Report: Pardus Linux

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Linux Distribution Pardus 2011.2 Cervus elaphus, Report by ksubedi
http://www.pardus.org.tr/en/

Part 1

Background

The Linux distribution chosen for this report is Pardus Linux. This operating system is made by Pardus project, which is owned and operated by TÜBİTAK BİLGEM, the leading free software initiation of Turkey, since 2003. Pardus project is focused on developing a mainstream operating system, and also aims to develop a high level technological innovation. Since 2005, Pardus project has released several products for individual users. After 6 years, products are being offered to corporate users as well. Some of the products also offered by the Pardus project include development, migration, setup and other support directly or with other partners. Pardus, originally code-named “ÖZGÜR” (meaning free), was initiated by the Prime Minister of Turkey in September 2003 as a research product. It took a year of Research and development for Pardus Linux to be released as a live CD. People started becoming interested in Pardus Linux, which was based on Gentoo Linux, as it had a different design and approach for a Linux operating system than the other available ones. Finally in 2007, Pardus 2007 was released as the first stable version. It was to be used in corporations, and lead to an increase in Pardus Linux popularity around the world.


After some years of development and releases, Pardus 2011 was released. The main target audience for Pardus Linux seems to be home, developers and corporate users. However with two different variations (corporate and home), this distribution specializes for each type of user. Pardus 2011.2 Cervus elaphus, the version being used in this report, can be downloaded from the mirrors on Pardus’s website: http://www.pardus.org.tr/en/pardus/indir/ The downloaded ISO file is approximately 1.2 GB in file size. This is quite a large file size for a Linux distribution as others similar distributions are around the size of a standard CD.

Installation/Startup

Pardus Linux was installed into Mac OS X Lion using VMware Fusion 4.0. The amount of RAM dedicated for this 8 GB disk spaced virtual machine was 512MB. One processor core at 2.0 GHz was also dedicated for this virtualization. The requirements for installation were:

  • CPU: x86 (Intel or AMD min. 350 MHz, recommended > 1000 MHz)
  • Memory: 256 MB RAM (1 GB recommended)
  • CD-ROM: 4x or better
  • Disk: >4 GB


Figure 1 - Startup
Figure 2 - Pre-installation

Creating this virtual machine was quite standard. Like any other virtualization, the downloaded ISO file was selected and the next steps were taken as directed by VMware.After creating the virtual machine, Pardus was booted for the first time and the boot options were displayed. Pardus offered several major languages for installation. English (US) was selected in for this one.


One of the attractive features of Pardus was that it was very user friendly. Being dedicated towards being an easy-of-use distribution, the makers did a well job getting the expected result. The installation process was very simple and looked elegant compared to other distributions. During the setup, the options were laid out very nicely and weren’t redundant or complicated. The partitioning settings were also easy to use. “Use All Disk” option was selected in this installation.

Throughout the installation, which took about 25 minutes, various features of Pardus were shown. Pardus came with all types of preinstalled software that users look for in modern operating systems. Noticeable applications were LibreOffice as the productivity suite, and FireFox as the default web browser.

Figure 5 - Installation

There were no prompts or disturbances during the installation. This seemed to be a great thing as it could be left to install without needing a careful watch for any user or network settings dialog that would pause the installation like a Windows setup. After the installation was completed, a restart was required. The restart screen was also nice as it was a graphical one rather than a ‘text-based’.

Figure 7 - Starting up Pardus Linux 2011.2


After a smooth and hassle free installation, upon first boot, a few steps were shown to personalize the operating system. These steps included user settings. Following the complete startup was the welcome screen. This screen had a warm welcome message along with various options to customize the looks of the operating system even more.

Figure 8 - Customize desktop screen

First impressions of this distribution would show that it was a very well visually designed operating system as every graphical aspect of the interface was beautifully created.

Figure 9 - Desktop view

As we can see from the icon of the task bar, the graphical desktop environment used is KDE.

