PCLinuxOS Zen Mini For Linux

PCLinuxOS Zen Mini is an open source and completely free distribution of Linux derived from the GNOME edition of PCLinuxOS and designed to be as minimal as possible.

One of the great things about this distribution is that it comes as a Live CD ISO image of approximately 300MB in size. It is dual-arch and runs on computers supporting the 32-bit or 64-bit architectures.

We have to admit that we didn’t expect to see a comprehensive Live CD boot menu on this PCLinuxOS edition, but it will allow you to start the live system with the default kernel, without the boot splash, in safe graphics mode using the VESA driver, in safe boot mode.

You will be able to start the live system by copying the contents of the ISO image to RAM, drop to a shell prompt, check the bootable medium for defects, change the language or pass extra parameters to the kernel.

Before you can use the live environment, you must choose a keyboard layout. Use the credentials displayed on the login screen to log into the graphical session, which is built around the GNOME Classic desktop environment and uses a single panel layout.

Being designed from the ground up to be as minimal as possible, the PCLinuxOS Zen Mini operating system comes with only a few graphical apps, such as the Mozilla Firefox web browser, BleachBit system cleaner, Gedit text editor, Baobab disk usage analyzer and File-Roller archive manager.

Synaptic Package Manager is also included if you want to install additional software packages. However, keep in mind that the distribution is no longer under active development and has been archived for historical purposes only.