Review: Pardus Linux 2008 (Page 1 of 1)
Written by
Steve Lake
Posted on: Aug 11, 2008 at 11:54am
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Pardus is a rather interesting Linux distribution amongst a wide field of many competitors. It's unique in that, while it's designed for desktop usage, it is funded and developed by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. I don't know the reasons behind this, but I suspect it was due to a need for a good quality Linux distribution for Turkish speaking people.
Pardus comes natively with support for ten different languages, including English, German, Turkish, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Catalan and Dutch. Turkish is the default language used by the distribution, but changing languages when you first boot up is easy. When you first load the cd, you're greeted by a somewhat cute cartoony lion that then faids into a standard boot screen. Pressing F2 brings up the list of languages. Once that's done, you can choose from either "Pardus 2008" (the live cd), "Boot from Hard Disk", or "Memory Test".
Installation
Bootup into the installation is somewhat of a typical affair. There is no livecd, so all you do is boot straight into the installer. Load times are fairly average, so there's nothing special to report there. Once it's fully booted, you're given the opportunity to either ready the GPL, or simply accept it. If you don't accept it, the only option you have is to reboot the system. If you do accept it, you're allowed to click next. You can also read the help and release notes for the distribution.
The next thing it does is give you the opportunity to check the integrity of your CD. This is a nice feature that I wish more distributions had. Mostly because it would reduce the number of complaints about poor live cd performance or installation errors due to bad media. If you don't want to check your media, simply click next. The next step is to select your keyboard. Interestingly enough, while there is only 10 supported system languages, there are close to forty supported keyboard layouts. There's even a place to test your keyboard layout to be sure it's working properly before continuing.
Next, you're given the ability to set your timezone. After that comes users and passwords, and then root's password after that. Interestingly enough, you can't set a password of root for the root user. The system enforces a somewhat disciplined method of ensuring user security by preventing you from using "cheat" passwords. A couple more clicks to choose where it should install, and then you're on your way. Installation times are somewhat on the slow side, but it's not unbearably slow. But given what it appears to be doing while installing the OS would explain why it takes so long. I say this because the steps that it appears to take are numerous and quite detailed.
Once this is completed, you simply reboot, and you're ready to begin your work. One interesting bonus item that displays during the install is a series of repeating informational screens about a number of programs that come with Pardus by default. So if a user is new to Linux, the screens provide the user with a little software 101 while they're waiting for the install to complete. I think this is a great feature as it'll help new users feel more comfortable with using Linux knowing that there are plenty of programs to do all they need to do.
System Overview
Initial bootup of Pardus provides you with a rather interesting initial bootscreen. The only options you have is to boot directly into Pardus. Down below where once there were five options (F1-F5) to configure the distro at boot, you now have three. Not a big deal, but the change is somewhat surprising. Booting into the system first time is reasonably quick. Subsequent boots only gain a little bit of extra speed, so apparently all major work is done during the install, with very little left to finish up on first boot.
The initial login screen is somewhat cute, with little cartoon cats next to each login and some cartoony buttons to go with it. Pardus 2008 uses KDE 3.5.9, but not a fully clean, naked KDE. A lot of customization appears to have gone into the KDE they use. But that appears to be for a reason, which I'll try to explore later. The first time you load the desktop, you're greeted with a rather interesting little program called the "Kaptan Welcome Wizard". This is a rather interesting tool based on the PAtCHeS (Point And Click Here Stupid) principle of simplicity (You really can't get much simpler than that. Even KISS doesn't touch this level of simplicity) for end users.
The Wizard allows you to customize your mouse, panel (aka taskbar), multiple (aka desktops), wallpaper, network and finally packages. The mouse configurations are fairly straight forward and start with default double click and left/right mouse settings. The panel configurations allow for four basic themes: Classic, Modern, Next Generation, and Transparency. Each has its benefits, and the end user is allowed to either stay with the default "Classic" theme, or step it up to a slightly newer look. There's also a checkbox that allows you to choose between the modified classic menu, or the newer KDE4 style "Kickoff" menu.
The Multiple, or desktops configuration allows you to configure how many desktops you have and, interestingly enough, gives you the option to use your mouse to switch between desktops using the desktop access applet. The next screen, Wallpaper, obviously allows you to change your wallpaper. By default, Pardus comes with no wallpaper set. There are a nice selection of black and white, as well as color wallpapers for you to choose from. The wizard will even change your wallpaper automatically to allow you to test drive it before committing to it.