Basic Operation

Figure 11 - Using widgets

Pardus was designed for office-related work and Turkish users, including the use in Turkish government agencies. It is also the only Linux distribution specifically targeted toward Turkish Linux/GNU users. The users are especially Turkish speaking people who want to use Linux, however the it is available to anyone and used by a broader community. It main goals was to be easy to use, and to be widely distributed. In general usage, users will find that Pardus Linux feels like a combination of several other Linux distributions and some aspects of Windows. However, there are are also differences, features and experiences that set Pardus apart from the popular distributions. User experience was enhanced by the inclusion of the widgets feature with several default widgets. Pardus was meant to be a complete, easy-to-use, desktop solution so it is packaged with all the necessary software and some extras too. It’s preinstalled software list includes the necessities such as web browsers, and word processers as well as instant messaging clients, torrent client and even desktop sharing applications. Several games are also installed and categorized. Most of the applications were easy to use and wouldn’t have been a downgrade from many popular Mac OS X or Windows applications. Included in this distribution were also development tools as well as educational applications making it quite a complete package.

Figure 11 - Pardus applications and window glow effects


Some problems encountered were lags or irresponsiveness. This may have been due to the lack of graphics processing power dedicated towards the virtual machine since accelerated 3D graphics was not enabled for this virtualization. Since many of Pardus’s UI incorporated visual effects such as transparency, shadows, glows and window effects, these problems probably were due to the VMware restrictions.


Usage Evaluation

In conclusion, Pardus’s provides a complete solution as an easy-to-use and a visually appealing Linux distribution. The installation process was simple. The desktop was beautiful and almost all applications a user would need were preinstalled. This version of Pardus was targeted towards the home users and its goal was to be widely distributed. After using it, it seems that the makers have made sure that the home users have everything they need however the extent of its distribution is hard to tell since Pardus is still not a popular name in the Linux community. Some of the evaluation done for this report were the usage of widgets. Usage of widgets was a key attraction in this distribution. Widgets could be added easily and many were available such as system monitors that show current usage, calendars, variety of clocks (digital, binary and "fuzzy"), application launchers that can be customized, puzzles, hardware info, hard disk status, "eyes" which follow the cursor, dictionary, weather, lunar, RSS reader, media player, sticky notes, featured calculator, unit converter, timer and task manager were some key ones out of a wider list. Almost all of these widgets were uniform in looks making a common look and feel environment while using them. Is was a big plus compared to the other widgets available for other operating systems where widgets are very different and do not match the look of the operating system and feel odd. Also, Pardus's huge list of installed widget include almost all commonly used widgets, so users do not need to find more online, download and install - however they can if they choose.



Part 2

Software Packaging

The package manager for Pardus Linux is PiSi. It integrates all of the commands to build, retrieve and manage packages. The packages are located in repositories, which can be added or removed by using command-line commands. There is a graphical interface also available to PiSi, which is called the Package Manager. The Package Manager can be also used to add and remove packages. PiSi it entirely Pardus's creation, thus does not use Gentoo's portage.

The repository contains the following:

  • Number of source packages: 2834
  • Number of binary packages: 4783
  • Number of patches: 5899
  • Number of packagers: 130


Some PiSi commands that can be used to perform various package and repository management include:

  • Install/Update package: pisi install pkg
  • Delete package: pisi remove pkg
  • Update package list: pisi update-repo
  • Update system: pisi upgrade
  • Search by package name: pisi search pkg
  • Search by file name: pisi search-file path
  • List installed packages: pisi list-installed
  • List repositories: pisi list-repo
  • Add repository: pisi add-repo name path
  • Delete repository pisi remove-repo name


Package Manager

PiSi uses LZMA (Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm) to for data compression. It is implemented in Python and is very efficient and small. The packages are zipped files, generally in tar.gz format.

Installing Software

Major Package Versions

Linux Kernel The Linux Kernel used in this version of Pardus Linux is 2.6.37.6 http://www.kernel.org/

KDE

The KDE platfrom installed in this Linux distribution is 4.6.5. The latest KDE version available is 4.7.3. This package has been modified quite largely in terms of layout and appearance. It has been customized to match the Pardus branding and look. http://www.kde.org/

Libc

The libc version used is 2.12. The current stable version for libc is 2.14. This also has not been modified by the authors.

http://www.gnu.org/s/libc/


X.org

X.org version number used is 11.0 and the x,org version used is 1.9.5. The latest version available of X.org is version 11 Release 7.7.

http://www.x.org/


Qt

Qt 4.7.2 is used in this version of Pardus Linux. Qt is a framework for software development. It also hasn't been modified in this distribution.

