

Hi Oscar,
Thanks for sharing your experience with us.
Regards, Ron

I disagree with those that find PCLinux 2007 lacking… I have used the previous v. and the latest v. is very clean, fast, attractive as hell and works out of the box with all my hardware, including a new AMD duo core and a Gigabyte mobo with ATI IGP… I have used PCLinux for my alternate box alongside Windows XP box and I like how this OS has progressed. If it were not for Firefox being an awful rendering browser, and I could use Maxthon on this distro instead, PCLinux is great in every way.
I very much appreciate how easily my HP printer can set-up. Plug it in, and within 4 minutes ready to print without installing all that HP bloatware.. Try THAT in Windows..

all was going good, until i went to use download some packages, couldn’t down load a thing. tried different reops but couldn’t get it work. had a look around and seems like an isolated case. so I’m stumped.

Hi Kelvin,
Stop over at Scot’s Newsletter Forum, in the Linux section. The folks there are great when it comes to solving problems and won’t make you feel dumb.

http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/

You must register but the process is painless.

i like to work on pclinuxos .because of that i trying for downloading linux