As a mentioned in my previous post I spent a little time last night installing PCLINUXOS on my laptop. Other than my machine at work most of my computer time is spent on this laptop and dealing with Ubuntu Hardy Heron was starting to take its toll on me.

I installed the MiniMe version of the distro, the Live CD of which weighs in at just over 200MB. It’s meant to be just enough to get get everything up and running so you can then, through ATP or Synaptic, install just the software you want. This was one of the major appeals of this Distro to me. The reason I gave up on Window, while I doubt I’ll ever run OSX, and why I’m moving away from Ubuntu is that I don’t so much extra crap built into the OS from the start. I want my operating system to operate my system, I’ll take care of the rest.

First Impressions

The first thing I noticed what that PCLINUXOS was able to start using the broadcom wifi in my laptop right out out of the gate. I opened up the network configuration tool and it asked me if I wanted to use the windows driver for via ndiswrapper for the card since there is no linux driver. I said yes and was done. In Ubuntu I had to use the wired ethernet to search Ubuntu’s forums for the right driver to use and instructions on how to set up ndiswapper.
PSLINUXOS time: 30 seconds
Ubuntu time: 45 minutes

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