Since Pardus 2007.1 "Felis chaus" Release Candidate was available, I went from surprise to surprise with Pardus: after a first look (harsh), and then a second one (somehow mitigated), I thought the path to 2007.1-RELEASE will be longer, but it wasn't: Pardus 2007.1 was released on March 16!

I took some time before publicly expressing my impressions, because I wanted to make sure I play a little with it, on both my old Omnibook XE3-GC and my desktop PC. With any operating system or software, I have the tendency to make them crash: I am not polite with them.

The Live CD first (Çalışan):
All the screen resolution issues experienced with the RC and my Radeon 9200SE are no more present. Actually, the LiveCD starts smoothly, and after the initial language selection (Türkçe, English, Nederlands, Deutsch, Español, Português (Brasil)), it went directly to a full KDE desktop at 1600x1200 (75 Hz), and then Kaptan Desktop proceeded with the usual ritual: mouse, KDE style, wallpaper, network, PiSi settings, and possibly TASMA:


The resulting desktop for the default settings, but changed to 1400x1050 (85Hz):


What's better, what's worse, and what else has changed meanwhile?

Let's say that Firefox still has the bookmarks in Turkish (they will be OK for the installed system). Let's also say that PiSi refuses to show unless I issue an update command once... even if there is no defined repository. I know you're not supposed to install extra packages when running from a LiveCD, yet you could afford some small additions, should the RAM be enough. Adding the official repo (http://paketler.pardus.org.tr/pardus-2007/pisi-index.xml.bz2) is useless, PiSi will not do anything (I wonder how was it nailed).

A strange thing about the shortkeys for taking screenshots. Here's how were they defined:


Strange thing, none of them worked, and redefining the keys was useless! (Associating keys to applications is another option, not tried by me.)
Using the open source "radeon" driver, I got 1193 FPS in glxgears with my antique video card, which is the maximum it can get.

A funny thing about the LiveCD is that Knights (with GNU Chess as an engine) is installed, whereas the Installation CD doesn't have it (it's in the online repo anyway)!

Trying now the same LiveCD on my venerable laptop detected its über-antique S3 Savage IX/MV as only able of 800x600 instead of 1024x768. This happened to me in the past not only with both the Live and Install CDs of Pardus 2007, but also with the vast majority of the LiveCDs, and with some installers: SuSE 10.0, Foresight 0.9.1 and 0.9.2, Scientific Linux 5 Alpha, and maybe more. The last time a LiveCD I tried worked 100% correctly with my laptop was with CentOS 4.3 (that's why I still have that CD).

OK, editing xorg.conf to add the Mode 1024x768 (the correct Depth 16 was set; a higher depth slows it down), then CTRL+ALT+BKSP fixed it.

Oh, the password is "pardus" for both "pars" and "root".

As this S3 is far from being a real video card (4 MB only!), but it can get Direct rendering, a score around 100 FPS (slightly lower) is fine (CentOS 4.3 had 113 FPS with X.org 6.8.2).

What else now? The LiveCD works, but I don't like to use LiveCDs!

Let's install Pardus 2007.1:
This time, Kurulan entered in a correct 1600x1200 resolution on my desktop, and the Manual Partitioning of the disk worked flawlessly!

A must-have, now fixed.

The rest was a piece of cake (but a little slow).

I decided to stop sticking with the GNOME layout (two panels) on the desktop, as higher resolutions make the regular KDE panel to be bearable. After a very little tweaking of the standard layout, here's what I got (it is still my current layout):


In the release candidate it was an issue with the initial font sizes, and here's what the deal is here: they look better initially, yet not the right sizes for the icon labels and the menu entries.

The reason is a little strange: the font sizes in the control panel (TASMA -> Appearance & Themes -> Fonts) are all correct at 10pt, but KWin (or whoever is responsible of that) does not read all of them until you go to the configuration dialog, change something back and forth (say, uncheck and check "Force fonts DPI") to enable the Apply button, then click it!

Back to the screenshot shortcuts: this time, to me only Print alone (PrnScr) worked (full screenshot), and redefining the keys was useless too. However, I don't care that much as long as KSnapshot pops up.

