Sunday, June 5, 2011

The Pinguy OS seems a worthy distro

For the last five years, the Linux distro that I have installed the most is Kubuntu and its derivatives,such as Linux Mint. Lately, I've been getting into the Ubuntu-derived Pinguy OS (v11.04)--it's the first GNOME-based Linux I've ever actually installed in over 8 years of using Linux. Though I'm usually a KDE guy, it seems to be pretty complete and has a LOT of stuff pre-installed--as well as being laid out in a useful way. Pinguy's power lies in the fact that some useful, but tricky-to-install-and-configure software comes already installed and configured. I have been running it for several days and I like it a lot. Other than adding Xfe and K3b (and a few more browsers), I am running pretty much stock, and except for having to install SeaMonkey 2.0.14 from the tarball (2.0.13 kept crashing), most of the added software went in smoothly. The only caveat seems to be that the default keyboard map is "UK"--so when you use the disc "live" you need to go to
Control Centre->Hardware->Keyboard->Layouts
and add the "USA" keyboard. This is part of the installation process, so no problems if you install it.