The bull doesn’t seem to be part of PCLinuxOS anymore, as it was in 2010 when I first started using it. The distro changes its look with each new release and nowdays the logo is something akin to a CPU usage graph. Other than that, I can’t tell you a thing about the greatest and latest version of PCLOS.
I became a PCLOS user when someone gave me an old Dell laptop running XP. The first thing I did, of course, was replace Windows with Linux. Up until then, I would’ve installed Mandriva without thinking twice, since I’d been using Mandrake/Mandriva since version 9.0 was released in 2002. However, in 2010 Mandriva was rumoured to be on the verge of floating face down in the water, which helped me make the decision to finally switch distros and try something new.
After doing some research and exchanging a few emails on PLUG, the local Linux users’ group, I decided to try running a live CD of PCLOS to see how it performed on the laptop. As the distro had started as a fork of Mandriva, I was comfortable with this move; I would be in familiar territory.
The live CD worked perfectly, recognizing and installing the proper drivers for all hardware. I liked this distro very much, finding it to be much like Mandriva, especially since it used most of the same graphical configuration tools. It was fast and stable. The user community on the forums was both helpful and polite the few times I logged on to attempt to fix a glitch. No issue ever went unresolved.
A couple of weeks ago I realized that my installation was out-of-date, so I set aside a day to upgrade to the latest and greatest PCLOS has to offer. I planned a clean install, so I downloaded and burned the ISO image to a CD and rebooted the system. A text screen asked me what I wanted to do and I selected “Live CD.”
Unfortunately, when the installation was complete, the mouse and keyboard suddenly quit working. With no way to address the system, I took it down cold with the power button and rebooted. Again, it took forever to load and I lost use of the mouse, trackpad and keyboard the instant the boot was complete. This was only a minor inconvenience. I’d soon get help on the PCLOS forums and would have this problem fixed in short measure.
I searched the forum first, to see if someone else had already reported the same problem and found an answer. When I was unable to come up with a thread about this particular issue, there was nothing else to do except log-in, pose a question and wait for a reply.
When I tried to log-in, however, I was told my username did not exist. That could be, I have memory moments just like everyone else and it’d been a couple of years since I’d used the forum. I opened Thunderbird and found the “welcome to the PCLOS forums” email I’d received two years earlier when I’d first registered. My memory was good; my login had been correct. Evidently the folks at PCLOS had closed my account due to inactivity.
This was still no problem. I registered for a new account, using the same username but with a different password. The system said my username was available and sent me an email welcoming me to the forums, repeating my username and password and explaining that a moderator would have to approve my account before I could login. I was assured I would be getting another email shortly.
That was two weeks ago and I’m still waiting. I’m not holding my breath. If I attempt to login, I’m told my username doesn’t exist. It’s as if my favorite distro has run off with another user.
To tell the truth, I don’t care anymore. After about a week I grew tired of waiting and started looking for another distro. To my surprise, I found one I like much more than PCLOS. About a week ago I installed it on the laptop, wiping-out the old PCLOS install in the process. I’ve had no trouble accessing the forum at the new distro and I’ve found the user community there to be even more helpful and knowledgeable than on the PCLOS site.
I’m still a little upset that I was left out in the cold, without access to the support forums, to fend for myself. It’s just a little matter, a hiccup at their server perhaps, but I expected better.
At this point I would not consider using PCLOS again nor would I recommend it to folks who need a user-friendly “first” distro. In this case, my need of tech support wasn’t great. It was only a problem getting a live CD to work. My computer wasn’t down. I wasn’t facing a loss of any kind. I could simply move on and try another distro or continue to use the system that was already installed on the hard drive.
What if circumstances had been different? What if I had a broken installation and couldn’t access my data? What if I was an absolute newbie who only knew how to start a browser and open an email client who needed help on a brand new PCLOS installation? What if I was a student with an unbootable system who needed to find some way to rescue an important essay?
We penguinistas are always telling people that, with Linux, help is only a click or two away. All that’s necessary is to go to the distro’s forums and inquire of the user community. This won’t work if the forums aren’t accessable.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Sadly, I have had to give up on PCLOS as well. I loved it for several years on my 32-bit system. When I upgraded to 64-bits, I found that there was no 64 PCLOS. There still isn’t AFAIK. It was projected to be released almost a year ago.
Moving on.
Hi Chris,
Just curious why you so carefully avoided telling us which distro you chose to use. I want to try it too.
