Distro#3 Pardus 2008.1 Hyaena hyaena

Pardus is from Turkey. The version I installed is 2008.1 Hyaena hyaena. It only requires average hardwares:

• 256 MB memory (512 MB recommended)
• 800 MHz Intel or AMD processor (1200 MHz recommended)
• At least 4 GB of free hard disk space (10 GB recommended)

I guess that is why I didn't see "64" in the download options. You can download a normal installation CD or a live CD from FTP/Torrent. Here are some screenshots from 2007 release.

At 1600, booted from CD, I pressed F2 to switch to English interface. In a few moments, it brought up the Pardus installer. The installer use the correct resolution of my LCD monitor, which is 1680x1050, it's a well-designed soft orange theme. The first thing to do is accepting GPL, then I can check the CD integrity, that took about 3 minutes. After checking, setting timezone and creating a new users. In the creating user screen, it allows you to give the administrator privileges to new user, I didn't check it. Once you satisfied to proceed next, you can set the root's password and hostname. Next step is partitioning disk, then GRUB. The automatic partitioning doesn't create a swap for me. Anyway, I clicked on Begin Install button to start installing. While installing and configuring, you will see some well-known icons of the packages, that is interesting. After exactly 20 minutes, this phase is done. Time for first boot!

It took 48 seconds to logging screen. It is a KDE. The first window is one called Kaptan Welcome Wizard, it let you do some configurations for this new system. However, the Network doesn't give me the PPPoE option. After finished all steps in this window, it told me about Tasma, a configuration application for Pardus. I still can't have PPPoE in this new Tasma tool, therefore I am seeking help from Package Manager, PiSi. I searched for PPPoE and tried to install it. Obviously, that can't be done since I don't have Internet connection for now and CD isn't in. However, there is not rp-pppoe package on the CD, but I saw ppp package and installed it. For unknown reason, I can't su. Later, I realized that I need a administrator privilege to su or sudo. After manually set up a DSL link, I did a first updating with only three packages only.

The current X display driver is nv, so I installed nvidia packages and ran nvidia-xconfig, then rebooted. But that didn't work, so I removed and tried the package directly from nVidia. Still couldn't get it to work, it reported that it can't open /dev/nvidiactl. I am not gonna solve this.

The sound system works, so does Flash. The default fonts seem to only have western fonts. One strange thing is it use runlevel 3 to bring up X, not usual runlevel 5.

I think this distro is nice and cute, e.g. PiSi. However, I still met few problems, like PPPoE and nVidia driver. So far, I haven't installed a distro which can completely work out of box for all my needs. It doesn't take too much storage, about 3.X GB after installation. Memory usage is ok, about 3XX MB after logging in. Didn't take too long to install, just about 30 minutes. This is an regular distro, you won't get into much troubles, but still need to fix!

Lastly, a screenshot: