A Look at Pardus 2007.3 Lynx

By: Dan Lynch
Monday, December 17, 2007 01:24:07 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/6445/1/

Installing Pardus

Pardus is a Linux distribution developed by the Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptography. I'd never seen it before this week and only heard the name briefly in passing, so I had no idea what to expect. There were a few things that immediately stood out about Pardus for me, though: it has its own package management system called PISI (Packages Installed Successfully, as Intended), it's pretty new on the already crowded Linux distro scene but not based on any other distro, and it contains some really interesting developments. I spent a few days with Pardus and here's how I got on.

Vital Stats

Distro Base: Unique (It's a custom Linux distro)
Package Management: .pisi (With the PISI utility)
Linux Kernel: 2.6.18.8-86
Default Desktop: KDE 3.5.8

I downloaded the LiveCD version of Pardus 2007.3 and fired it up on my system. It worked perfectly, and after choosing my language (Turkish is the default, obviously), I booted the system. After a few minutes I was greeted by a KDE desktop and a nice little set-up applet called Kaptan Desktop, I wondered if maybe Kaptan was some kind of open source superhero but didn't ponder it too long. I configured my mouse, keyboard, and network connection with the wizard.

At this point, I looked on the desktop for an install icon as you would normally get with the live versions of distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, and so on. I couldn't see one and a quick look at the Pardus website confirmed that I'd made something of a blunder in downloading the live version as it cannot be installed as a full version.

To be fair to the Pardus developers, it did say that in bold on the website, somehow in my rush to download the distro I missed it the first time. So don't be impatient like me and read the text properly. After a few hours downloading the install CD from a mirror, I was ready to try again.

This time after selecting my language options I was greeted with an installer straight away. I'm not usually one to worry much what things look like but I have to say the graphics and custom artwork right through Pardus is really nice: lots of nicely drawn little cartoon icons that appealed to me.

I sometimes have trouble with the APIC controller on my motherboard and often in distributions like Ubuntu I have to boot with the "noapic" option to get anywhere. Pardus didn't seem bothered by this, however, and it flashed up a brief warning then carried on about it's business.

The installer was pretty intuitive and easy to use, there were also some nice little touches like the simplified partitioning options. I like to have my system root and home directories on different partitions, which isn't hard to do but usually involves selecting where to mount different partitions and so on. Pardus had an option which said "Install system and user files on different partitions" and with one click of the select box, it knew what I wanted.

Like many other things in Pardus, the installer has been custom built for the distribution; it's called YALI (Yet Another Linux Installer) and I was very impressed by it. The install took about 20 minutes in total, which is quite respectable especially since it included formatting a 200gb hard disk. The documentation for Pardus is very good, I must say, and the wiki is very well maintained. There's even a screen-by-screen install guide for anyone who might be a little nervous of the install process.

It's Easy PISI

After installing and booting the new system, I was greeted by Kaptan Desktop again, who helped me to set up my peripherals and networking--who was that masked avenger? I was then prompted by PISI, the custom package manager in Pardus, that 54 updates were available to the system. I opted to do the updates and was initially a little worried when it said there were 155 Mb of data to download but it came down surprisingly quickly. The mirror servers were very fast and within about 10 minutes the installs were done.

The PISI (Packages Installed Successfully as Intended) package manager is another unique development for Pardus. I'm a massive fan of Apt on Debian systems and I have my issues with Yum on Red Hat so I was a little apprehensive of PISI, but it's really slick and I like it. It's written in Python with package sources implemented in XML and Python, it uses online repositories, and solves dependencies very effectively. I had no issues installing anything I could find with it. The default repository didn't quite have everything I wanted, such as the Bluefish HTML editor, but it was very well stocked.