The Firefox bookmarks are now correctly in English -- and this make think that the LiveCD is almost useless, because the install CD has definitely less bugs.

The glxgears score was correct for the "radeon" driver and RV280: 1168 FPS for 1600x1200 (75 Hz) and 1192 FPS for 1400x1050 (85 Hz).

PiSi works now right away, so I could notice that the online repositories carries several proprietary drivers:

• ati-drivers 8.34.8
• nvidia-glx/-kernel/-tools 1.0_9631
• nvidia-glx/-kernel/-tools-new 1.0_9755
• nvidia-glx/-kernel/-tools-old 1.0_7184

The RC seemed to have not only a faster PiSi when updating or even searching, but also a slightly slower operation when selecting packages that need complex calculus dependencies (NOTE: on an older computer, PiSi might be the most resource intensive application). Now I noticed something different.

Say you entered something in the search box, and PiSi started the search. You are still frantically typing, trying to complete the searched string, but you manage to actually delete it, so that PiSi will search for 1-2 characters only. It might get unresponsive until a warning will pop up:


Otherwise, PiSi still looks more ergonomic than RPMdrake in some regards (not in all of them), but it's still slow. Well, given that I love even Yumex, how could I not love PiSi? :-)

Besides, it can now check for updated automatically! By the way, 19 updates were immediately available after the initial install!

As the space on a single CD is limited, many people might need to download a few hundreds of megs from the online repo. Quick notes:

• The packages conflict with Eclipse was fixed! And it works, y compris for C++ and Python.
• KDevelop 3.4.0 works too, with both Qt3 and Qt4 (checked).
• WINE is online...
• Umbrello is online...
• KOffice too!
• PyTraffic too :-)
• Inkscape 0.43 (rather old, eh?), Potrace 1.7, Scribus 1.3.38.
• RealPlayer 10.0.8.805, Skype 1.3.0.53.
• Some webcam drivers, plus Lexmark drivers.
• AppArmor!
• oh, slocate is not on the CD, but online ("sudo updatedb" right after installing it).
• p7zip.
• Xen support!
• Eric 3.8.2 (IDE).
• Apache 2.0.59 (installing it does not start the service!), mod_php, mod_python, mysql-client, mysql-server.

As a "traditional" user of aMule and Gtk-Gnutella (both lacking Pardus packages), I had the surprise to discover giFT and its GUI Apollon: even if there is no eDonkey, nor KAD support in giFT, it's an interesting discovery, as it mostly works, and it seems you can find lots of (illegal) things with it alone:



To have spellcheck in Firefox, you still have to right-click and swich from Turkish to English / United States...
There are some more things to say about Pardus 2007.1, but I will only say that MPlayer still has the menus in Turkish (but you could use Kaffeine and KMPlayer instead), then it comes about...

Upgrading from 2007 to 2007.1: my laptop already had Pardus 2007, so the easy way was to issue a sudo pisi upgrade.

As it was about a slow Celeron/850, 256 MB (PC100), 4200 RPM disk, and because I had installed almost everything available from Pardus, the whole process of downloading and installing the new packages took quite a while, possibly a few hours. I don't know exactly, because I just let it "crunching", then at a later point it was ready, so I rebooted and everything was fine!

The KDE 3.5.6 packages took from ftp.kde.org were replaced with the newly-released ones in the official repo.

The small annoyance with KPowersave (bug 4906) was fixed.

This was the smoothest upgrade I've ever done!

Some more usage stories.
KPowersave is fixed, but Suspend to Disk still fails with my desktop PC. No matter the GRUB kernel line had a resume=/dev/hdb4, which is my swap partition, large enough and used indeed, no matter what I tried with /etc/suspend.conf, no matter how many stupidities on the subject I've found on mailing list, it keeps saying:The kernel's config options (as present in the provided sources) seem to be correct, yet it is a problem with suspend. I guess it's an upstream one.

Suspend to RAM works flawlessly on my laptop.