Simon
@simon fox I’m keeping my choice to myself until I publish a review of it later this week. I will tell you this, it’s not one of the top ten distros, but it’s really sweet.
By the time I became aware of PCLOS, I had already been using a 64bit computer, so I never gave PCLOS a chance.
I, too, was a Mandrake/Mandriva user for a couple of years. I think it was during version 7, 8, and 9. Then I started distro-hopping. Eventually I settled on PCLOS.
I used PCLOS for about 5 years. But my laptop is 64-bit and my tower is 32. PCLOS worked great on the 32-bit box, but I wanted to run the same distro on my laptop. And at that time I was running aptosid (previously sidux) on the laptop. Sidux/aptosid was a very good experience for almost 3 years.
Then I came across mageia and noticed it was available in both 32 and 64-bit. And when I saw it was a fork of Mandriva, I had to check it out.
That was about 6 months ago. During that time I’ve been through a major release that went very well on both systems.
I think it’s worth a look.
PCLinuxOS has a 64 bit version, as I am running it already for 1 month without problems.
It’s still a test version and will become public when the last wrinkles are ironed out.
Should be soon.
But saying it hasn’t one, is simply displaying your lack of knowledge, or your reluctance of even trying to get the correct information.
Think before you talk, please
I ditched PCLOS a long time ago due to some of the people in their forums that I thought were outright RUDE. Because of that, I’ll NEVER recommend PCLOS to ANYONE.
Fred, it seems frequent that I hear about trouble with the forum but in a long past tense (as you said, “long time ago”). From what I understand there has been a great deal of changes made, new members, new developers, new moderators. Last 2 years I’ve not once seen rude behavior from regular forum members and if lesser experienced members do then it is moderated. It is the most friendly and helpful Linux forum I’ve been a part of, not that others aren’t, but no need to carry an opinion based on old news. Sorry you had a bad time.
I tried the latest a few weeks ago. It installed on my desktop and laptop with seemingly no problems. That is untill I wanted to add other distos to the grub boot loader. I run multiple distros on my desktop one of which is slackware. The pclinux grub would allow the addition of slackware but would not boot it. Interestingly when then ditching the pclinux grub for another distros grub pclinux would not boot. Would not even boot properly from the slackware lilo boot loader. There was a wait during boot up. Something to do with waiting for a minute for two partitions to be recognised – or something – before stopping on init. There was no work around. I then netcatted from my laptop lmde over the pclinux partition and had no problems with that. All in all disapointed.
New X, new GRUB, new……
Differences between old(er) and new hard en software will always be there.
update-grub is one of them.
GRUB 2 is always in error copying GRUB 1 settings.
example: In the GRUB 1 menu.lst change all (hdx,y) to (hdx,y+1)
only then it will be correct imported in GRUB 2 with update-grub.
GRUB 1 can boot GRUB 2, but 2 should be installed on an partition, not MBR to do it right.
All those solutions can be found on nearly all distro fora.
Evenso solutions for slow, changed or wrong X GPU drivers.
What is wrong with fora cleaning up a userbase from non used accounts after a certain amount of time ?
Then, a 32 bit pae kernel can use all of your memory on a 64 bit system, installable from within the package manager in most distro’s
The famous 12.04 Brown/Purple is standard equiped with pae.
Chris Hall, I understand some frustrations, but with help of us penguinista’s all problems can be overcome 😉
But keep on blogging,
Ed
Sorry for my English, it’s not my native.
I agree that PcLinuxOS isn’t all it once was.
I started using it on the last beta before 2007 final. I’ve never found a more flawless Linux distro than that release since.
My problems began when upgrading from kde3 to kde4, which completely broke my install so I had to install 2009. That was a major disappointment, Bugs and non working software galore, and that was on many different systems, so my having a system with odd hardware couldn’t be used as an excuse.
While 2010 seemed to fix those issues Ive never looked at PcLinux the same since.
I do still recommend it for new users, and unlike another poster Ive never had any problem booting other distros from PcLinux;s Grub ( I always have at least 6 distros as well as windows installed on my system), In fact one of the reasons I still have it installed is I cant stand Grub2 and PcLinux still uses good old reliable Grub legacy.
I left PCLinuxOS too. My time with PClinuxOS is available in Testimonials-part in PCLinuxOS forum. I switched finally to Mageia. I do not regret it.