I have a 19" widescreen monitor with a native resolution of 1440x900, which very few distributions provide by default, so I needed to install the binary Nvidia drivers for my graphics card. I opened up the package manager and a quick search for Nvidia turned up several driver options. I installed the "nvidia-glx-new" package along with the kernel module and let PISI install everything else it needed. It took a couple of minutes and all I needed to do then was enable the driver in my xorg.conf file. I edited the file to add the resolution I wanted and switched the driver from "nv" to "nvidia". This was the standard approach until quite recently on Linux but I've been spoiled a little by tools such as the Restricted Driver Manager in Ubuntu. I didn't mind setting up the drivers like this and I found lots of good support on the Pardus Wiki but it's honestly probably not something novice users would enjoy.

A quick reboot of the X server and I had the right screen resolution and the correct driver up and running. I wanted to install the Compiz Fusion 3D desktop and I searched for it in the repository but couldn't find anything. After a quick Internet search, I found a very good guide that told me how to add the contrib repository and get access to more software. I did this and installed all the required elements of Compiz Fusion; there were even some good Python scripts to do all this automatically for you, if you prefer. Once I'd done that, I started Compiz but found a lot of errors in the terminal--it seemed my xorg.conf file wasn't quite right and I tweaked it for a while without success. I had to move on due to lack of time but I know I was close and I'm sure it could be done with the right settings.

Again, not the easiest install I've ever done, but far from the hardest. Any Linux enthusiast like me would probably enjoy this tinkering.

Using the System

I found that Pardus came with a hell of a lot of software installed by default. Almost everything I needed was already there and everything else was only a few clicks away with the package manager. KDE usually comes packed with stuff anyway I suppose, but Pardus tries to be a user friendly system and succeeds pretty well in providing a hassle-free experience.

I was able to play all my multimedia files right out of the box in Kaffine and Amarok, every format I had was handled perfectly even Windows Media, which is ugly I know, but still seems to be everywhere. I don't like Kaffine too much so I installed VLC very quickly with PISI. I also found Java, Flash, mplayer-plugin, and everything else needed to browse the Web without trouble was already installed for me in Firefox. A lot of systems do this nowadays but I think it's still worth mentioning and give credit.

I found plugging in my external USB disk and using it just worked straight away with the NTFS-3G driver giving full write support—again, not exactly ground breaking stuff as a lot of distros do this, but still damn handy and worthwhile.

I even managed to find a few unexpected things such as Skype in the contrib repositories which was useful. Unfortunately it was only version 1.3 which is a little out of date but it installed perfectly and worked well. Not having heard of Pardus much before this, I wasn't expecting to find so much community support for it but I have to say there's lots of good help out there and since it was only initially originally released in 2005 it's growing fast as a distro.

The community seems quite tight-knit but very helpful and accessible through forums, and the wiki is very helpful and nicely maintained. It will be interesting to see how this distro grows in the future.

Wrapping Up

Overall, I had a very positive experience with Pardus, considering I didn't know what to expect going into it. I was very pleasantly surprised. It really has some innovative features and I like the approach a lot. I really like the fact that it's backed by the Scientific and Technological Research Council Of Turkey--perhaps this guaranteed support enables the developers to be bolder in their approach, I don't know. Either way, it's great to see a national body supporting the development of open source software like this and I wish more nations would follow suit. It could really be beneficial to us all.

Pardus is pretty easy to use and most things are taken care of for you with PISI, YALI, and the other tools but I'm not sure I would be happy giving it to complete novices to install. The documentation is great but I do think the distro could benefit from some kind of tool for installing graphics drivers and 3D desktop automatically. I was able to get my drivers installed but editing config files is not something novice users will want to do. The system is very fast and stable, which impressed me a lot. Pardus has a utility called MUDUR that is supposed to speed up the boot process. I'm not sure how much difference it made but the boot is certainly quick enough, it would be interesting to see how it compared in a benchmark to other distributions on the same hardware.

As I mentioned at the start, Pardus is not based on Slackware, Debian, Red Hat, or anything else and in this day and age that's a real rarity. It's nice to see someone trying to do something different and not imitate. I think this distro is really one to watch in the future; it's come so far in two years, where could it be in another two years time? Who knows? I, for one, can't wait to find out. It's already a nicely polished Linux distro and I was able to get a fully working desktop up very easily, it's also a very nice looking OS. So if you want to sample something a little different my advice is give Pardus a spin.