Pardus 2008 review
I’ve tried many user friendly distributions such as Ubuntu, Mandriva, Mint, Pclinuxos… but there’s always been a reason for me to switch. In absence of Pclinusos 2008 I decided to try Pardus 2008 exactly one week ago…
Installation
Unfortunately the Pardus 2008 disk is not a livecd which means that installation is mostly a shot in the dark. Strangely the defualt language is Turkish but those with a keen eye will find that pressing F2 at boot will give an option for English (and many other languages). The actual installer itself is among one of the most intuitive I’ve seen although not by far as most installers nowadays are a simple case of clicking next. Shamefully the install takes approximately 30 minutes, It seemed a bit quicker than that but its still a far cry from the 10-15 minute installs of most modern distributions.
Aesthetics
Upon first boot your greeted with a first run wizard called ‘Kaptain’ which does a great job of helping you get everything running and afterwards my defualt desktop looked somewhat like this:
My defualt desktop
Every Pardus install will look different due to the easily customisable Kaptain however I wanted to further customise this install and I ended up with something like this:
I’ve never had such a beautiful desktop before. It’s mainly thanks to the highly versatile control centre ‘Tasma’ which is best described as an improved upon kde centre:
Package management
By default Pardus comes installed with everything the basic user could need Firefox, Openoffice, Amarok, Kaffeine; which is all I need. However if there’s anything else you need to install you can use the Pardus package manager ‘PISI (Packages Installed Successfully as Intended).
PISI
Personally I still prefer Synaptic to PISI but there’s no denying that PISI is still exellent in its own right. The repositories are fairly complete they have everything you could ever need in them although you may be dissapointed as it doesn’t have as much ‘choice’ as more popular distributions (i.e. it doesn’t have at least half a dozen video players). Unfortunately there is only one Pardus server from which I draw average speeds of about 300KB/s which despite being fairly fast doesn’t utilise my full bandwith as I usually get speeds of approximately 1200 KB/s.
Multimedia support
Multimedia support is extremely important and luckily I havent found any multimedia flaws with Pardus yet. All my music is handled with Amarok which plays all my MP3’s, Ogg’s and WMA’s. All of my video files are handled by Kaffeine which i’ve tested with avi’s and wmv’s, Pardus can even play DVD’s out of the box:
DVD playback - Silent hill
Flash and Java are also installed out of the box so I can happily surf around sites like youtube.
Speed/Stability
Pardus 2008 is probably the fastest distribution I have ever used. Its quite nippy on my mediocre 1.5 GHz processor. I’ve also never experienced any crashes or slow-down. If speed is your thing than Pardus is the ultimate desktop distro.
Conclusion
Pardus 2008 is everything I could of asked for it looks good, plays all my multimedia, it’s super-fast/stable and it’s so easy even a Mac OS X user could easily adapt to it. Pardus has taken over my linux partition at the moment I consider it the best distribution available at this time; I won’t switch distribution anytime soon perhaps I may use Pclinuxos 2008 for reviewing purposes but it’ll be hard to top pardus 2008.
Bulletspawn's life (or lack of) 
The only trouble I had with Pardus 2008 is that the disk partitioner pooched my other operating systems.
I’ve a test machine with Vista and Sidux installations. I opted to shrink both my NTFS and EXT3 partitions to make room for Pardus and perhaps another OS on my little 80gig drive.
Vista would not boot afterwards, citing missing files, and Sidux could not get past an fsck, citing an inconsistency in the superblock size / corrupted partition table.
So be warned that Pardus may not play well with others and that you should use GParted or similar if your drive needs preparation for multibooting.
I’ve since redone my Sidux install. Vista can wait, because I’m not all too keen to learn about all of the new and annoying wizards anyway.
I set up all of my partitons back in january, 10 GB root and 30GB home with I can’t remember how much swap space (4GB I believe) so I didnt bother with the disk partitioner in Pardus.
Strange what happened with sidux though but doesn’t vista allways get nerfed when you try to shrink the Partition or have they fixed that now?
anyways thanks for the heads up I allways use the latest Gparted anyway 😛
Wouldn’t surprise me about Vista. Heck, I was pleasantly surprised that it coexisted with Linux in the first place 😉
Could be that the problem with the Sidux partition could have been fixed, but it wasn’t fixable by following the manual fsck procedure that it asked me to do during boot, and I don’t know enough to know otherwise what to try.
I’m at the point with Linux where I can install, use, and tinker with it a bit, but if something tosses a serious wobbler it’s format time…. much like my early days with Win98 for that matter :LOL:
Shame, you said that the installer took 30 miunutes? Well, in my ancient system, it took the installer more than an hour to do it. However, as soon as the system was up and running it rewarded me with the most elegant desktop I have yet experienced in a Linux! I choose the orange background and transparent panel/taskbar.
Like you multimedia support is most important requirement for me. Second most important is out-of-the-box support for all partitions on my hard drives. Nothing is more frustrating for a newbie like me than to look for my Windows partitions and not find them or to mount them and get permission denied error WITHOUT telling what I might do to mount them.
Pardus 2008 delivers beautifully. It has all I really need the most for day to day computing so repository size is not that important to me.
[…] pardus 2008.1 review Posted September 19, 2008 Filed under: linux | Tags: pardus, review | So far has no noticeable differences between the last version therefore I will not review it. Instead I shall link you to my last review: Pardus 2008 review […]
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someone mentioned that their sidux install does not work after installing pardus. It may just have been the boot manager, Sidux needs to use its Sidux boot manager.
YAA Adding this to my bookmarks. Thank You