Hello All,

Just wanted to drop a couple of lines to thank Roberto and other people involved in development of PC/OS.
I have it installed on two of my machines out of three and all is running perfectly.
PC/OS was the final step for my change from Win to Linux.

Keep the good work going, guys, you are doing great.

Antonio

ChrisA, the A standing for asshole I see. Just crawl back under your rock. Enough is enough. Were this my board, I would have deleted you from day one -- it is what you deserve.

Let's get back to the business of using PC:OS. 'Don't like it, 'don't use it.

Of course by responding sadly I push this thread to the top of the list.

Every one here DID pick a distribution and they chose this one so sadly you are preaching to the converted.

The most information I got about this distribution came from a review I read on a linux website. Not sure which one it was, but I think it was distrowatch. Someone correct me here. It was a website that reviews linux distributions. Because of what I read I thought I would give it a try. It was the inclusion of REALBasic that caught my interest, which sadly is not with the 64 bit version, but I understand that it was rather poor and rather slow. The replacement Gambas is said to be much better and I look forward to trying that out.

There are a fair number of users at the moment because of the popularity of this distribution. Partly this is because it now seems to be freely available with the suggestion that if you use it extensively it would be helpful to make a £40 contribution. XP is currently about £65 so PC/OS has to do a lot of convincing to justify such a donation. If it becomes your default OS I'm sure that a user would want to help promote it in this way, but that of course will take some time.

As above I'm using the 64 bit version that is now available. This is based on Ubuntu/Xubuntu 9.04 jaunty jackalope. One might think that the true Ubuntu version would be better, but I want the development software some of which is third-party and all of which is painfully difficult to install to the extent that I would not wish to attempt it myself. MonoDevelop is still a problem at the present time. Ubuntu is pushing ahead rather too fast at the moment and their experiment with ext4 was scary. Reading their release notes is also very worrying. 64 bit has lots of problems for example Debian 64 bit is described by VirtualBox (and Sun Microsystems) as a mixed distribution. Apparently it has a 64 bit system filled with 32 bit applications and therefore VirtualBox cannot support it. It's not clear what the situation is here, but the likes of Gimp are probably 64 bit. REALBasic won't run easily in 64 bit and neither will POVray (at least not easily if at all). We want 64 bit because we want more RAM. That's the only truth.

As an example of an obsolete distribution I would like Chris to take a look at Red Hat or the free alternative which is actually CentOS (not Fedora). Red Hat achieve's it's stability by not upgrading the kernel. They only seem to upgrade the kernel when they upgade the whole system. Currently this is about once every 5 years. CentOS has a convincing argument that sadly doesn't work. My motherboard has a J-Micron controller and the IDE side of that is faulty. As my optical drive is on the IDE side of that many distributions do not install. Sabayon Linux was set to compete again PC/OS as it also has all the codecs and is considered superior because being based on Gentoo the use of source code and all the advantages that go with that. Sabayon did not install. It seemed to fall fowl of the J-Micron controller. It was Ubuntu and Canonical that wrote the patch for the J-Micron controller. Debian seemed to acquire this from them, but we get it direct from Ubuntu. Now as you imagine CentOS would probably not install because kernel is so out of date that it would probably fail on the J-Micron controller. Sabayon was supposed to be bleeding edge. In Centos you can't easily install stuff like Gimp I understand because it requires a more up to date kernel. So Red Hat and CentOS are your candidates for being obsolete, while Ubuntu is currently bordering on bleeding edge. This disto aims to sit on the LTS releases, and thank God for that. You need to be between obsolete and bleeding edge, and this distibution is doing fine in that regard.

Our weakness is that it's new. Give it time to attract more users. Watch to numbers rise or fall. Critisize it when the numbers fall (not when they are rising).

PC/OS is not stupid. Young children are stupid. Eventually we hope that young children grow up to be less stupid, and generally they do!