Pardus 2008 : A testdrive

What is Pardus?
A few weeks ago I was asked to testdrive Pardus - a distro of Turkish origin - once it was released. It was released on june 27 and here is my report on this distro.

The Pardus Team can be found in the National Metrology Institute Gebze - Kocaeli / Turkey (see map here and a satellite picture here).

The distro comes on a single CD and after burning the CD, I booted the distro. My box is a laptop HP Compaq nx6325 with a ATI video card, Broadcom 4312 Wifi, and runs PCLinuxOS Minime2008 as main OS. Debian 4.0 R3 is also installed on a small partition and Pardus will be installed in a 10 Gig spare partition.

Installation
Upon booting you are greeted with GRUB on a orange background and all text is in Turkish. You can change to your native or a more common language (like English) by pressing the F2 key. Unfortunately the auto-boot delay is rather short, and a newcomer will see the installation proceed in Turkish before he/she noticed the option to change from Turkish to another language. A somewhat longer delay should be considered here. I went for the Dutch language.

I did a manual partitioning and Pardus provides an easy to use partition interface. After partitioning (using my current swap and /home), the copying and installing process begins. It feels like it takes somewhat longer than I am used to in modern distros. And once it reaches the 100% mark it goes on to configure all the aplications. I wonder why both cannot be done at the same time.
I noted that all the locales are being copied to the HD, although I only chose Dutch. Could this be because the Turkish community worldwide can have eg. Turkish as main language and German/Dutch/English as second language so that in Germany/The Netherlands/UK/USA they can have both languages at their disposal. Seems logical to me.

Then a standard root password is asked for.
When entering the user data, there is a check box that you must check if you want this user to work with some Administrator rights. If you are running as a user without admin rights, you cannot 'su' to root in a console and as logging in as root from the KDM screen is also impossible, that checkbox should be checked by default when the user data for the first user is entered.

Grub did a fine job by recognizing my grub on sda1 and asked if this one must be used. By using the existing menu.lst of the PCLinuxOS and adding Pardus at the top, Grub now lists Pardus, PClinuxOS and Debian as distro entries.

All my hardware was detected, with the exception of the Wifi. I'll try to get it going once logged in.

Installation : Conclusion
In general, the installation runs fine, with really very good interactive screens but it seems a bit long (although I didn't time it). I have not discovered any major showstoppers, but you must know in advance that at least one user must have admin rights.

The Desktop
There is not much to be said about it. It is KDE and colors, themes and other visual goodies are so personnal, that I will comment on it.

Wifi
A Broadcom 4312 used to be hard to install and even some modern distros like Ubuntu could not handle it without some CLI magic on my box. Pardus simply detected the wifi and using the Network Manager I was able to set-up my wifi in a matter of seconds. Great feeling !!

Printer
Upon plugging in my printer (Samsung ML-1710P laser) it was automagically installed and configured

Software
Pardus comes with a rather complete assortment of packages. Openoffice, Amarok (plays MP3 out-of-the-box), Gimp, DigiKam, Kontact, K3B, Kaffeine (Win32 Codecs, Libdvdcss2), ...
So for multimedia all drivers are available to play your DVD's and Win32 formatted media.
Installing new software using their GUI Package Manager running on top of PiSi is a breeze.

Specific Pardus Software
Coming from PCLinuxOS I found a number of 'strange' software names like TASMA (Control Centre), KAPTAN (Welcome Screen), PiSi (Packages Installed Successfully, as Intended) . The website gives you a nice explanation on those projects :http://www.pardus.org.tr/eng/projects/index.html.

TASMA, the control center, is a nice looking frontend, which resembles the PCLinuxOS Control Center and is the Central Point of Contact for all configuration stuff in Pardus. It makes it very easy for a newcomer to find the right tool for any type of configuration.

History Manager
A nice tool is the history manager. It allows you to roll back to a previous state if after an update something isn't working as expected.

What is still missing?
Well, not much. It isn't a LiveCD. Being so user-friendly a LiveCd would be a nice add-on. I also noted that some programs, like Scribus are missing from the repos, but this is normal as it is a rather young distro and it takes time and determination from the devs to get all that stuff in the repos.

Overall conclusion
Pardus surprised me. Today it is listed as nr 49 on Distrowatch, but it deserves a place near or in the top-ten. It is a distro that has everything to become a major newcomer-friendly distro.
It is a distro that I will use/propose (along with PCLinuxOS :-) ) when converting Windows Users to Linux, and the Dutch version is also very good (kudos to the Dutch translation team).