http://qt.nokia.com/


Bash

The Bash version is 4.1.7(2) - release. The current version of Bash is 4.2. It hasn't been modified since it is one of the core packages used in many Linux distros.

http://www.gnu.org/s/bash/


Coreutils

The version of Coreutils used in this distribution is 8.7. The latest version for this package is 8.14. This package includes the basic file, shell and text manipulation utilities of the GNU operating system so it didn't need to be modified.

http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/


Python

Python 2.7.1 is used in this distribution. The latest version available is 3.2.2. The package hasn't been modified by the author since it is a widely used language.

http://www.python.org/


PiSi

The software-packaging program installed is PISI (Pisi 2.4_beta1). This software is developed by Pardus and is used for its fast performance. Since Pardus built this program, modifications weren’t necessary for the distribution author.

http://www.pardus.org.tr/en


Mozilla Firefox

The version currently installed in this Pardus Linux is Mozilla Firefox 5.0. The current version released is 8.0. The distribution authors haven’t modified the software package a lot. Apart from the compatibility with this distribution, most of the software is the same. I suspect Mozilla Firefox is used in this distribution since it is a very popular web browser with a large community. It is also open source and well supported.

http://firefox.com


kMail

The email client used by Pardus Linux is KMail and the version is 1.13.7. The latest version for kMail currently available is 2.89. This particular package was installed since it is part of the KDE. Once again, the program was customized to match Pardus Linux’s over theme and branding.

http://userbase.kde.org/KMail

Initialization

Pardus Linux is one of the few Linux distributions which has been designed with a boot process with simplicity, speed and maintainability in mind. Mudur is a simplified boot process which makes Pardus faster and more flexible. It is, however, not a replacement for the /sbin/init command. It is a script written in Python which performs tasks such as initializing the system and mounting the filesystems. This occurs in the default boot level. In the boot runlevel, Mudur performs more tasks. After Mudur completes it's tasks, mingetty (/sbin/mingetty) is executed.

The default runlevel, which was 3, was found by using the more "/etc/inittab" command. The services and daemons initialized at startup were listed in "etc/mudur/services/enabled". They include the following:


acpid
ACPID is a completely flexible, totally extensible daemon for delivering ACPI events. It listens on a file (/proc/acpi/event) and when an event occurs, executes programs to handle the event. The programs it executes are configured through a set of configuration files, which can be dropped into place by packages or by the admin.
http://acpid.sourceforge.net/


alsactl
Alsactl is used to control advanced settings for the ALSA soundcard drivers. It supports multiple soundcards.
http://linux.die.net/man/1/alsactl


bluez
Bluez is the canonical Bluetooth stack for Linux. Its goal is to make an implementation of the Bluetooth wireless standards specifications for Linux. As of 2006, the BlueZ stack supports all core Bluetooth protocols and layers.[7] It was initially developed by Qualcomm, and is available for Linux kernel versions 2.4.6 and up.
http://www.bluez.org/


cups
CUPS is the standards-based, open source printing system developed by Apple Inc. for Mac OS® X and other UNIX®-like operating systems.
http://www.cups.org/


nscd
Nscd is a daemon that provides a cache for the most common name service requests. The default configuration file, /etc/nscd.conf, determines the behavior of the cache daemon.
http://linux.die.net/man/8/nscd


pscs_lite
PSCS Lite is the middleware to access a smart card using SCard API (PC/SC).
http://pcsclite.alioth.debian.org/pcsclite.html


rsyslog
Rsyslog is an open source software utility used on UNIX and Unix-like computer systems for forwarding log messages in an IP network. It implements the basic syslogprotocol, extends it with content-based filtering, rich filtering capabilities, flexible configuration options and adds important features such as using TCP for transport.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsyslog


vixie_cron
The vixie-cron package contains the Vixie version of cron. Cron is a standard UNIX daemon that runs specified programs at scheduled times. Vixie cron adds better security and more powerful configuration options to the standard version of cron.
http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/g/vixiecron.htm


xdm
The X Display Manager (XDM) is an optional part of the X Window System that is used for login session management. This is useful for several types of situations, including minimal “X Terminals”, desktops, and large network display servers.
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/x-xdm.html


All of these services/daemons are initialized by the "mudur.py" script.

References

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