Shaine, I don’t care. Besides, I like Debian-based distributions much better, and I’m currently running CrunchBang Waldorf, although I replaced its default Openbox desktop with Xfce. To me, it’s pure computing paradise.
“I became a PCLOS user when someone gave me an old Dell laptop running XP”
Just how old is this laptop? Give us a glue just what your tring to install on other than its a Dell. I have a old Toshiba that has XP, but will not load the latest PCLOS. I can’t fault PCLOS if my old laptop doesn’t or barely meets system requirements. There has been too many Kernel and DE changes since 2010 so to compare a 2010 release to the current release is unfair. Just look at the difference between Ubuntu 10.04lts and the now 12.04lts.
I’m still using PCLOS. My system’s 64 bit-capable, but I’m fine with the 32-bit version. Seriously, unless you have a ton of memory you need to address, a 64 bit distro buys you exactly nothing (except that it needs more memory to run in).
I’ve got 2GB of memory on an 8-year old box, and PCLOS runs fine. I occasionally have problems with my ancient nVidia FX2000 card (which isn’t supported at all on the latest Ubuntu).
But yes, there are problems. The prime maintainer has stepped aside (temporarily, I hope – but maybe not), and things have slowed down. PCLOS is now 3 versions behind on the KDE desktop, and everything seems to be on hold while the dev’s work on the 64-bit release (which, seeing all the whining about it not being available, might be a good idea).
Anyway, what I love about PCLOS is its rolling update model. Once you’ve got it installed and all the apps you like set up the way you like, you never have to go through that again (in theory, at least). And this works better on PCLOS than on any other distro I’ve tried. It’ll be a real shame if it goes down in flames, but I think they’re working out the kinks after losing Texstar, who put together a really great distro.
I still run pclos but I am looking for another distro. Texstar has left the distro again and it is all down hill. The few fanboys left have made a distro for themselves. That discussing black metal theme became the default against the majority of people on the forum (which most have left) and the corny icons that were changed to “fit the theme” are shameful. If you change the theme the next update will replace it again. I get tired of changing it back. Most of the opengl screensavers don’t work. The fanboys wanted the 64 bit version so the 32 bit goes mostly out of date due to lack of interest. If you voice your opinion on the friendly forums you get banned. I have been banned twice. The last time was 2 years ago but I am not interested enough to reregister anymore. I can’t run a full update on my system because some of the updates break my system. I went to update openoffice a couple days age and the in house install script wouldn’t run because my system was not up to date. Being up to date had nothing to do with openoffice so why force an update that would break my system. I edited the script to get the new openoffice script to run but it is things like that that turn people away.
@littlenoodles @moniac I remember Texstar from the forums a couple of years back. I wasn’t aware that he was a lead developer. If memory serves, I think he helped me with an issue I had. I’m sorry to hear he’s left the project.
@nikkels With all due respect, not having a released version ~= no version. There is no GA PCLOS 64-bit.
I’ve been “playing with” linux since 1995. I’ve paid my dues with testing, reporting and generally being without a useful system until things were fixed.
I’ve not experienced anything I’d call “rude” from the PCLOS crowd as other have reported… “Think before you talk” comes pretty close. Unless I’m 4 drinks deep into a double tall vodka soda, I think before I talk. After that, I tend to get very psychological. I’ve read stuff the next day that blew my mind. 😉
If all of that was too hard: bite me.
Of course, it’s Mageia you’ve installed — no need to be so secretive about it! 🙂
I gave up on PC LOS after the 2010 version. I always preferred the less known Gnome version.I did find PC LOS Zen mini, which I like. It basically comes with the system, Synaptic package manager and Firefox. The rest is up to you. If you want PC LOS you can download Zen from SourceForge. To me that is what Linux should be about. (Zen also has it’s own logo). I also run a Debian/Ubuntu distro, Zorin. I would recommend it to anyone, laptop or desktop, Light or full version depending on your hardware. Great for new users. To me Linux is about making the OS what I want. You can find that with some Linux distos.
>I ditched PCLOS a long time ago due to some of the people in
>their forums that I thought were outright RUDE. Because of
>that, I’ll NEVER recommend PCLOS to ANYONE.
Fred, you are a MORON… is that rude enough for you?
Ive heard of stupid reasons for not using a distro, yours beats them all in the stupidity derby. Most forums are usually moderated and the old time newbie flames are not looked up upon in a good light.
