Pardus 2011, Independent Distro Releases Latest and Greatest

Pardus Linux, the independent Linux distribution hailing from Turkey has seen its next major update with version 2011. Pardus is funded by the Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey, which is a governmental agency that manages, funds and conducts research in the areas of education, Science, and technology in Turkey. Its underlying goal is to guide and advance Turkey's competitiveness in the global market in these key areas. Pardus is used by the Turkish Armed Forces, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Turkish Police, Turkey's Social Security Institution, and the Ministry of Defense. For ordinary users around the world, Pardus is just a really nice distro.

Pardus comes as an install image or live DVD for i686 and x86_64 architectures. In this latest release the kernel was updated to 2.6.37, KDE to 4.5.5, and Firefox to 4.0 Beta9. LibreOffice has replaced OpenOffice.org and the Pardus bootsplash has been replaced by Plymouth. The Pardus installer now supports LVM/RAID and UUID identification and all GTK applications are themed with GTK Oxygen for continuity.

Pardus usually sits at around 30 to 40 in Distrowatch's Page Hit Ranking, but it always receives positive technical and user reviews and comments. It is probably known best for its high performance, good looks, stability, and unique tools.

Original Tools

Mudur is the boot up process which is designed to be faster than some of those found in other Linux distributions. Mudur is written to handle scripts and processes asynchronously and in parallel with some boot caching, saving the state of services, and other techniques.

Kaptan is the Pardus desktop customization tool. It guides users through the process of choosing a menu, wallpaper, user account enhancements, and whether to enable Smolt (which allows system information to be collected to aid development).

PiSi is the package management system unique to Pardus. To regular users it functions very much like APT and includes a graphical front-end. For some users, the smaller repository might be a bit of a negative but Pardus does ship with a lot of handy software.

The Pardus hard drive installer is original as well, although it does resemble others a bit and functions similarly as well. It's an easy, fast, and attractive wizard that walks even the most inexperienced to a successful install.

Conclusion

All in all, Pardus is a truly underrated and underused distribution. It's a wonderful offering that everyone should try. And everyone can, because it comes with support for about every language in the known world.

One of the desktop customization combinations available