PCLinuxOS 2008.1 GNOME installed

Being involved in the PCLinuxOS.NL team, I was constantly focusing on KDE. I thought it was about time to get to know a distro running GNOME, so last month, and mainly due to the hype surrounding Ubuntu's HH release I tried HH and it still makes me think of the AC/DC song "Shot Down In Flames". The number one distro of the planet simply couldn't get my Wifi (Broadcom 4312) up and running out of the box. Next I tried Fedora 9 and once again it was no-joy with the Wifi.

The funny thing about all this was that I had a PCLinuxOS 2008.1 GNOME available for download under my nose and it simply didn't' occur to me to try this one out.
If it wasn't for a Dutch Forum user asking about a possible Dutch remaster of PCLosGNOME, I would probably have overlooked it all together... Shame shame shame ...

But, this morning, I downloaded and installed it on my spare partition on my laptop (HP Compaq 6325). What can I say. Everything worked out of the box.

It's PCLOS so it SIMPLY DOES WORK!!.

My wifi was configured using ndiswrapper and after a small update using Synaptic (72 files) I had my first working distro running GNOME, in less time than I expected.

What struck me first was the high quality of the graphical part. I am personally rather fond of 'dark' themes, and this one is really, really subtle in its simplicity.
Being a newcomer in the GNOME community, I cannot say much about the default package selection, but using Synaptic I simply added OpenOffice, some games and Pidgin (because Emesene is Microsoft Messenger only).
At first sight I can play my mp3 music collection, view movies (haven't tested the DVD movies yet) all out of the box.

PCLinuxOS 2008.1 GNOME gives me a very good impression and I haven't encountered any show-stoppers yet.

Some small things that I noticed were that - as DrakLive does not include other OS in the menu.lst of GRUB - a simple tool like the 'redo mbr' of the Minime2008 would be most welcome, in order to look for and include other installed distros in its menu.lst.
Another point is that among all the possible languages (from /etc/rpm/macros :
%_install_langs an:da:de:el:en:en_GB:en_IE:en_US:es:fr:hu:it:ja:nl:pl:ro:ru:sk:uk)
the Dutch language is missing. Maybe a tip for the devs to include it in the next release ;-)

I will now use the PCLinuxOS 2008.1 GNOME version as major distro on my box, so that I can appreciate GNOME and its programs and get a feel of the GNOME way of interaction with the user.