Pardus:Contents
Contents |
What It Is
Pardus is a GNU/Linux distribution developed in Turkey, as a product of the Pardus Project. It was named after the Anatolian Leopard.
Pardus is an easy-to-install and use operating system, with many enhancements to desktop usability, compatibility and security. Through the versions from Pardus 1.0 to Pardus 2008 (current version), users can connect to Internet, read e-mails, securely communicate with others and exploit the computer's multimedia capabilities by listening to music and watching movies.
Ladislav Bodnar, the creator of DistroWatch, wrote in his round-up of Linux in 2006 that Pardus is one of the distros he was most impressed by this year "...thanks to unique package management ideas, innovative start-up sequence and general desktop polish..."[1]
Pardus is open source and freely distributed as a GPL (General Public License) product. It can be installed in Turkish, English, Spanish, German, Dutch, Swedish or Brazilian Portuguese.
Background
Pardus was started and is developed by TÜBİTAK - UEKAE. This project aims to develop a GNU/Linux, plans on answering the expectations and basic desktop requirements of people who are computer-literate by using the excellent means of a Linux distribution, and code or architecture with building tools that will make it easy to use and set up operation. The first version, Pardus 1.0, was released on December, 27, 2005.
Releases And Packages
The Pardus Live CD was the first product of the Pardus Project. The latest stable version (Pardus 2007.1 Felis chaus) of the Live CD includes the Linux 2.6.18 kernel, office tools (word processor, spreadsheet editor, presentation tool, etc.), Internet tools (browser, e-mail, instant messaging, relay chat etc. clients), multimedia and graphics tools (video player, music player, etc.), games and lots of other applications. COMAR is the configuration manager developed inhouse.
Goals
The goals of project are to develop a widely-used distribution, form an organization that will continue this distribution and contribute to the original technology by creating an ecosystem using this distribution and open source software around it.
Potential Users Of Pardus
Pardus is designed to fulfill the requirements of the following types of users and organizations.
- End users with basic desktop knowledge: Pardus includes many desktop applications for daily use, including mail reader, peer-to-peer download software, chat applications, internet browser, CD/DVD burner etc, as well as complex, niche applications like Blender (3D editor), GIMP (graphics software) and Scribus (desktop publishing).
- Developers: Pardus comes ready with required software (languages, libraries and development environments) in order to develop applications.
- Organizations in need of a server: Pardus repositories contain many servers like Apache, MySQL, OpenLDAP, DNS, etc.
PiSi Package Management
PiSi (Packages Installed Successfully as Intended, is the package management system of Pardus. It is the tool that installs, upgrades and removes the software packages successfully, as intended. PiSi stores and handles the dependencies for the other packages, libraries and COMAR tasks.
Some features of PiSi are the following:
- Uses LZMA
- Implemented in Python
- Efficient and small
- Package sources are written in XML and Python
- Fast database access implemented with Berkeley DB
- Integrates low-level and high-level package operations (dependency resolution)
- Framework approach to build applications and tools upon
- Comprehensive CLI and a user-friendly Qt GUI (distributed separately)
- Extremely simple and fast package construction
Hardware Requirements
For Pardus 2007, the hardware requirements are;
- At least 1200 MHz of CPU (Intel or AMD)
- 256 MB RAM (512 MB recommended)
- CD-ROM (4x or better)
- 4 GB of hard disk space
The new stable version, Pardus 2008, has more or less the same hardware requirements.
External Links
All external links about Pardus can be found at Pardus links page
