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Review of Yoper Linux v2.1
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Sep 13, 2004 05:02 PM
from the what-you-want-it-to-be dept.
from the what-you-want-it-to-be dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "An interesting review of Yoper Linux has just been posted posted at linuxforums.org. Yoper Linux really does look like it could be the first serious competition Gentoo has had in a long time."
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Competion for what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Competion for what? (Score:5, Funny)
Well I admit that freely, but how does that answer my question?
Parent
Re:Competion for what? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Yoper can run as fast as Gentoo, with a fraction of the setup time, and be just as stable, Yoper will be indeed be the Windows-replacer I suggest for our future Installfests on campus. We've been installing Mandrake or Fedora Core 2 and were toying with the idea of getting a few dozen lab computers setup with distcc to make Gentoo installs feasible. Yoper would definitely save us the effort.
I'll still want to see benchmarks for game performance though. This could be my Doom 3 Linux distro of choice as well.
On a different track of thought, perhaps someone in the Gentoo camp will work on making some of Yoper's features available in one of the install stages. It's won't be blatant rip-off, it'll be the bazaar in action.
Parent
Re:Competion for what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Configurability, the easy generation of ebuilds (often just copying the ebuild text file to a new version name suffices), not to mention simplicity of tweaking a tar.gz myself or adding a patch file - everything I got out of building myself, but with package management system to keep track of what gets installed.
Then of course there's getting me out of binary dependancy hell for which I'm quite grateful, and there's always revdep-rebuild if some interaction gets lost (due usually to my having done a restricted update, but...).
As for the features, I agree.
Adding the patches to Gentoo will be trivial.
And Gentoo has had things like prelinking for ages - not to mention parallel startup and fancy gcc options.
But I've never seen the linux distro game as that competitive, looks like this one will serve a different market, offering a fully integrated, if less flexible, distro tweaked for speed.
Each distro has its uses. I use Knoppix and Fedora at times, even if every machine at home runs Gentoo.
Parent
Re:Competion for what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Gentoo does not IMHO require you to be well versed in the ways and workings of linux; if you can read one of the many languages in which the handbook is written, then I would say you merely require to have sufficient computer literacy to understand the consequences of your actions and the ability to type.
Gentoo makes you work hard to install, as it doesnt abstract you from what you are doing with excessive automation and pretty gui widgets, but it gives clear instructions and reasoning to every step. I find most linux newbies (who are already computer literate, not mousewagglers, but not power users) actually do better for going through a gentoo install and have a fairly good understanding of what they have done at the end.
Course, Im a gentoo supporter, so Im bound to like it.
Gentoo isn't aunt tillies OS by any stretch, but for someone who wants to know what they have done and learn about what they are doing, it is bloody hard to beat.
err!
jak.
Parent
Not as good (Score:4, Funny)
Sir, (Score:4, Insightful)
(*) Forget the speed difference some people try to claim, it's a red herring -- like you said, nobody really notices the difference either way.
Parent
Oooo! Talk about stuff no one cares about (Score:5, Funny)
In other obscure news about competition that no one cares about, Bob's Fatburger is launching a new ham & swiss sandwich that may prove to be stiff competition against Arby's in the war of the cold cut sandwich arena.
if their webserver is any indication.. then no.. (Score:3, Funny)
but then, the article is slashdotted..
Re:if their webserver is any indication.. then no. (Score:3, Interesting)
btw, yes, this is being typed from yoper right now, been using it for a few days, its awesome. Yoper for desktops, debian for servers, thats my story and i'm stickin' to it.
different purpose (Score:5, Interesting)
I would not jump to the conclusion that it's competition for Gentoo just because it's also fast.
Re:different purpose (Score:5, Interesting)
This is very true, and I'd like to clarify the reasons. The main one IMHO is that a lot of software options are compile-time. For example I don't use Gnome or KDE, thus I don't want any of the relevant dependencies/bindings compiled into the software I use. Many desktop oriented distros choose nearly every possible binding like this, 'just in case' it is needed. Even when the relevant code is not really used, bigger code is always slower.
The fact that Yoper is compiled for i686 should not make much difference; there are tons of compiler options that go beyond simple i686 capabilities. In fact many compile-time optimizations are due to compiler-independent options as I mentioned above.
It seems Yoper is fast because of prelinking. Gentoo with prelinking should be even faster. But again Gentoo's main point is not that it's fast; it's the ability to control almost every detail of software installation, while avoiding the complications from manual ./configure; make; make install.
Parent
Link to yoper (Score:5, Informative)
Does anyone else think it's strange that a story about yoper has no link to their home page, but does have a link to gentoo?
Re:Link to yoper (Score:3, Informative)
Gentoo Competition? (Score:3, Funny)
For what? "The worst installer of all time", or "The most time consuming distro ever".
Re:Gentoo Competition? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say I want to evaluate several large programs.
I can emerge/use ports for all of them, or I can pkg_add -r and play with them now. All the builds in the package repository are well-tested and I can be sure if the program is going to work at all, it's going to work with pkg_add installation.
I can't recall a time where I've been prompted for interaction with pkg_add, but I'm sure it's possible.
OTOH, with a minimal freebsd install I can configure the machine with a base system already installed and pre-configured while I'm adding any other software.
Another good example:
Shit has hit the fan/boss is hanging over my neck/whatever. I need to install program X to get my work done, money is being lost, customers are frustrated, whatever.
Do I want my program 2 hours from now? No. I want it yesterday. pkg_add/apt/yast/any other binary package installer that resolves dependencies gives me that power, and it's guaranteed to work.
And like I said, twiddling every bit to get your whopping 5% performance increase or less really means jack squat when you're doing a server build. Heck, for all the time your boss spent paying you to tweak gentoo to get that performance boost, he could have spent a 1/4 of that on more ram, faster drives/processor, whatever. Besides, real performance comes from properly architecting your farm, if you're relying on that 5% boost to serve more pages/process more mail/whatever, you're going to be surprised when it really hits the fan.
A binary/source based distro (I know of no package format these days that is binary-only, unless slackware still uses pkgtool and tar.gz packages) has more benefits than just quick installation, as well.
Need to roll out a custom version of package X? Compile once/package/distribute.
So tell me again how this causes YOU anymore work? It doesn't it simply takes advantage of your (probably) mostly idle system, and does a little more than copying files from a CD/ftp mirror to your hard disk.
I apologize for my laughter.
You do know that compiles take processor time, right? Generally they peg the processor for a good deal of time and in many cases, use a good deal of memory. Hope you're not doing anything important when that's going on.
Really though, if gentoo is good for you, great. Enjoy playing with use flags with experimental compilers on your overpriced workstation while I get real work done.
Parent
competition (Score:5, Funny)
uhhhh have you heard of Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, Debian, Turbo, etc...? First real competition...phht! Gimme a break.
Beating Gentoo? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think Gentoo is a great desktop distribution for someone who has a lot of time on their hands and is capable of doing things manually. However, I wouldn't recommend Gentoo for use on an important sever, nor would I recommend Gentoo to use for someone who doesn't have a lot of time or who is incapable of doing some complex things by hand.
I think Gentoo right now is one of the better hobby/tweaking distributions, but I really don't think that's the usershare Yoper is going after.
.torrent for latest version (Score:5, Informative)
Help save their gracious FTP mirrors.
Office Speed (Score:3, Insightful)
Yoper's speed is evident mostly in everyday functions, such a opening a OpenOffice document. I have always found OpenOffice.org to open painfully slowly, but the start time in Yoper was impressive. In most systems it can take 15-20 seconds to start the massive OpenOffice, Yoper manages this in about 10 (on my machine, these are not official numbers from OpenOffice, just mine).
His machine is a P4/1.8ghz/512mb box. Is it really noteworthy when an office suite opens in <sarcasm>about 10 seconds</sarcasm%gt; on a machine of that class? Really? Wow. That's
Other than that, the experience looked promising. Does anyone know if it works as well with apt as Debian does? Or as poorly?
Re:Office Speed (Score:4, Informative)
MS Word - 10 sec
OO Writer - 12 sec
Sad? Yes. But specific to OO.org? No.