Somewhat similar with the previously font-related issue, there is one more "first-time changes will fix it" weirdo, this time as a... "first-time changes will break a little, but you can fix it". Let me tell it to you.

The initial settings for the Desktop are as follows:

• Mounted USB devices will be shown on the Desktop, however right-click -> Configure Desktop -> Behavior -> Device Icons will show the "Show device icons" as unchecked (although some of the grayed items are selected).
• Thubmbnails (Icon Previews) for the desktop icons are OFF (but in Konqueror, they're ON). The tooltips do have previews, but the icons themselves don't.

Now, for people like me, used from GNOME to have on the desktop the same icon thumbnails as when the Desktop folder is seen in the file manager, there is the option to enable "Icon Previews" for the desktop too, right?

The caveat of doing this is that once you click on Apply, you will lose the ability to have the icons for the mounted USB devices on the desktop! You will have to come back and check "Show device icons", but the bewilderment of the newbie could be expressed this way:

"Hey, I only added some thumbnails on the desktop, and suddenly something dissappeared, like the orange USB stick!"

It's a one-time fix only, however this is needed because the initial settings are not properly reflected in the configuration dialogs! (I don't know what's the real problem with KDE, maybe I'll get smarter one day.)

Or maybe you'll not want thumbnails in the desktop icons, as it's a bad practice to save a lot of things on the desktop instead of $HOME.

While testing the RC, I wondered what does PiSi mean when it says «A conflicts with B. Remove the following conflicting packages?» when no "following" packages were listed. What package will be removed? A or B?!

I encountered a similar situation now, at the CLI (on the laptop), and this time I could see which package was removed:So the answer is: the second package will be removed (package B).

OK, one more communication issue was clarified :-)

As something not related to Pardus, but to the upstream KDE, I was annoyed to see that Konqueror doesn't have Yahoo as a search engine, although the list you can choose from has plenty of useless engines (including MSDN).

OK, here's the search string to add for Yahoo:I started using Konqueror as a Firefox replacement since I noticed (with KDE 3.5.6 on both an updated FC6 and Pardus) that Konqueror is usually faster than Firefox on a KDE system, and it currently renders the websites much, much better than in older versions.

What could Pardus have to be perfect?
It worked very well so far, with two unique SIGSEGV crashes: one, with Knights upon exiting while it was thinking (so it's rather an upstream bug), and a second one with TASMA, related to (again!) an initial setting after having upgraded from 2007 to 2007.1 (any further use of it was not crashing anything).

It's not stressing a low-end system that much (unless you're using PiSi, but remember that yum/yumex are slow too), and there aren't unnecessary services started by default, except hplip.

What could be done to improve the overall experience? I suddenly got the idea that what I miss in KDE is a terminal on the right-click menu, but I recently noticed that they have added such an entry in FC6!


The KDE right-click menu in FC6 (no Oo.org integration)


The KDE right-click menu in Pardus 2007.1
Couldn't we have in 2007.2 both a Konsole entry and the switch/lock/logout part? It's a little more for a wish, but a Konsole on the right-click would be fabulous to have!

The happy bottom line: Pardus 2007.1 is highly commendable. I mean highly commendable indeed!

It is great for the first time user (unless he's a Greek who can't stand Turkish menus in MPlayer).
Also for the convenience, it has all the plugins and the codecs enabled, and it mounts all the partitions it finds (NTFS included).
It is great for practically everything a home desktop or a laptop user would want to do.
The choice of the applications for a single CD is excellent (though slightly different between the Live CD and the Install CD).
The alleged "lack of packages" is not that true: there are lots of packages you'll not find in other "small" distros, especially scientific applications and development libraries and tools.
It is great too for developers focusing on KDE with C++ and Python. It's particularly interesting because it has both Qt3 and Qt4 support not only for KDevelop, but also for PyQt!
The package manager is only one of the innovative features that do have a future.
Also note that Pardus passed the test of an upgrade without breaking anything, which is an important plus to me.

Pardus 2007.1 deserves much more attention than PCLinuxOS 2007 or Kubuntu. Teşekkür ederim, folks, and keep up the good work!

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