Convenient distro

Hi, have you ever consider to base CAELinux on other distro than PCLinuxOS? My personal opinion is that it would be better to base it on some of the most popular distros, which are more stable and have bigger community of users and developers as well. I have nothing against PCLinux, but it is Mandriva underneath, so why not Mandriva? Not lobbying for Mandriva (or SUSE, Fedora, UBUNTU or...), but I am mainly Windows user using Linux occassionally for calculations, but when I need to run some Linux programs, not supported by PCLinuxOS (no RPMS), I need another distro - trial system is too much even under VMware. I do not complain in any case, your work and CAELinux are great, but I want to point out some aspect, which I think more users can be facing to.

Anyway, thanx for your great job! Milan

Hi,

I understand your point of view and to be honest, if I could spend as much time and money as I would need, I would probably switch to a more \"professionnally accepted\" distro like Mandriva, RedHat, SuSe or Debian.

But the facts are that PCLinuxOs is free, and absolutely fabulous for creating remasters including LiveDVD & HDD modes!!

For example, I have tried to remaster a Knoppix first, and it turned out to be a nightmare to configure all the graphic apps. It took me just 1/10th of the time to do the same on PcLinuxOs with a better result in the end... so that's the reason!!

For your information, PCLinuxOs is RPM \"compatible\" so, except possible dependency problems, installing RPMs from other distro is possible (from command line preferably).
For example, if you have a rpm called MyProg.rpm in /tmp, try the following in a terminal:

rpm -ivh MyProg.rpm

if it fails due to dependency problems, try:

rpm -ivh --nodeps MyProg.rpm

and check if the program runs fine.

Hi,

Unfortunatly, it seems that PCLinuxOS isn't compiled with SMP module, and do not allow working with several processors. This would be a great argument to change from PCLinuxOS to another popular linux livecd/distribution (like Knoppix for example).

(it's still very interesting to have this all in a liveCD, thank you)

PEB

Hello,

this is not exactly true:

PcLinuxOs does have a SMP kernel available, but it is not installed by default on the liveDVD (it may be the default in future versions though). To get SMP + 4Gb ram support (and 3D graphic drivers etc...), you must install the distro on harddisk and use \"Synaptic\" to download a new kernel (SMP kernel 2.6.16 for example)...

I am working on CAELinux Beta 3B which will consist in a full system update to the latest versions of Xorg and kernels. If during testing I see that SMP support does not create weird effects on single CPU machines, I will probably include it as default for the next release.

Regards,

J.Cugnoni
www.caelinux.com