Pardus — a penguin from Turkey
[ Saturday, 2 December 2006, riklaunim ]
Pardus is a Turkish distribution that comes with KDE as the default desktop. It is however not just another pack of known open source apps. Pardus comes with its own, original GUI system installer, a package management system — PISI and system settings applet — TASMA, as well as a few additional goodies. This review is based on my experience with Pardus Linux 2007 Beta 2, which can be downloaded from the official project’s FTP.
Installation
The graphical installer speaks English, Turkish, Spanish, German or Dutch. It asks us about the keyboard layout, programs we would like to install and allows us to create custom partitions. At least 3.5GB of free disk space is required for the system files and the SWAP partition. Overall, the Pardus installation is pretty standard and should not be a surprise to those who have installed a few operating systems. After copying the package file to the hard drive, we are invited to create system users and install the GRUB boot manager.
A few words about the desktop
The design of Pardus is very pilished. Starting with the GRUB manager, through the boot process to the KDM session manager and to the KDE desktop the system has a very consistent look and feel. The Pardus artwork team paid attention to such details as their own icon set, skins for fbsplash and KDM.
By default, Pardus comes with a full-featured KDE desktop with a few non-KDE apps like the GIMP or Firefox browser. The browser is equipped with all the common (and sometimes non-free) plugins like Java, Flash beta 9.0, MPlayer (for multimedia content) and others. The distribution installs all the common codecs by default as well (including proprietary and patented ones like MP3 or WMV), so playing any kind of multimedia is not a problem with this distribution, out-of-the-box.
And what makes Pardus special?
Pardus has its own set of tools for system management. PISI is a graphical package management utility which allows for package installation and upgrade. The repositories contain very current versions of all popular open-source applications, KDE translations and localized GLIBC. There is no GNOME in the repos, except for just few selected GTK+ apps (like the GIMP). TASMA is basically a modified KDE Control Center (kcontrol). It has special tabs for each of the system configuration modules like networking, firewall, etc. It is simpler than the default KDE tool, making it more suitable for the newcomers. Kubuntu creators could learn a few things from the way TASMA is designed.
Compared with the previous stable version, Pardus 2007, the tools are much more polished and mature. Package building has been enhanced as well. It is now supported by by two powerful servers. The boot-up process has been modified with a few python-powered scripts built-in.
Supported languages
Pardus can’t be fully localized. There is local language support for the KDE localization and GLIBC locales only. The system tools like PISI and TASMA are available in two languages only (English and Turkish).
Stability, security and performance
It is hard to say much about the security of Pardus 2007 since it has not been officially released, yet. During the three days since the beta was released, there haven’t been any security patches. I haven’t observed any problems with the functioning of the system either. I could not find any info about the planned update scheme for Pardus 2007, whether the updates are going to be continuous like in Arch or Gentoo, or the waterfall mode with new releases each year or half year like Ubuntu or Fedora Core.
The performance of Pardus seems very good. The applications were launched without much latency and the OS seems to respect the computer’s resources, not eating them up too fast. The booting time (from GRUB to KDM) took me 36 seconds in the default installation, compared to 43 in Gentoo.
Summary
Pardus is an interesting distribution. It is well designed, consistent and comes with bleeding-edge applications, which makes it a good desktop distribution. It’s probably not a great choice for the free-software radicals (since it comes with non-free apps by default) nor for the US residents (inclusion of patented stuff like the MP3 codecs). One major problem is the lack of good documentation (even in English) and lousy localization (seems to be Turkish/English-centric with other languages support as an add-on).
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23 Comments
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Nice review, I’m loving the reviews coming from Pardus, so I may give this a try. The same day you made this review, the RC of Pardus also showed up, can’t wait to see how the RC holds up.
> Pardus can’t be fully localized. Local language support
> concerns the KDE localization and GLIBC locales only.
> The system tools like PISI and TASMA are available in
> two main languages only (English and Turkish).
This was a bug in beta – not an issue with RC now, so users can install Pardus in 5 languages (EN, TR, ES, DE, NL).
We are looking for more native translators, see http://www.pardus.org.tr/eng/projects/translation
I could make some PL translations
The review was made bit earlyer and then translated to english.
Just tried using the install CD in English. It never loads an installer. After booting linux, I’m simply dumped to a command line with no instructions.
hello,
am on distro hopping & about to download this one now.laptops w/ bcm4318 wireless cards(includes mine)would like to see distros w/ out of the box functionality.hope this one has or will have.
thanks
First of all: In my opinion Pardus is one of the best Linux Distributions out now!
Like in the most available Linux distributions I don’t now what I can do with the K-Mixer in the K panel, it does nothing. I hope future versions of Pardus will have more Wallpaper and more “good” games. In german K menu “programs” should be “Programme”.
