I’m setting up a PC for my future father-in-law right now. I’m avoiding installing Windows as I hate dealing with it. I’m happy to help him to get to grips with using the machine and doing whatever he wants with it, but not so happy with having to provide Windows support (after all, I don’t use Windows, so I can hardly call myself an expert at it).

So, I needed a Linux distro that’s clean and simple that he should be able to just get on with. My friend Tony recommended PCLinuxOS as a suitable distro, so I thought I’d give it a spin. It boots as a live CD incredibly easily, auto-detecting everything. Once at a KDE desktop, it’s a usable system already. If you want to actually install to the HDD, just double-click the install icon on the desktop (yes, it has KDE set to require double-click for icons; no doubt useful to save confusing people moving over from Windows, but left me wondering why the hell it wasn’t doing anything). The process is simple, and the ability to sit here with a working system and a copy of Firefox to keep me amused whilst the installation progresses is actually quite cute :)

The installation was absolutely trivial, and detected some old pre-existing Windows partitions (once upon a time this machine was used for gaming, so had a Win98 install just for that), and offered to add them to the grub boot menu.

Ah, and in fact, the installation is finished already before I’ve finished writing a post about it! Time to reboot and see what it’s like.