Brief History
How it all began … At National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology – NRIEC- from Kocaely, Turkey, in summer of 2003. In order to provide a free-of-charge turkish genuine and completed localized Linux distribution, a development core was formed. First goals were to provide a modular, localized, easy to admin and extensible distro.
First official release was Pardus 1.0, available at the end of 2005 and was inspired from Gentoo Linux, but today a few things remind us of Gentoo legacy. Since then, after beta and release candidates versions, Pardus team released stable versions 2007, 2007.1 (codename Felis chaus), 2007.2 (codename Caracal caracal), 2007.3 (codename Lynx lynx) and last one, Pardus 2008. Almost each Pardus stable release contains a Live-CD (“Calisan“) – not available yet for 2008 release – and an instalable iso image (“Kurulan“); also, each Pardus version reveal a new anatolian felidae (cat) both on project codename and default wallpaper. Project name itself - Pardus – describes a leopard subspecies, possible extincted in Anatolia plateau.
Why Is Pardus So Unique
Pardus is independently desktop distribution, based on KDE 3.X branch, with major unique features: custom package management and system configuration tools. Current Pardus release has build on top as a desktop manager KDE 3.5.9. With each release, Pardus become more unique, thanks to many original modules implemented, improved and refined with each version. A short list and description of them:
- YALI (acronym for Yet Another Linux Installer) – Pardus GUI installer – detects hardware and install software from CD to hard disk. Written in python and qt, available in several languages including turkish and english. Great interaction with user based on customization of user information, automatic login, timezone, system keyboard and language settings. YALI it’s fast, gorgeus and intuitive.
- COMAR (pronunced chow-mar), acronym for COnfiguration MAnageR, manage together software aplications and their tasks, init scripts, system tasks and desktop.
- MUDUR, Pardus init system. It’s fast and effective and is written in python. A single script, mudur.py , manage system and user processes, modules loading, filesystem mount, system clock.
- PiSi (pronunced pee-see), acronym for Packages Installed Successfully, as Intended is the package management system of Pardus. It install, upgrade, remove, handle dependencies and manage software packages; a xml file contain each package spec. Use it in console or as a visual application (is written in python, and has a qt GUI).
Release Highligths
Pardus 2008, released at June 26th, is a joint-effort of developers, artist, translators and documentation writers and it’s the first release of 2008 branch. It contains, among others, last stable KDE environment version (3.5.9), Kernel 2.6.25.9, Gcc 4.3.1, Glibc 2.8, Python 2.6, Java 6, Firefox 3.0, OpenOffice.org 2.4.1. Pardus 2008 still uses qt3 libraries (3.3.8), because of KDE3. There are a lot of breakthroughs, like rewritten COMAR and MUDUR modules, in order to work with dbus and new authorization infrastructure, an improved hardware detection (automatic printers detection, improved peripheral devices detection), improved user authorization management, based on dbus and COMAR, which make authorization simple but not as secure as developers tell us, more intuitive and user friendly network manager, with customized configuration and saving profiles possibility, but with pppoe connection feature lack, a faster and with many improvements PiSi, like only downloading changed parts in package upgrades (haven’t see that), history manager, which helps you to go back to a previous versions of packages, improved YALI, mostly through a new integrated GUI partitioning tool, complete rewrite of Kaptan Desktop, a new GUI tool – Display Manager – which provides visual configuration of your monitor and graphic card. Pardus migration tool aims to recover user email settings, bookmarks, email messages, instant messenger accounts from another operating system; it’s something like Ubuntu Migration Assistant.
After boot process and log on Kaptan Desktop invites you to customize your desktop. You can choose from new wallpapers stock. Pardus use Plastic style and Tulliana icons and a custom menu (and a custom KDE menu start button too). Then you have the possibility to go deep in system’s customization with TASMA. Manage your system services, your boot configuration, install or configure peripherals, add and manage users. My ACER laptop touchpad works like a charm, also Crystal Eye integrated webcam. Unfortunately, even hplip package is present on system, there is no menu shortcut for HP devices GUI configuration, like in Mandriva, for example. TASMA related entry (“Add Printer”) is KDE default applet. Instead, you have to use console and run hp-setup script. Despite this lack of feature, i was able to install a network attached HP Color Laserjet All-In-One device, which performs very well and is controlled via cups web interface.
Speaking of network, Pardus is Windows network ready. Just open Konqueror and browse through smb:/ kioslave your network. Pardus has sysinfo:/ kioslave too, which looks gorgeus.
