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Once upon a time, there was BeOS. It was a wonderful operating system (OS), built by Be Inc. in 1991. Back then it has all the hallmarks of a revolutionary OS, and while its punch may have weakened over the years, it still has the potential to be a great platform. It was originally optimized for digital media work, it squeezed the juice out of multiprocessor systems, used a nice 64-bit journaling file system by the name of BFS and used an API written in C++ (because of its ease of programming). Although BeOS is not a Unix derivative, it used the bash shell and was POSIX compatible. Unfortunately, BeOS was not viable from a commercial point of view, and the company stopped its development. Be Inc. was acquired by Palm Inc., and now BeOS fans are trying to bring it back to life once more. Projects such as Haiku for example, are trying to build a new BeOS, from scratch. Others, such as PC/OS are using Linux distributions as their basis.

So what is PC/OS all about? It’s a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu (which seems to be the epitome of all ‘user friendly’ distros lately), and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it mostly derives from Xubuntu given that it uses XFCE as the main desktop environment. PC/OS aims to provide a stable, easy to use, out of the box operating system. To say that it’s fool proof would be exaggerating given the various installation problems I encountered, particularly with sound and video cards, but I’ll leave that aside for now and move onto the mainstay of this review.

Live CD & Installation

First things first: I downloaded and burned the ISO image of the Client edition onto CD. It also serves as a LiveCD, so I was able to check things out before the installation. I can confirm that it works like a charm, and you can get a taste of the full operating system right from the CD. The basic “pack” includes almost everything a casual user might need for everyday use. Of course, you have the apps provided with Xfce, such as Mousepad or Thunar, the file manager etc. But I suspect many readers will probably expect a bit more than that, right? Thankfully, the developer took those extra needs into account and put together a package that everyone from newbies to programmers should be happy with.

After sampling the LiveCD, I decided to do a full install of PC/OS. I set it up and it booted with some icons and symlinks that should not have been there. For example the “Install” shortcut was still in the menu and on the desktop. Another bad guy who still wanted to stick with the distro even after it was on my hard drive, was Remastersys, a tool that lets you “build” your own Linux distribution. It’s no walk in the park, but it lets you create a customized version of Ubuntu – and all its flavors – and backup your entire system on a installable LiveCD/DVD.

Feature Set

What you get with PC/OS (and you might not get with other distributions):

Two categories that are not included in other distributions (at least in those I’ve tested):

- Mobile (containing links to Gmail, Live Mail, Google Maps, Live Maps, Wikipedia and Box.net)

- Extra Applications, with Evince for viewing pdf documents, GdMap (a utility for managing your disks and partitions), Lacie Lightscribe (for printing on CDs if you have a CD/DVD writer that is Lightscribe capable), Zen map (a powerful n map front-end for those of test the security of their systems).

In Accessories you will find a small utility, called ‘catfish’, which works as a local “search engine”, so to speak. DiskSearch is another application for searching, but this time, you can find things only on removable media. Sysinfo displays a lot of useful information about your system.

There’s a Development category containing Gambas2, MonoDevelop, OpenLDev (a nice IDE that resembles Geany, from my point of view), and the Glade Interface Designer. I found Kompozer, a KDE application for building websites, in Network, but it should have been in Development, given that you use it to develop web sites, right?

In Graphics you will find the ever-faithful GIMP, Ristretto – an image viewer, GQView and Pencil, a very simple and very useful tool for creating drawings and graphics.

Multimedia will give you (almost) everything you might want for your multimedia needs. I found it interesting that gtkrecordmydesktop has been included, so you can make screencasts, if you like. Totem, Rhythmbox, and Serpentine will let you watch movies, listen to music and rip audio CDs, respectively.

Firefox, gFTP, QtTube (for saving the Youtube videos you love) and Transmission (one of the most popular BitTorrent clients for Linux) are included in the Network category. Here you will also find Lynx, the text-mode web browser and various other tools. Unfortunately, there’s no feed reader, which is a VIT (Very Important Tool) for news addicts. If you want to stay in touch with your friends and family, you have Pidgin, a very neat and popular instant messenger.

Office is made up of the OpenOffice suite, OSMO – a small personal organizer, HomeBank, a personal accounting utility, Gnumeric Spreadsheet, an application that resembles Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet.

In Others you will find Notepad (the small Windows text editor), which is run through WINE and WINE’s ReadMe and FAQ.

In System you will find all the general system administration tools, just like in all Ubuntu flavors. In the last menu, Wine, there’s an option to browse the virtual C:\ drive, created by Wine and also configure or uninstall Wine.

Desktop Layout

The way applets are added to the upper and lower panels is very interesting. The upper panel is very short and contains only the menu, a clipboard utility, Notes (for note-taking, of course), the clock and calendar and an applet that gives you access to system help. The lower one sports the taskbar, a “show desktop” applet, another applet for the file manager and a few useful ones, to Firefox, System Monitor, Terminal and to Trash.

Overall Impressions

When you need something that doesn’t take up too many resources, but can also let you do advanced tasks like software development for example, then PC/OS is for you. Considering that it comes with a full set of applications, ranging from text editors to fully-fledged IDEs and multimedia applications, it has the potential to attract a wide array of users.

PC/OS is very lightweight, so you can install it even on older computers, maybe even on a PII with 64 MB of RAM given that it’s based on Xubuntu. It’s also very stable, and it seems that most of the development and build tools are included, so you can build applications from source. In case the configure script reports something missing, you can easily install that library or application with ’sudo aptitude install library_name’. PC/OS makes use of the Ubuntu repositories so you can take advantage of the updates provided by the Ubuntu community if you want to.

On the downside, I did encounter problems with my media cards. I wasn’t able to use the restricted drivers for my video card in the usual way. Fortunately I was able to download Envy, a good tool that does all the system configuration for you, and when it’s complete you get better resolutions and desktop effects. Before setting up Envy, I could only use a resolution of 1024×768, this was frustrating when using multiple applications at the same time. My thanks go to Roberto Donhert, the developer from PC/OS, who guided me to Envy. Also, Envy will be included in future versions of PC/OS, so it might fix your video problems too.

The 2.3.1 version of OpenOffice.org that comes by default with PC/OS 7.10 also has a few problems, like poorly rendered menu fonts for example, but this can be fixed by using Roberto’s solution, which consists of downloading OpenOffice.org 2.4 from PC/OS’s site. The installation is very simple and you only have to run the two scripts provided with the package.

All in all using PC/OS has been a positve experience, and it has now become my new OS of choice. It’s also good to see the BeOS family tree growing again. My thanks to Roberto Donhert for his help in putting this review together and all that’s left for me to say is go and explore PC/OS now!