Tuesday, October 15, 2013

PCLinuxOS

I have been pleased with PCLinuxOS so far, although there was a bit of a learning curve for me, arriving from the universe of Linux Mint/Ubuntu. I think what I like most about PCLinuxOS is that I found what appears to me an easier and better-documented path to compiling programs from source, which means I will be able, after educating myself, to access the very latest versions of my favorite Linux programs, such as Wesnoth, something that I was not able to do in Linux Mint without a lot of trial and error. In PCLinuxOS, much of the overhead in setting up the system for building from source has been automated, meaning I can get started rapidly, whereas with any Ubuntu derivative, there is a lot of guesswork involved in determining what dependencies and compilers are needed, and I am not aware of any process that automates all of the overhead. I did manage to compile Ktorrent 2.3.1 before it was made available in Kubuntu 13.04, but I spent a couple hours tracking down its dependencies, and I had to make educated guesses in most cases, because the dependencies named on the Ktorrent web site do not match the names of the dependencies found in the Ubuntu repositories.

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