From LQWiki

PCLinuxOS is an English only Live CD initially based on Mandrake 9.2. It can also be installed to a local hard drive. When used as a LiveCD, it can work together with a USB Key (or thumbdrive), where configuration and personal data will be saved. Locally installed versions of PCLinuxOS utilise the Advanced Packaging Tool (or APT), a package management system (originally from the Debian distribution), together with Synaptic, a GUI frontend to APT.

Since it runs solely off the CD, PCLinuxOS makes an excellent portable Linux demo or system rescue disk, but its completeness makes it a good general purpose desktop as well. PCLinuxOS should work on most modern computer hardware. PCLinuxOS has been under heavy development, but there is now a stable, released version available, PCLinuxOS 2007.

PCLinuxOS has a script called mlivecd, which allows the user to take a 'snapshot' of their current hard drive installation (all settings, applications, documents, etc.) and compress it into an ISO CD image. This allows easy backup of a user's data and also makes it easy to create separate PCLOS-based distributions. The Amarok LiveCD, VideoLinux, Ruby on Rails LiveCD, Kid-Safe Linux, PCLOS Supergamer, SAM Linux and PCLOS MythEdition projects all use this feature.

PCLinuxOS also can play back almost any type of multimedia file (wma, mp3, rm, mov, avi, etc) without any configuration, something that many Linux distributions cannot do. It does not, however, include the controversial libdvdcss for DVD playback, but libdvdcss is available in the official software repository.

Recommended memory to run is 256 MB or more. 5 to 6 GB of free space to install to hard drive with the full version. 2 GB worth of space is required for .93 MiniME version.

External links

• PCLinuxOS homepage (www.pclinuxos.com)
• PCLinuxOS Documentation (www.pclinuxonline.com)
• Wikipedia entry (en.wikipedia.org)
• PCLinuxOS Community Project Website (mypclinuxos.com)