PCLinuxOS - Rolling on a river

The early beta releases of PCLinuxOS owed much to Mandrake/Mandriva, but Reynolds' objective was to search out the best and most friendly tools from every source, and "to provide an outlet for my crazy desire to package source code without having to deal with egos, arrogance and politics."

Reynolds first considered contributing to Mepis, a Live distribution created by Warren Woodford, "but I had no clue how to build Deb files. Coming from five years of packaging RPMs (for Linux Mandrake) and not really wanting to learn a new packaging system."

The earliest version of PCLinuxOS was "a LiveCD based on Mandrake Linux 9.2, along with all my customisations, just for fun... Since Mandrake was a trademarked name, myself and others decided to name the LiveCD after our news site and forum pclinuxonline, thus PCLinuxOS."

At first, the LiveCD didn't provide the option of a full installation until "srlinuxx from tuxmachines.org came up with a novel way to copy the LiveCD to the hard drive, and posted it on our forums."