The Network section is a bit more complex than the others, but still provides you with a reasonably easy "point and click" setup for your network connection. It's a bit annoying in the way it does things, with it pestering you twice for your login in order to add and activate the connection. But once it's done, you no longer need to touch it. It's definitely not PAtCHeS territory, but still simple enough for a new user to handle.
Now the last section, the one for the package manager, blows PAtCHeS clean out of the water and sails past KISS with a vengeance. If a user understands packages and what to do with them, this area will be easy. If not, it'll be confusing. Now given that there's a whole whopping 3 checkboxes to deal with, you might think otherwise, but having dealt with new users and package management before, this will generate a lot of "deer in the headlights" looks from people who've never dealt with this before, or don't understand package management.
For them I'd just recommend clicking the first two checkboxes under updates and not touching the other under repo. In 20/20 hindsight, I'd say that the developers would have been wiser to have just assumed the settings the user would need and set them by default with an option to "opt out" for more senior users.
Now once you've completed all those steps, you're down to the "goodbye" page. Oddly, this is not really a "you're done, click finish to exit" type page. Sure, you can just click finish and be done with it, but you also have the ability to go into some more advanced settings (not exactly newbie friendly) for making some additional adjustments to the system. If you're green to Linux, this will confuse you. If you've been around for a little bit, this will oddly make sense. The two control panels and one web enabled help section you're offered are not organized in the best possible layout, but they're usable.
Now, back to the customized KDE that Pardus uses. The developers interestingly enough tossed out the classic Kcontrol KDE control panel and replaced it with something called "Tasma". It's something similar to Kcontrol, but with twenty pounds of makeup and its dignity sold down the street for a couple of Twinkies. It gets you to most of the important Kcontrol sections you'll need to access, but I'm heavily unimpressed with the way it does it. And in some cases, whole sections, or large portions of important sections, are completely missing.
The Pardus KDE menu is an interesting beast in itself. It's still the 3.x series KDE Kicker menu you fondly remember, but it's been reorganized in an almost Windows 9x format. This works well if you're using Pardus on older hardware or a UMPC where screen resolution isn't all that great due to hardware limitations. It allows the menu to fit into a smaller space, yet still provide you access to your applications.
The list of included programs is trimmed down to only those that are most useful. But some big names populate that shortened list, such as Gimp, Firefox, Kmail, numerous KDE core applications, K3b, Amarok, Mplayer, Open Office, the Kontact PIM suite, Gparted, and numerous others. So while the list of applications is somewhat thin compared to other distributions, this deficiency (or advantage, depending on your viewpoint) is compensated by an all-star lineup of software.
Multimedia support is pretty good and is handled by default applications such as Mplayer, Amarok and others. DVD support though appears non-existent. Or at least I couldn't get it working. Plus I couldn't find any installed DVD applications. That doesn't mean you can't install your own, but there are certainly none available out of the box.
Package management and installation/removal of software is handled by the aptly named "Package Manager" (a gui frontend for the PiSi package manager) that offers a fair selection of installable applications, along with decent explanations of each application. It's not as good as Synaptic (Is there really anything that's actually better than Synaptic?), but it is newbie friendly, so it has a redeeming value in that respect.
Now on a down note, hardware compatibility doesn't appear to be Pardus' strong suit. I was relatively unimpressed with how it handled my video card (Nvidia 6200) or how it had detected my hardware. It's handling of other things such as USB devices also left something to be desired. In order to get everything up to where it should have been, I had to do a little command line hacking. This is the same hardware that has been successfully detected without flaw in the majority of other distributions I've reviewed. So it's not a hardware issue so much as it is a problem with how Pardus detects the hardware and handles installation of drivers. It got about eight percent of everything on my system. But given that there are numerous other distributions that can get 100% of my hardware on the first try, 80% is unacceptable.
Conclusion
Overall I liked Pardus. It's got a few things it could stand to improve on, but overall it's not a bad distribution for the new user. It's still got some bugs that I think need to be addressed before I can recommend it for new users, but it doesn't have far to go. With a little work it could easily fall into my list of recommended distributions. But for how far they've come so far, it's quite worthy of a nod of approval. Once they dust off those last bugs, it's a fair to say that they could easily challenge Ubuntu, PCLOS and the other kingpin distros for best distribution for new users.
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