Parent
not gpl compliant (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:not gpl compliant (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
I like it (Score:3, Insightful)
Not too intimidating... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah. If you're intimidated by a Bash prompt, you're gonna LOVE vim.
Ok, Lemme just type--
BEEP!
What the...
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
Ah! I just want to edit the--
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!!!
AHHHHHHHHH!!!!
Remembering the Yoper Jerk (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Remembering the Yoper Jerk (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Remembering the Yoper Jerk (Score:3, Interesting)
Yoper suspicious (Score:4, Interesting)
Since the site is slashdotted, it's hard to see if anything has changed in a year.
Re:Yoper suspicious (Score:5, Interesting)
1. It seemed to launch with huge fanfare and hype, and there was a bit of a backlash when it turned out to be just another "generic distro plus knoppix hardware detection" deal.
2. Source wasn't originally available, so it was infringing on the GPL.
3. They were very reticent about acknowledging the work they'd built on, and responded quite violently to any criticism.
I had a poke about their website recently, the things that now make me uneasy are:
1. Package availability -- according to this declaration [yoper.com], you can only install Yoper-packaged RPMs ("The ones for other distros have to probably be installed with rpm -Uvh --force --nodeps and might break apt.").
2. Lack of decent documentation -- lots of important information seems to be squirreled away in the forums.
3. Amateurish website ("Yoper is one of the most standardised Linuxes that you will find and hardware performancetries to be better better than that of any commercial OS." -- http://www.yoper.com/about.html )
3. Responses to criticism still seem pretty belligerent, not to mention self-contradictory. A forum post from March 2003 says:
We are not a one man distro. Currently we have hundreds of users and several people on the development team and also a new commercial team that does the commercial side here in NZ. ( original post [yoper.com] )
Then, in October 2003:
Some of you compile quite a few packages, which is great!!!! The base Yoper is done by ONE person and this person (ME) has a distro which is now fairly well known even though it is only version 1. Just think of this. Yoper is a one man distro and so many have an opinion on it. ( original post [yoper.com] )
So, is it a one-man distro or not?
Still, it seems they're no longer trying to flog it for 99 USD, which makes me think a little more kindly of it
Parent
Re:Yoper suspicious (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember it somewhat differently; unfortunately the posts were deleted by the admin. This is why I think that responding to criticism is preferable to deleting it: there's no way to determine in hindsight whether the criticism was valid.
Would you try installing debs on a SUSE system and expect it to always work?
The difference is that I can expect to find most of the software I want as a SuSE-compatible RPM. Yoper is a far less popular distro, so I'm concerned that not much software is available unless you resort to non-Yoper RPMs, which might break the system.
Give the little guy a chance!
Is he a little guy or not? One minute it's a professional-grade distro with x thousand downloads, a large user base, a substantial development team and a "commercial team". As soon as any criticism arises, it's "well, what do you expect from a one-man distro?". You can't have it both ways.
Andreas is the guy behind the distro, english was not his first language (cut the site some slack) and he's a programmer, not a Public Relations Rep
But he claims to have "hundreds of users and several people on the development team and also a new commercial team that does the commercial side here in NZ". Presumably one of these hundreds of minions wouldn't mind proofreading the website. Shouldn't crafting a decent website be the job of the Yoper commercial team?
I have nothing against Yoper or Andreas. I think it's great that free software is good enough that one person can put together a working distro. And I don't believe that a one-man distro has to be flakey -- look at Knoppix, or Mepis. But most of the good stuff I've heard about Knoppix and Mepis is from independent sources; most of the good stuff I've heard about Yoper is from Yoper's website, which states that criticism will be deleted from its forums. Evenhanded evaluation is thus hard to come by.
Parent
I just have to say (Score:5, Interesting)
Yoper really is the next best thing to Gentoo for me, as far as Linux goes.
It really is a slick system, and very deserving of the accolades it's starting to receive. To me, it's the distribution to judge others by (With the obvious exception of Gentoo, and other source-based distros).
If they can continue the momentum and build their software catalog (meaning compiled, optimized packages for Yoper), I can see Yoper easily winning the Desktop Linux race.