Ubuntu has probably the most annoying fans in Linuxdom (they take their social cues from Mac-heads) but I would never not use it for that reason (Unity or Gnome are enough reason for that).
The only thing more stupid is the people who whine about a default wallpaper or theme. So what? Are you that effing lazy that you cant change it? Ive been using KDE for quite some time on different distros and think its amazing but I despise the light silver theme and even more the oxygen widget style which controls how the min-max-close buttons look, totally useless if you have bad eyes. So the first thing I do when I install for myself or someone else is change the theme (some dark-transparent like Slim Glow) and how the buttons look.
Takes almost no time.
Does a default I hate make the distro worse? Of course it doesnt, its a subjective thing… Waaaaaah, the default theme is black!!!!
Sheesh…
Btw, I installed PCLinuxOS on three computers about 2yrs ago because I wanted a rolling distro and wanted foolproof Wifi, one of those was an old dualcore and a Celeron one and I communicate with those people still and they seem to have no problems.
Point is, I read this kind of stuff all the time about all distros. Some people will whine and others will say “Nope, works well for me.”
>I remember Texstar from the forums a couple of years back. I >wasn’t aware that he was a lead developer.
Wtf? Really?
Im reading a FOSS writer who has never heard of Texstar?
Id call you clueless but its my fault for following the blind.
Have you heard of A.Seigo or L.Torvalds? Theyre well known graphic artists like Nuno Pinheiro….
@silent bob, you are a perfect example of what i was referring to about the obnoxious fanboys on the pclos forum. What is your forum name. You give the standard response about the theme and changing it. If it is so simple why wass the much nicer 2010 left as default and the fanboys just change it. I could go on but one can’t reason with fanboys. I’ll just keep on watching pclos drop on distrowatch a nd laugh at you pitiful pclos fanboys.
@Silent Bob I think Fred is entirely justified in dropping an association with any group that treats him rudely. I’ve got think skin so I’m willing to put up with a bit of snarkiness, but even I’ve been known to disassociate myself from people and groups when I think I’m being treated with disrespect.
I also would like to ask you to be a little more civil with your comments on this site. It’s perfectly okay for you to disagree with my article, or with any of the comments posted here. But there’s no need for rudeness. I would ask you to treat those who comment here with dignity and respect.
Sincerely,
Christine Hall
@Timoleon No, I didn’t install Mageia, I only ran the live version for a few hours as research for an article. It’s a nice distro, though. Just not for me. That’s one of the things I really like about Linux, enough choices for everyone.
@Fred I’ll have to agree with you. I had a very similar experience and was so put off by the community that I immediately downloaded a different distribution.
The real issue is that the PCLinuxOS community received that reputation on their own and they did so early on in the distribution’s history. I’ve heard many people complain about the community and it is too bad that they had a very hard time with criticism when it was new. It is a decent distribution overall but I would never recommend it to anyone either.
Silent Bob is the type of PCLinuxOS community member I am talking about. There is no reason for that kind of behavior anywhere. Also, please don’t put Texstar up there with Linus. At least Linus has a little class when he berates something.
Chris Hall – Linux has indeed a lot of choice, but sadly one of the choices does not include a distro where everything actually works properly. Plenty of change, plenty new wallpapers and new logos, and lots of slightly different ways of doing exactly the same thing, and plenty of bugs. But is that really choice? As human beings we also have a lot of choice of diseases and crimes. Me, I just want something good for a change. Something finished. Something that actually works. But then I seem to be rather unusual in this regard. Good luck with your choice.
I too tried to make PCLinuxOS my standard OS but was offed by their community forums because I had TEXAS or TX in my name. Apparently Texstar wants to be the only one associated with the state.
So Hello Linux Mint! I never looked back…
My time with PCLOS lasted for five months (not bad, since I was a distro hopper then). I went for the lean and mean LXDE flavor to reduce net traffic on my mobile broadband data plan, and for quite a while the rolling of the release worked very well – until a glibc update came in and a number of programs started to segfault on startup. Another thing that bothered me was the rigid fora rules concerning mentioning other distros. Once I tried to open a thread about unity and if it there were a chance to get it integrated into PCLOS. The topic didn’t survive half an hour, then it got removed without comment from the moderators.
Everyone running a board is free to set up a policy for their domane – as everone is free to accept and to participate – or not. I decided to leave.
