Pardus has come a long way since the last time I tried one of their fine Linux distributions; it was an excellent system nearly a year or so ago, and has just gotten much better in the meantime. It stands out as a system that is wonderful to use, either in the liveCD (Calisan) or the installed version (Kurulan) and is friendly to speakers of many European languages across a broad range of hardware.

There are systems that you try for a while and then get sidetracked with the bling from one of the major distro releases, and somehow I got lost and didn’t find my way back to Pardus, though the system and name stayed with me as a very positive one, a system that I would definitely like to stick with and learn more about.

I had been planning to run the livecd and then if it worked out to install the full system, but got caught up in a game of lbreakout on the livecd and lost track of time. When you first enter the grub login screen you are asked to choose your native language from a long list (numbering around ten), the first being Turkish (naturally, as Pardus is a product of Turkey), followed by English, and then a number of other European languages, both major and minor.

The splash is slient, so there is a minute or two of seeming inactivity with just the outline of a flashing cursor at the top of the otherwise dark hued screen, followed by a couple of xserver adjustments as the system sought to find the correct resolution (1024×768) for this R60 Thinkpad with the intel 945 integrated graphics card.

The most excellent Tasma control center launches as you enter the KDE desktop, and gives you a wealth of choices as to menu style (four nifty choices there), wallpaper, internet connection, and the package manager Yali. Once you have finished making your selections, you can either head back into Tasma for more customization right away, or finish and delve further into the choices on offer on the lovely KDE desktop, one that the Pardus developers and graphical artists have truly made their own, with a number of eye-pleasing alterations.

First stop was Firefox, which loaded very quickly, to head over the various spots one would normally go when accessing the internet– youtube, a streaming mp3 site, and a site that streams non-flash video–all of them passed with flying colors, all of the various codecs ready to go from the livecd without a hitch.

Just as a livecd it is a very fun and responsive system–one can only imagine how much speedier it must be in the installed version. All of my hardware was recognized, including wired/wireless, core duo processor, HP all in one printer, and external (fat32) hard drive.

This lynx comes loaded with tons of games, all the graphical tools for media/content creation you could imagine, something for every internet need, music/video playing, as well a full (one might say over brimming) office suite of tools–whatever your content creation, work, entertainment or internet needs, Pardus 2007.3 has something for you–and the configuration tools are as fine as any system I have tried, comparable to those on offer in PCLinuxOS and Mandriva ‘One’ 2008, all this in a tiny 688MB livecd package. It’s amazing how much they were able to pack into this single disk.

If you are looking for a system that is fun, fast, easy to set up and run, easily customizable and using the KDE desktop environment, then there is hardly a better choice out there than Pardus 2007.3, one of the dark horses in this year of stellar Linux distribution releases. Try the livecd and see if you don’t agree–you may find it’s hard not to queue up the installer disk on your torrent list as you zip around in livecd mode. Highly recommended.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 24th, 2007 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Pardus, KDE4, Distro, LiveCD, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.