A night with Pardus

or how I lost my faith

Pardus is a Turkish Linux distribution developed by TUBITAK - UEKAE. You can have more information on their website. There are several good reviews about Pardus, especially their latest product, 2007.3 Lynx Lynx. After the experience I had last night, which this my 2 cents review is about, I did some research and I have come to understand that this release is a 3rd update to the stable version 2007. I don't know if it means 2007.3 is also stable or if it's beta. As a matter of fact I wouldn't care if it was beta as 2007.3 failed big time even for a beta release.

First, I went to their website to download the ISO file which turned out to be downloadable only from their own FTP site. There is no mirror location. If you want to get it you have to download it from Pardus FTP site which takes a lot of time due to Turkey's low outbound bandwidth. Lack of mirror locations, especially for files that are huge in size like Pardus, is something you don't expect from this type of a project. Nevertheless, it's fine, as eventually you will have the ISO file on your disk ready to be burned.

After a successful burning process, which by the way took my 3 CDs due to God-knows-whats-going-on, I started the installation process. I put the Pardus CD in, changed the booting priority in the BIOS and kicked off. A nice grub menu came up with several language options, Turkish being the default, which is nice as I myself is Turkish. I selected English and then a second menu with installation options appeared on the screen. Selected the default one and enjoyed the initialization screen, which is just an image with a Pardus logo. Actually I was hoping to see messages or at least some form of a progress bar which indicates which hardware I have and how they are initialized. This, I think, is one of many items that distinguishes Linux from Windows. You want to know what is going on back there and Linux provides you this information. Or you want to know because Linux provides it. I don't know which comes first but in the end it's one of the reasons we love Linux. That is why most people just watch the screen scroll after they enter the command "./configure" to install a software. You already know what your system has or sometimes you are suprised because configure says you have some library which you thought you didn't. It's always fun to watch that screen scroll or watch a progress bar. Pardus didn't let me have that joy, it just displayed an image but it was fine, I think.

Then I accepted the License and got ready for the partitioner. I have 2 SATA and 1 IDE disk. First SATA disk is about 80GB and has Windows XP on it. Second SATA disk is 300GB and it has data only but it has everything. Pictures, videos, music, programs I wrote in the last 10 years, documents and softwares I downloaded, simply everything. And it has 7 partitions. Linux, NTFS and HFS+. IDE disk is 80GB and it's empty, doing nothing more than just sitting there in the case. My plan is to install Pardus on one of the partitions in the second SATA disk.

First attempt, partitioner didn't recognize the partitions in this disk. See below.

But when I tried fdisk in the console, I saw that fdisk had no problems with recognizing the partitions.

I decided that Pardus partitioner didn't work accordingly because of the existing HFS+ partitions, those having the "af" Ids. So I posted a bug report on Pardus bugzilla website. Anyway, I restarted the computer, booted into Ubuntu Linux, removed 7th and 6th partitions, changed Id of 1st partition to 83, which is Linux, and started the Pardus installer again. Same thing happened. Pardus partitioner displayed the SATA disk with no partitions, and the disk is still empty. So I have to install it on to the IDE disk. I was planning to use it for another purpose but anyway. I could format the IDE disk after I'm finished with testing Pardus so I didn't care much about it.

I removed the Partition 1 of Maxtor IDE disk, created Linux and swap partitions. Next screen is about installing bootloader. I chosed not go install any because I already have one. Final screen is format confirmation window. But it is just a dialog window with Ok and Cancel options. There is no confirmation, such as, this disk will be formatted, these partitions will be created, I'll do this, I'll do that. You don't know what you are confirming here. I didn't know what I was confirming but I was under the impression that it was going to work on the IDE disk. Then it started formatting upon my confirmation. I have that "Please wait" note on the screen. I don't know how it goes as there is no progress bar. I don't know which disk it's formatting but like I said, I didn't expect anything wrong. At least not this big of a wrong thing to do.

Once the format finished, the installation screen appeared. I have some message on the right hand side of the screen, some images in the middle, and a progress bar at the bottom. It took about 5 minutes for the installation to do nothing and throw an error message which says the device is read only. Oh well.

Long story short, I booted back into Windows only to see that the 2nd SATA disk is not accessible any more. It turned out that Pardus formatted IDE disk, created the partitions that I asked for AND removed the TOC of second SATA disk. I was able clean up the mess and recover the TOC and the partitions and almost all my data. Yay!

It took me an adventerous night with Pardus to realize how bad it is designed and programmed. From the moment I booted my computer using the Pardus CD to the moment where I got that error message during the installation, I simply had no idea which hardware it recognized, how they were initiliazed, which disks were being worked on, which partitions were created, removed and formatted, how was the installation going, what Pardus was doing to my system. This is a poor design. There has to be information on the screen regarding all the actions I listed above. Prior to installation and formatting the disk, there has to be a confirmation screen which lists the actions that will be taken. And, no matter what, my 2nd SATA disk which has got nothing to do with the installation shouldn't have been modified. Pardus had no logical reason to touch it but yet it played with its partition table. This is poor programming.

I had some good feelings about Pardus. I was planning to test it and then if I saw a potential I would go ahead and contribute to the project. Even though I was able to recover my data, I have no more excitement about Pardus but a frustration.

I know this also means there are some important and crucial items that needs to be fixed and if people like me don't help they won't get resolved. Maybe someday I will build up a new excitement and go for another installation. But, not soon.