PCLinuxOS is awesome. Especially I like the “2008 MiniMe” edition, which comes as a bare-bone installable live CD, and contains only the KDE desktop essentials. This means that you will have to install all the desired applications on top of it, in order to make it a usable desktop system. In other words, the approach of 2008 MiniMe is very similar to Microsoft Windows XP, which also comes only with a minimal desktop environment and without applications. The beauty of this approach is that using PCLinuxOS package management (Synaptic) the installation of required applications is a snap and the selection of software is customized for your needs. No clutter, no useless applications, just the tools you want. As you result you have a stable, customized and a very light weight desktop environment.

I have recently installed a couple of PCLinuxOS systems, in most cases dual-booting along side with Windows XP. Along the way I learned a few useful tricks, which I wanted to share with the public. These are nothing spectacular and most likely will not reveal anything new for the Linux enthusiasts, but I think that newbies coming from the Windows world may find these valuable.

1) Enabling Windows NTFS partition support

Open Synaptic package management, and install ntfs-config and it’s dependency ntfs-3g driver. In the system menu you will now find / System / Configuration / Hardware / NTFS Configuration Tool. Use that to enable access to your Windows NTFS partitions.

2) Mounting a software RAID Windows NTFS partition using dmraid and ntfs-3g

Most motherboards these days support RAID arrays, also known as fake RAIDs (as they are not true hardware RAIDs) or BIOS RAIDs. Usually after installing Linux, PCLinuxOS or some other distribution, you end up seeing the two (or more) physical disks of your RAID setup, instead of the merged RAID volume. Luckily there is a driver available for accessing fake RAID disks within Linux - open the package management Synaptic and install dmraid. Next step is to open the Konsole again and do the following.

su
dmraid -ay

This command activates all BIOS raid arrays of your system and outputs the unique identifiers of the RAID arrays (a bunch of letters). They should now appear under /dev/mapper. Continue on the Konsole and list the contents of the /dev/mapper folder.

ls /dev/mapper
control  pdc_begabfcgj  pdc_begabfcgj1

In my case this is a 2 disc RAID 0 configuration, where the discs have identical mirrored content. The one you want to mount in Linux is the one ending with the number 1. Make a directory for the mountpoint.

mkdir /media/my_windows_raid  (this can be whatever you desire)

Now you can mount the RAID volume manually.

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/mapper/pdc_begabfcgj1 /media/my_windows_raid

Obviously you replace the dev/mapper string with your own, and use your desired mountpoint. The PCLinuxOS however does not load dmraid on system boot or mount your RAID automatically, but there is a simple workaround to achieve that. Edit the /etc/rc.local file, which contains commands that are executed on system boot in root user mode.

kwrite /etc/rc.local

Add the following lines:

dmraid -ay
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/mapper/pdc_begabfcgj1 /media/my_windows_raid

Optinally you can just use mount -a and add the mount parameters to the /etc/fstab file. Here is what my fstab mount looks like with all the parameters.

kwrite /etc/fstab

Add the line:

/dev/mapper/pdc_begabfcgj1 /media/my_windows_raid ntfs-3g defaults,user,exec,auto,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

There is plenty of documentation about fstab and ntfs-3g on the internet, so I leave that outside the scope of this article. As usual, Google is your friend.

3) Sharing Pidgin instant messenger profile in between Windows and Linux

Pidgin is an open-source multi protocol instant messaging client. It support all major service providers, including MSN (Messenger), Google Talk, ICQ, AIM, IRC and Yahoo! (and more…). It is availble for both Linux and Windows. In dual-booting environment one can use a single Pidgin profile for both operating systems - this is very convenient as all your settings, chat logs, etc. are shared among the different operating systems. To achieve this, you only need to create a  symbolic link from the Linux Pidgin profile directory to your Windows Pidgin profile directory. First make sure you have your Windows partition mounted in PCLinuxOS. Then open command line interface (Konsole) and type the following.

ln -s /media/win_c/”Documents and Settings”/username/”Application Data”/.purple ~/.purple

In this example the Windows partition is mounted as /media/win_c. Replace that with your mount point. The username is your username in Windows. Now when you start Pidgin, you should have all your accounts, contacts and settings in place.

4) Your Youtube and other websites with flash do not work (Firefox 3)?

In Synaptic install flash-player-plugin with the suggested dependencies

5) Websites with Java applets do not work?

In Synaptic install java-1.6.0-sun-plugin with suggested dependencies

6) Enable audio/video playback of most formats

In Synaptic install mplayerplugin and smplayer including their dependencies

7) USB audio device not working?

This is most likely due to the fact that you have more than one audio device in your PC - most commonly the on-board audio chip and the external USB audio device. PCLinuxOS prioritizes the on-board audio above USB audio. I am sure that there is a more sophisticated way of doing this, but a simple workaround is to disable on-board audio in your computers BIOS settings (accessible on system boot).

8) Get Windows fonts

There’s no denying - the fonts of Windows are great, and most websites are designed for them. They also look good on your desktop. In Synaptic install webcore-fonts.

So there you go - eight tips for your PCLinuxOS 2008 MiniMe, with some of them being more or less obvious, but I think that most of the Windows refugees will need some guidance even with the basics of package management. Feel free to post additional tips and tricks using the comment feature below. And if you are not yet using PCLinuxOS then get it from www.pclinuxos.com