Testimonial: A Boring Evening

by Roland Ewert (longtom)

Well, since this is testimonials I thought I'll share this one with you.

I am with Linux for a bit more than a year. Since I live in South Africa I always and primarily used a distribution heavily endorsed by a South African icon. Having said that, I was always intrigued by the philosophy of PCLinuxOS, which appeared to be so logical to me that I couldn't forget about it — as I forgot about so many other distros I had a look at before.

So I started getting into it, downloaded 2009 and had it running in a virtual machine, etc. You all know how it goes when they hook you … ?

I am part of the forum for some weeks/months and I like it. I like the "down to earth" approach here, no fanciness, no nerd fights and all that unpleasantness I encountered before and didn't care for. So here I was — not really running PCLinuxOS on any system but having fun with the community.

Yesterday I downloaded 2010 — and things are changing.

I was, sitting at home yesterday evening. As Walter (that one from Jeff Dunham) says: "I was bored as hell, it was hot as hell, mosquitoes using me as their main landing strip and I was not tired — so going to sleep wasn't an option." So I thought: "Why not install that PCLOS KDE 2010 on my PC?" "Nah … that's never going to work — stop kidding yourself!"

Let me tell you about my PC. I bought it 2nd hand from a spoiled teen who needed something more powerful for gaming — many years back. Many, many years back. Many, many … It is a proud Pentium IV 2.0Ghz Celeron with a whooping 512meg Ram divided into 2 sticks. It is also filled up by some oldish to very old harddrives (80GB Seagates and the like). Ah yes — and I am the proud owner of an ancient nVidia 128meg video card and some sound card which I forgot the name of. Oh yes — I don't have dsl at home yet — so this is an off line machine.

So, I did try the live CD on that thing and it loaded up. KDE desktop and all. All right … Shut down, pop the gparted live cd in, make some space and start again. There she is again and off I go installing. This took some time — long enough to make coffee, drink it, get rid of it … you get the picture. The grub settings were as simple as I had never seen it before. I didn't touch a menu.list file — how cool is that! It finished, I restarted, popped in my credentials and there I was. The video card was detected without a hitch and installed without me even noticing it. Everything was there that should be there, resolution was fine, sound was sweet … cool!!

So I started playing. I am not a KDE person, and never used it for longer than 10 minutes. My stuff works in Gnome! So I had ample to explore and eventually arrived, as we all do, at the desktop settings. I didn't even think of Compiz on this old block, but there was some animation in KDE itself. Rotating cube and all that jazz. Well, surely not on this machine. Come on, longtom, you should know better … I didn't. I always have to push it — ask my mom. Well — what can I say? It worked. On a 2.0Ghz Celeron with 512 MB of RAM, I had a rotating cube — and if I had the speed slower than normal, it did it without any stopping or stuttering. How is that?

This will be a distro for the whole family. It couldn't possibly be simpler to setup and operate.

The only thing I need to find out is how to get Open Office on this block without an Internet connection.

All in all — what a great distribution. Thank you to Texstar and his nameless team who put in all the hours and effort to get it this far. I can say without a blink that this was my best Linux experience I had this far — and by some distance!

Go to the fridge and get yourself a beer — you deserve it!!!