This site will be closing on December 1, 2007. You may visit Mandriva Rocks Weblog for future blogs regarding Mandriva.

As many of you may already be aware, PCLinuxOS is based on Mandriva. Recently, I discovered that I was unable to install certain packages that were available on other distros. This is, in my opinion, due to the lack of community support. I apologize if that may seem harsh but I have been waiting for certain packages to become available and it seems as though adding them to the repositories is a slow process. I am sure there are many reasons for this, however, I have chosen to switch to Mandriva 2008 instead of using PCLinuxOS.

At this time, I am enjoying my new distro and hope that the community for PCLinuxOS will continue to expand but at this time I feel Mandriva has the support I need. Your suggestions and opinions are welcome.

Linux Commercials

Linux Commercials

New BootSplash

bootscreen.jpg

I have created a new boot splash for PCLinuxOS. Here are some basic instructions, with thumbnails on how to use it.

1. Click on the ‘bootscreen1.jpg’ file above and save it to your desktop (you will be using it later)
2. Open the Control Center
3. Choose Boot and select a graphical theme to display during boot (see fig. 1.0)
4. Choose Create New Theme (see fig. 1.1)
5. Create a name for the theme at the top and choose your settings for both verbose and silent (see fig. 1.2 and 1.3)
6. Save both verbose and silent
7. Close
8. Select a graphical theme to display during boot again
9. Choose your new theme and hit OK

That’s it. Now, I have discovered that Silent does not work but if you know what your doing you may be able to get it all to work just fine.

Since the time of creating the bootsplash file, some adjustments have been made. So, just tinker around with the dimensions of the verbose box and you should be fine.

Java and all it’s problems with PCLinuxOS

I’ll make this short and sweet. There are two different versions of Java runtime in the repositories. Java-1.5 and Java-1.6. By default Java-1.5 is installed, I think. So, if you do not see a need to upgrade to Java-1.6, don’t. I have had a few problems with Java-1.6 in some websites. Just play around and see which one works best for you. If you start experiencing Firefox not responding then switch your Java.