Just to set the record strait, Texstar has not left, he’s just pulled way back due to health issues. He answered my problem post just a few days ago.Chris, I’d like to know which distro you found. I might want to take a look.
Haven’t had much to do with PCLOS is a long time now. It was the Linux Mint of distros back in ’06. And I used it happy in the knowledge that it just worked. But with the rise of Linux Mint I have changed fealty to it. So I said goodbye to PCLOS quite a while back. Did give later versions of it a spin but never got around to using it full time. It is sad to hear of so many who are disappointed with it.
@DeBass – I expected this sort of reply and was tempted to put what I will now put. It seems that after going on to the pclinuxos forums and receiving explanations there which btw seem similiar to yours that there is an attitude among pclinuxos followers that in no-way-shape-or-form is there anything wrong with pclinuxos. Its all the bootloaders fault of other distros or/and grub1 that pclinuxos uses is the most stable, that grub 2 is rubbish that other distros use. Blame anyone or thing else but pclinuxos is fantastic. Well its not. The only distro that was not playing nice was pclinuxos there/ergo its was pclinuxos that is to fault.
But carry-on defending the indefensible.
@proxy- As you read in my other post I’ve been very disappointed with the more recent versions of PcLinux myself, as others have pointed out the forum has gone downhill as when you descibe a problem you get a response like “works fine on my system” or something equally unhelpful.
But you seem to have a problem with Grub Legacy and having 7 operating systems on my comp at all times all bootd through PcLinuxes Grub, and reformatting and installing new ones to test all the time, it’s obvious you don’t know how to set up bootloaders or your just trolling about Grub Legacy.
Personally when the time comes that no distro uses Grub legacy I’ll have to use Lilo because even it’s preferable to Grub2, easier to configure and just as functional in all important ways since the only thing Grub2 surpasses the others with is a prettier boot screen which is irrelevant to me.
@itsgregman – Likewise if you had read my original post you would see that I did not just use grub from pclinuxos. I also used lilo from slackware and grub 2 (although this was from debian and did not mention debian in original post). All the same the only distro that would not play nice was pclinuxos.
Also it was not just the problems witht he bootloader. It was booting as well that caused problems. Namely (just to repeat) having to wait 1 minute for each partition to have something done to it ( two partions in all) before finally stalling on INIT.
FYI – I started with mandrake-7.1 at least ten years ago and have during this time experimented with many distros. I currently have five on my desktop.
Quote “Davepet
August 9th, 2012 at 1:09 am
Just to set the record strait, Texstar has not left, he’s just pulled way back due to health issues. He answered my problem post just a few days ago.”
I guess he deleted all his pclinuxos social media accounts just for fun.
In 2008 before any mention of health issues a guy named ziggie if memory serves posted a comment on the old pclinuxosonline that texstar told him that he was quiting pclos after the 2008 release. Texstar’s comment was “that really pisses me off” but guess what, he left with out as much as goodbye. After much posting to find out what was going on with him word got around he said he had cancer. He came back when the first bunch of yahoos made a disaster of a release. He got it going and left it with Neal and pinoc who are a top notch but not enough to maintain it. Whether he is ill or not is his business but he had intentions of leaving ill or not anyway and to make occasional comments on the forum is of no value.
Looking for a replacement for pc linuxOS?
Try Mepis 11.
It is debian STABLE, polished to a gem like shine by Warren Woodford.
KDE based, with a great community (no bad attitudes and very helpful)
PCLinuxOS is undergoing a time of change, Texstar is still around, although is not currently directly involved (to my knowledge) in the day to day development of the distro.
I was “retired” from the admin team by OP a few months ago, so my knowledge is possibly out of date. PCLinuxOS has some great testers involved, and they have been able to clean up a lot of issues that have developed as part of the learning curve of the current fledgeling development team.
As for the forum and the rudeness, I was aware of this reputation from waayy back, when we had a couple of “hardcore” moderators, as they left things calmed down a littel , only to rise again over teh last 12 months or so, there were a few personality clashes and in house challenges that costs teh distribution some very talented people, the biggest challenge was that as the development team shrunk there was still the same “estate” to patrol, and there was a clear unwillingness for people to compromise in order to focus. I suspect that the tone of the review here is a reflection of the development team being spread too thin while learning their skills.
