I’ve been extremely busy during the last month supporting and starting projects for PCLinuxOS. For those of you who may not know, I am the webmaster for http://mypclinuxos.com. What I desired when creating the site was a place that the community could come to help make PCLinuxOS better. Not that it wasn’t good on its own…it does just fine. Just that I wanted the community to feel more a part of development and to have them take pride in the distro.
I’m really impressed with the way the community has responded, not only to the creation of mypclinuxos, but also to the organization of the site. I’ve tried very hard to provide any open source tool available for web based project development for everyone that I could provide in a shared host environment. Heck, I’d even configure tomcat on my home Linux box and put it out there if they needed it. Why do I do this? Why do I do this for free? How do I do this for free?
Well, let’s get into it shall we? Inside the start of MyPCLinuxOS…
I started Yet Another Linux Blog a few years back to chronicle my search for the perfect desktop distribution and to house many tips and tricks that I had in my arsenal and also that I had run across on the web. I found PCLinuxOS after my wife determined that it was the best Linux desktop available last year while participating in my Linux experiment. It completely replaced the SimplyMEPIS install I had on every computer in my home and it also replaced the disks I hand out to friends.
I laid low in the PCLinuxOS community, checking out the pulse by forum lurking. I hung out in IRC using an alias that no one could trace to TKS (the nick I used at the time) nor my current nick of devnet. I tried to really grasp what community I had got myself into. After I determined that the community was fantastic…I was ready to give back.
See, I started a fan site for SimplyMEPIS and had my efforts dashed by various sources. I had been an active member of the MEPIS community in the early days of the distro and it was amazing how fast those I considered my ‘community family’ turned on me when my opinion differed from theirs. So when I decided to support PCLinuxOS, I was VERY careful about what I was getting myself into. I couldn’t be happier with where I am at and where the distro is at today. I see the popularity for this distro going through the roof and I’m in for the ride. So it’s very nice to be a part of something like PCLinuxOS and to have gotten in on the ground level as a contributor.
One of the areas that I see PCLinuxOS hurting the most is in the internationalization arena. I truly believe that if we made PCLinuxOS available for install in as many languages as Ubuntu or OpenSuSe does, we’d be right up there with them in popularity and userbase. As it is now, PCLinuxOS is released in English only. MyPCLinuxOS has many people forming teams right now to change that. If you’d like to see PCLinuxOS in different languages both for the installer and LiveCD, head over to MyPCLinuxOS and join up with our team to help us do so. That’s it for now. I’ll have more updates about MyPCLinuxOS and what’s going on there in the future.
Wow… I found this article through Digg and was surprised to recognize you from the Mepis community. 🙂
Good luck with your new project and distro. 🙂