Oh, and for the record, if you've heard of any problems with their support, or OSS issues, it appears that this is very much a thing of the past. I was there for the beta testing, and I was one of the those who didn't like what happened after the release of v 1.0, and I can safely say that it appears that Yopers seen the light, and has remedied any problems they may have had. The Yoper community is also very good.
Check it out! You know you've installed dozens of Linux distributions already... What's one more going to hurt? It could change your usage of Linux.
yap yap (Score:3, Informative)
so many people here are saying this is NOT that great but have not tried it. so here
http://iso.linuxquestions.org/download/http/www.t
a nice torrent for you to play with
Does this person know how to use Gentoo? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure what this person is talking about here. Is he talking about KDE again? Well, I use fluxbox and it takes under 2 seconds to get into my X system after typing "xinit". (most of which goes to driving my nVidia card)
I run Gentoo and I don't see where the 'competition' lies, exactly.. I'm sure you can make Gentoo's KDE as 'fast' as Yope's since it can do all those things Yope does with gcc, when you emerge the KDE package. I feel this article misinformed some people really, this distro looks pretty weak in my opinion.
Re:Too many Distros (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Too many Distros (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, we do need them.
The thing you're missing is (as Agent Smith would say) purpose. Many of these distros exist purely because they meet a specific purpose. For example, there are distros used for desktop computers, distros for firewalls, distros for embedded devices, distros for clustering, distros for servers, etc.
Put another way: choice is good!
Now, had you said "we don't need 100's of desktop distros" I might have agreed.
Parent
Re:Too many Distros (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Too many Distros (Score:3)
Re:Too many Distros (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, you can take a Debian box and transform it easily into a a firewall/proxy. But if you want some specific functionality, such as single button poweron/poweroff for a headless firewall b
Re:Too many Distros (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:eh? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:That's great (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's great (Score:5, Insightful)
We're still getting there. Right now, linux DOES compete with windows, in the 'good with computers' or better class of folks. 5 years ago you had to be much more advanced. Over time, the OS is getting better, but folks (especially linux savvy folks such as yourself) don't help things any by standing around and whining that it's not perfect RIGHT NOW.
Parent
Re:That's great (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:That's great (Score:4, Funny)
Ahhh, you must have followed the wrong directions. Jack [sourceforge.net] is a low-latency audio server, designed for professional audio work. Maybe you should consider KPlayer [sourceforge.net], the wonderful KDE frontend to mplayer [mplayerhq.hu]?
Parent
Re:Is is LSB 2.0 compliant? (Score:3, Interesting)
So...no.
Re:Is is LSB 2.0 compliant? (Score:3, Informative)
s/apt/deb/ would make your statement look intelligent - assuming it's true, since apt _has_ been ported for RPM.
-Erwos
Re:Full Text (Score:3, Interesting)
All packages compiled specifically for the i686 against the latest and greatest of the gcc
All the binaries were 'stripped' (ie. all the debug symbols and other nonessential data are removed.) in order to create an even faster base system.
Prelinking
So I wonder - I've done all that on my gentoo-box .. then why should yoper be noticeably faster?
Re:Full Text (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How Gentoo won the community (Score:5, Informative)
Check out Mandrake 9.1 vs Gentoo 1.4 [gentoo.org]. IMO there's a big speed avantage over some of distros simply because it's quite easy to tune and tweak a Gentoo install not to load drivers or programs it doesn't need. Comparing Suse 9.1 Pro to Gentoo (I backed up my Gentoo box, wiped the drive, installed, tested and by the end of the day had Gentoo back on), Gentoo won the speed contest hands down.
The only thing they got going for them is the multiple architecture support.
I think Portage is pretty cool. It's the only distro that I've use that could install mplayer correctly the first time (emerge mplayer). Gentoo is hardly perfect but it is a very stable distro with unique features. I've been using it for over a year now and have yet to find anything better for my purposes and in my opinion.
No GNU/Linux distro is the best for everyone. Having choices is a good thing. Gentoo isn't for everyone but is pretty damn good.
Parent