For each release, Pardus packages selection is made in order to provide a complete desktop experiece and all necessary tools to improve it. That’s why, Pardus menu entries contains best applications knowed in linux world. Along OpenOffice.org, you’ll find KDE own KCalculator, Kwrite, Kate, KPDF. Entire kdenetwork and kdepim packages are present, so we have, among others, Kmail, Kontact, Konversation, Kopete, KFTPGrabber, KGet, KTorrent. As web browsers, there are Mozilla Firefox and Konqueror. KDE games are present too. Scan with Kooka, make screenshots with KSnapshot, view images with Gwenview, manage your photo collection and photo-camera with Digikam, paint with KolourPaint and edit photos with Gimp. Listen music with Amarok and Juk, rip audio cd’s with KAudioCreator. Pardus 2008 integrates new PulseAudio Server. You can watch movies with Kaffeine or MPlayer. Even both web browsers have own video plugin: Gmplayer (gecko-mplayer, a gnome-libs frontend to mplayer, used for Firefox) and KMplayer (kdelibs frontend to Mplayer, used by Konqueror). It’s quite strange why is present MPlayer alongside KMplayer and GMplayer but we have the possibility to get rid of them. Unfortunately, my favourite video playback application - SMplayer – depends now on qt4 and is not a choice by default. Of course, K3B manages burning operations and kdebluetooth handle bluetooth connections and peripherals. Both OpenOffice, K3B and Amarok have customized splash screen, which looks very nice.
Pardus contains Macromedia Flash support and complete DVD decryption and playback, through libdvdcss, libdvdread and libdvdnav libraries. Pardus handle default restricted multimedia formats too. Well, this is strange, but Pardus does not have installed Microsoft Core Fonts; they aren’t available neither in official repository. There is a workaround for this on Pardus WorldForum, so it is possible to have those fonts installed. Anyway, you could use dejavu-fonts or install and use liberation fonts package. Pardus repositories contains more than 1000 packages, which is not promising, by simple comparation with Debian repositories. But you’ll find on Pardus official and contrib repositories most important packages fron Linux world: a lot of development tools (Pardus loves developers), games, hardware kernel modules, applications for KDE3 (system menu services, utilities, players, KOffice suite, KDE and KOffice localization packages and many, many others), a lot of network applications, software for science and robotics, server application and system locales. Pardus does not provide a complete Gnome desktop, even there are some gnome-libraries installed or available. Instead, Pardus repositories contain XFCE4 (with most of plugins) and … KDE4 ! And yes, packages like wine or compiz are present too. If you have any doubts, search a package (enter few letters from package name), using search bar provided on top-right of package manager.
Problems In Paradise
Pardus has bugs or lack of features – HPLIP GUI tool and menu entry, lack of MS Core Fonts, (still) a turkish MPlayer, badly gtk style integration, an unsupported official english forum, event that there is a community international english forum, poor english documentation. Unfortunately, on my laptop, Pardus 2008 has a serious bug – system freeze after 90-120 minutes of work, independently of application used in that moment. A black/grey/yellow screen appears. First i thought there is power management and automatic suspend/standby, but after i disable it, bug does not dissapear. In order to get rid of it, a hard reboot is required. I think is this bug, still open, which affecting only Intel chipsets. Network Manager is a good piece of software, but it lacks pppoe network configuration.
Since 2007 releases, administrative rights system has improved and is more secure. But, even now, as a regular user, you could choose to remember admin password for current session, or even worse, remember forever, which destroy the idea of security. Seems like this is a PolicyKit “feature”; more details here. And from a purist point of view, along binaries, Pardus repositories should contain sources, too. That is GPL. More Pardus repositories mirrors will be nice, in order to speed-up upgrade tasks.
Conclusions
Despite problems and glitches above, i must admit that Pardus Linux is a newcomer-friendly distro which deserves more attention. Obviously, with next updates and resolved bugs, Pardus will become more stable.
Overall, Pardus system eats around 400 MB RAM. Knowing that recommended memory requirement is 512 MB, there should not be any problems. System is very responsive and fast. Pardus provides out-of-the-box multimedia experience and a system almost ready set-up in 30 minutes. Artwork is cool and Pardus own tools are simple, yet powerfull, intuitive and bloatless. A good hardware detection and easy wifi setup, carefull package selection. NVIDIA and ATI available binaries, a lot of eye-candy applications available in repositories. Is the best KDE3 distro available.
ASEMĂNĂTOR
