Dear Friends,
The PCQ Linux 2005 in the March 2005 issue is fully packed with features and its free. The system it was installed on was a P4 2.4 Ghz and Intel 845 GEBV2 motherboard. Its foundation is the Fedora Core3 linux. It has so many installation choices that its very difficult to choose. However, once you select the broader choice, before the installation starts, it gives you a package list and that is where individual packages of any type can be selected. It has a grub loader and during installation it asks if you want to add additional entries. It does not detect the existing RedHat installation and the manually added partition entry in its dialogue box is useless. The installation was smooth and everything went fine. There is however a minor hiccup of internal modem not detecting and surprisingly the 2.6 kernel does not detect my sound card, even though RHEL's 2.4 does. An older machine's external modem has been added to the system so that issue is tackled and net access is fantastic. Since there are less security programs running compared to XP, the net experience is racy. The sound driver module will have to be compiled according to Intel's website. The PCQ forum has a solution of running some sndconfig rpm but there was none for FC3. This will be a good learning exercise and I will get the steps from google. The grub script was modified to properly detect the existing RHEL and now all the 3 systems boot smoothly.
Overall this is a very comprehensive free OS. It even has support for a thin diskless client server as well as clustering for supercomputing. It is rich in multimedia software. It is definately worth trying. The best part is that it is available in CDs and not DVDs.
Regards,
Rony.