Pardus is a Linux distribution funded by the Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey. Even though it uses KDE, Pardus tries to make every user - including those who come from a GNOME Linux distribution - feel like home and in which the user is in control of how his desktop looks like right from the start.
Pardus 2011 comes with its own original tools: YALI (installer), Kaptan - an first boot configuration tool, PiSi (package manager) as well as many tweaks to some already existing tools. Read on to find out more!
First impressions
(Pardus login screen)
When you first boot the Pardus 2011 Live CD, YALI installer (which now has LVM/RAID and UUID support) will guide you through the installation process. Everything is intuitive and easy to use for both novice and advanced users (the following screenshot is just one of the YALI installation steps):
While most major Linux distributions impose their own style (theme, icons and so on), in Pardus you're in complete control of how everything looks from the beginning: when you first boot Pardus you'll meet Kaptan, an original Pardus tool that runs when you boot Pardus for the first time and lets you customize the user interface and other settings (you can choose the theme, menu, wallpaper and so on):
If you've never tried Pardus before, I'm sure the first impression will be "wow" for most of you like it was for me!
Default applications
(Clementine)
(Firefox 4.0 beta 9)
Pardus 2011 is not your regular KDE Linux distribution - you won't find KOffice (now Calligra Suite) by default but LibreOffice. Further more, Mozilla Firefox 4.0 beta 9 is the default web browser. Other default applications: SMplayer as the default video player, Clementine as the default music player, KsCD is now the default player for Audio CDs and of course most of the popular KDE applications like digiKam, Kdenlive, Kopete, Dolphin, Ktorrent, Kget, Choqok, Konqueror and so on.
(GIMP)
The reason for using GNOME Network Manager as the default network manager application is to make it easy for its users to set up CDMA, HSPA and VPN networks.
But you don't have to worry about integrating GNOME applications with the KDE look - Pardus has this covered and the latest Pardus 2011 uses KDE's Oxygen style for all the GTK apps. This is great for those who use GNOME and want to try a KDE Linux distro as they can keep using some of the applications they've got used to while trying out some of the best KDE applications too.
For a package manager, Pardus comes with its own "PiSi":
But of course, there's also a graphical package manager too:
Panda (Pardus alternative driver administration) is a new System Settings module which allows users to change the driver between Open Source and proprietary one for NVIDIA and ATI display adapters.
Pardus 2011 comes with KDE SC 4.5.5, Linux Kernel 2.6.37, Python 2.7.1, xorg-server 1.9.4 RC1 with improvements to the automatic driver configuration mechanism done by the Pardus developers.
Download Pardus 2011
There's much more to Pardus 2011 then I could ever cover in a post so you really need to try it out for yourself to see why Pardus is considered one of the best KDE-based Linux distributions of the moment.
Pardus 2011 is available for both 32bit and 64bit and you can download it from HERE | Pardus 2011 release notes