I still use PCLinuxOS (well personalized remasters) on quite a few machines, how ever I have switched to FreeBSD at this time as its something i wanted to do for a while, I also set up my own project http://blog.fossconvergence.org which is non-distro and non-os specific.
as for those folks that raised te “issue” of fanboys, this happens in Linux frequently and with all distro’s I am not sure why that is but its not something anyone will stop from happening while we view Distros ad being “vrs” each other
As for PCLinuxOS and its current dev team I hope that they can get a grip on it and reign in the distro and focus to make it as tight as it used to be.
Jase
I left PCLOS years ago and moved to ArchLinux, you could say I graduated. When I left the quality (in my opinion) had begun to decline, which is what led to my search for an alternative. Still, it served me well for a long time.
I have used and supported the distro for many years, but can no longer recommend its use to others. I have also observed numerous instances of rudeness and closed-mindedness of the senior contributors of the PCLOS forum. And in the end, any distro is really only as good as its supporting community and forum.
Today, August 9, 2012, I posted the above article on the PCLOS forum and challenged the PCLOS team to carefully consider the article and ensuing reader comments. My goal was to entreat healthy discussion and introspection. Instead, the result was that moderators simply deleted the post AFTER first responding with the same old “The PCLOS Forum is without blemish, it is those WHINING posters that are in the dark”-type of responses.
That was the “final straw”. As of today, I will no longer use PCLOS, due to one thing only….the rudeness and narrow-mindedness of the leadership of the PCLOS forum. I have installed PCLOS on many client machines which will soon be migrated over to the new Linux distro of choice. I cannot recommend its use to anyone due to its lack of wholesome support.
There are many fine Linux distros out there. When the leadership of one of those distros decides that it no longer needs to concern themselves with the input of the public at large, it is doomed to become an isolated and second-rate distro.
Goodbye PCLOS.
As an aside, I recognize Hootiegibbon, above, as one of the outstanding contributors on the PCLOS forum. He has helped many people over the past years. Thank you, Hootiegibbon, for your consistent and helpful advice and empathy.
@Hootiegibbon Thank you for sharing with us here and giving us a peek at what’s going on at PCLOS from your perspective. I’ll be sure to put your project on our blogroll.
@gungaden Although I can’t login at the PCLOS forums, I can lurk and read. For the last few days I’ve checked-in and I’ve been confounded by how many there have missed the point of this article. They either see it as an out-and-out attack on PCLOS, which it isn’t intended to be, or they approach it entirely on a technical level, which wasn’t what the article was about either. The good news is there were some people on the PCLOS forum who seemed to understand my intended constructive criticism. Also, we’ve seen quite a few very nice, community minded folks who’re involved in the PCLOS community posting here and attempting to be ambassadors for their distro – and good for them!
A few months back I asked for help getting the then new Eagle CADsoft 6.x circuit and layout software working on PCLOS. I got a NASTY reply reprimanding me for daring to ask for help for a proprietary package and that the forums and PCLOS were only for OSS. (Which is not true, many non-OSS packages are included in PCLOS.)
Then a few weeks ago, the PySol card game quit working. Not a deal breaker, but I (used to) like a quick Lexington Harp once or twice a day. I’m not going to chance pointing it out.
My #1 complaint, though, is with their so-called rolling release. It can only update from recent installs. Which would not be a problem, unless you also use MyLiveCD to image a system that was originally created with the 2010 version. After installing the newly created LiveCD, it will be back to being a new 2010 install. Trying to update it results in a destroyed installation due to the new RPM version. SO WHY was aptupgrade removed?
For most of the Spring and Summer I’ve been downloading and trying distros. I really dislike the *buntu’s, but then again find Linux Mint 13 MATE to be the front runner so far.
The main plus for Mandrake / Mandriva / PCLOS was always the extensive hardware driver support and incredibly easy ability to administrate and configure due to the Control Panels.
jr
When I first found PCLOS it was a revelation. For the first time, everything just worked, “right out of the box”. And it was fast. Unfortunately, I have become less enamored with it over time. Installing on a laptop is always dicey as the DVD drivers don’t always work and then you can’t boot to the live CD. I haven’t replaced it yet because of inertia.
@Chris. Out of curiosity, did you try to upgrade through the rolling update? or was your first attempt the Live CD?
&Pat I already had a two year old install on the laptop that I was still using, but I hadn’t updated it in the two years, so I decided the safest way would be to do a clean install. I never got to that point, as my practice is to run the live CD to see if everything works first. As I couldn’t get the CD or flash drive to boot, I moved on to another distro.