While PCLinuxOS development is stale and going on behind curtains where no one from the development team is willing to answer any question either at forum , to emails and nor at IRC #pclinuxos help , there is another project lead by Erkan Kaplan a Germany based Turkish who is working tirelessly on Lapis Linux .Lapis Linux is not just yet another community remastered copy of PCLinuxOS but a total pure work started from scratch. They started their project basing it on Tinyme 2008 but building it from zero ,making and baking every brick themselves. So it is not reinventing wheel again but getting an idea from an existing project but putting all the efforts with their own hard work.
Lapis Linux is purely Turkish Language distribution and GNOME is the main desktop environment. Till version 1.0.1 released on 11/08/2008 it was almost impossible to use it in English but everything was in Turkish and it was impossible to boot it and proceed. But since it is under extremely active development they have moved to 1.0.2 Yavuz (RC4) released on 03/11/2008. This time it has locale English enabled by default and after little tweaking around one can easily set English as default language as I did posting this post from Lapis desktop.
Lapis Linux is GNOME oriented distribution but from current version onward they are offering KDE 3 ,KDE 4 & XFCE along to be downloaded and installed . Lapis Linux version 1.0.2 Yavuz (RC4) is sporting Linux 2.6.26.7.lapis1 kernel & GNOME 2.24. All the art work and graphics are from the Lapis Linux team and very pleasant looking.Compiz support is also present.The PCLinuxOS control center and Synaptic are also present for easy access.
At current development phase many packages are not properly working but as Serkan one of the developer said " We are moving forward to lzma supported RPM packages with this version.So, there are lots of packages which should be packaged again. As we see those packages, we'll fix them. And yes there will be English support with this version." it is clear that the development is going on progressively and things will settle down sooner.
There is an active forum for Lapis Linux but since everybody speaks Turkish there so it might not of much help to English speaking people but those interested to participate and report issue can reach the development team on Lapislivecd mailing list & Lapis Linux .
The current development version of Lapis Linux 1.0.2 RC4 can be downloaded from Lapis Linux main website for testing purpose.The development team can also be reached at IRC Freenode #turklug & #lapislinux but many of them don`t speak English so that might not of much help.
Lapis Linux is indeed a great news for those who want to use PCLinuxOS and are not happy with their development pace. Lapis Linux is a good alternate and a pure work .
I urge all to give it a try, they might be disappointed currently if it did not work but will not be once it comes up with another stable release which does not look too far with their fast development work going on tirelessly.
