Condres OS 19.09 Review [KDE Plasma Edition] Supplement: Installation

Introduction

Installation of Condes OS 19.09 was simple, reliable, and straightforward as it uses the Calamares installer, suitable for most users. However, I missed two features that are present in some installers -- the visibility of volume or partition names in addition to block device designations assigned by the kernel and the ability to preconfigure additional external partitions to be mounted by fstab at mount points indicated in the installer. The second of these is only available in openSUSE's YaST installer which will create the mount point directories and include appropriate entries in /etc/fstab.

The live environment from which the installer is run itself had a couple of problems. The first was that the home partition would run low on space with an error message displayed to that effect through the Plasma notification system. The first time I saw this error, it was when I was temporarily saving installation screenshots to the live environment user's home folder before copying them to a USB thumb drive. I rebooted the system and started the installation, this time saving the screenshots to the USB thumb drive directly, but the errors occurred again. The second was that some links to resources in the welcome application and desktop shortcuts links to these resources were broken.

Fortunately, the first of the live environment issues, which could have interfered with the installation, did prevent the installation from proceeding. Screenshots of the installation process are below.

Some notable features of the live environment and installer:

• The installer includes license agreements for proprietary software that must be accepted before installation can proceed with links to view the license, although the links did not work.
• The welcome application includes a tab for displaying passwords, something that I haven't seen in other distributions. Many live environments don't require passwords even for running a command as an administrator, but some do, and users may have trouble finding it on their website. This feature would be helpful for such distributions.
• The installed OS has A LOT of software preinstalled including three web browsers. Although I didn't explore the available software in the live environment, it is probably safe to assume that the live environment also includes these as well.

Installation Steps

Click on any of the thumbnails below to see a slideshow of the screenshots.

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Conclusion

The Condres OS installation is simple and straightforward. Despite a few minor issues and one warning from the live environment desktop environment, the installation process was completed quickly resulting in a properly working installed system.