Best regards
Janko
But does it support Kurdish language ? I could not fond aything about that.
I installed the 2007 RC on my test PC. However, after the installation (in English), the system booted up in Turkish. I could not figure out how to change the settings to English. I tried changing the keyboard settings, then reboot. No luck!
Does anyone know how to set it to English?
Thanks.
PS: Since the desktop is in Turkish, it was difficult to explore what features unique to Pardus. However, the layout have a pleasant look-and-feel.
I hope it’s not a turkey from penguin people.
(That’s meant as a joke.)
Seriously, looks good, I’ve not seen Firefox 2 on another distro yet.
A lot of distros have it already. Ubuntu 6.10 has it, to name the key one.
@IMQ,
Hi, From the Pardus(KDE) Menu,
1. Select Pardus Yapilandirma Merkezi
2. Bolgesel ve Erisilebilirlik(At top)
3. Click Dil Ekle
4. Select Amerikan Ingilizcesi
5. Click Uygula
It should be OK!
We’re waiting for the stable version of 2007 tomorrow
It would be nicer we hope!
This is an absolutely incredible distro! Fully functional after a bit of tweaking. Very clean, fast, easy to update, and user friendly for newbies and experienced users alike. After the first boot, subsequent boot times are very fast.
The bcm43xx is supported out of the box, but not “configured correctly” because the kernel module is somewhat flaky and doesn’t not play nice with all cards. You need to add “bcm43xx” to /etc/hotplug/blacklist and add “ndiswrapper” to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6. Reboot to make sure that the kernel driver doesn’t load and ndiswrapper does. Afterward, just configure your wireless.
Oh, one more thing… Ndiswrapper requires the windows xp drivers bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5.sys for your bcm43xx card to be installed.
i have installed this distribution.. this distribution uses the gfx kind of menu… and in the mplayer the language support is missing.. instead of menu items in english i can see the turkish menus..
and then after the installation configuration takes more time.. it should be reduced…
otherwise this is a good distribution…
@goutham
You can use Kaffeine or the “KDE Frontend for MPlayer”
……………………………………………………..
“”Free People Says:
December 8th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
But does it support Kurdish language ? I could not fond aything about that.”"
…………………………………………………….
All of the Kurdish people (including me) know Turkish very well. So it is not necessary..
PARDUS 2007 3D Desktop – AIGLX, BERYL, KIBADOCK
Click below
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht9gDGiFpiQ
Pardus is a good distribution
Please, I installed in English, but all the package descriptions in the PISI package manager are in another tongue. Is there some setting I am missing or is it going to the wrong package server or ??? Please help, I don’t read Turkish
Thanks
Hi Alan!
I guess you missed one localization setting, because almost all pisi packages in the repo has both english and turkish descriptions, can you check your settings that Emre Aladag mentioned above on post 11?
and also the 2007.1 “Felis chaus” rc is now on the servers:
here they are
Kurulan_Install
Çalışan_Live Edition
I have installed the latest Pardus 2007.1 on two computers (so far!) – I have been experimenting for over 8 years with many linux distros. This is the best overall so far – it seems to have everything – beauty, speed (kde is actually fast with Pardus even on a low spec computer), stability, easy/reliable package management, good selection of applications, network management etc etc.
A small improvement would be to make it easier to set up printing, also english localisation in general as well as in Open Office. A non-technical person might give up. Also I found it easy to compile extra programs but a non-technical person would struggle with simple instructions.
Pardus’ rating in distrowatch should be much higher. Please support this wonderful distro!!
With a little extra polish, Pardus could be the first Linux distro really to be ready to be installed on retail computers.
Well done the Pardus team, you should be really proud of your efforts!
Hi..
I NEED HELP FOR PARDUS PROGRAMs.
What Thats Programs ARE Job..
-AMAROK
-JUK
-K3B
-KAFFEÄ°NE
-KMPLAYER
-KREC
-KOLOUR PRÄ°NT
-KOOKA
-K PAF
-FÄ°REFOX
-K GET
-KONQUEROR
-KOPETE
-OPEN OFFÄ°CE
-ACILIS YÖNETİCİSİ
-G PARTED
-KDE BÄ°LGÄ° MERKEZÄ°
-K POWER SAVE
-KRFB
-K JOB WÄ°EWER
-KATE
-K NAZAR
MÃœMKÃœNSE TÃœRKLER YARDIM LTFN
*** dangerbow@hotmail.com ***
qopqop43@gmail.com
WRÄ°TE FOR HELP ME SEND MY MSN ..
Turkish: Pardus güzel bir sistemdir. Herkeze öneririm.
Hello, I like to show you new version of Pardus which is 2009.1 international
You can download from this link:
http://www.pardus.org.tr/eng/download/