Interview With Lead Yoper Linux Developer

Bongoots writes "Andy Kissner from Linuxforums.org has just posted this: 'In the past few weeks, there has been a lot of hype and controversy surrounding Yoper, ranging from insults to ruthless Gentoo comparisons. I recently sat down with Andreas Girardet, who is a key developer for Yoper, to dispell all the rumors and discuss the direction in which the Yoper project is headed.' Click here to read the rest of the interview."

Re:Oh well

[GreyPoopon]

I was excited about this for my old 350mhz celeron laptop.

Were the old 350Mhz celerons considered i686 or only i586? I can't remember, but I think they were all i686. But in the unlikely event they were i586-based, that is why it crashed and burned for you. Too bad. I was hoping to get some impression of how it would run on my old 200 MHz Pentium Pro. Anybody else try on a slower machine like that?

I've been using it since v2

[marcushnk]

and it is quite nice.. and shows some great promise.. the only thing it lacks is the number of contributers.. comon people.. get in while its hot.. add more brains to this project and make it what it should be.

Re:Thought Police.

[zaxios]

Watch out. IBM might own your thoughts. Make sure you don't think about Yoper at work.

Just to be safe, don't think at work at all. If you didn't catch the parent's comment, it was a reference to this travesty [slashdot.org]. In this case, offtopic + insightful = funny.

Re:Oh well

[sparcnut]

Were the old 350Mhz celerons considered i686 or only i586? I can't remember, but I think they were all i686. But in the unlikely event they were i586-based, that is why it crashed and burned for you. Too bad. I was hoping to get some impression of how it would run on my old 200 MHz Pentium Pro. Anybody else try on a slower machine like that?

Celerons are all i686 class as are Pentium Pros and Pentium IIs. Pentiums and Pentium-MMXs are i586.

I had Slackware 9.0 running on a P2-233 with 64M RAM a couple years ago and it was reasonably fast, even running Mozilla 1.4. Expect a PPro-200 to be the same or slightly better because the PPro's L2 cache is clocked twice as fast as on the P2. Slack 9.0 is mostly optimized from i386 to i586 depending on the packages, so expect Yoper to be _much_ faster.

I'd say it would be manageable for email, web browsing, and that kind of thing but not much more. It'd make a real nice X terminal if you have some bigger boxes on a 100mbit network.

Re:Thought Police.

[lakeland]

No. US contract law is very different to contract law in other countries. Outside the land of the free we have these things called 'inalienable rights', and no contract may interfere with them. For instance, no contract can say 'you may not have children while employed here', or 'you may not work for a compeditor after you leave', or 'we own what you produce in your free time'.

Any contract stupid enough to interfere with his free time would be thrown out of court within minutes, and IBM forced to pay all of his costs, as well as damages. I believe you don't have laws allowing the judge to do that in America either.

Re:This guy rules

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, he happens to be a 14 year old boy. Ive just met him and the amount he knows about linux blows my mind.

Umm..

"I hold a Masters in Philosophy of Logic,and have worked for ISPs as a system administrator/manager since the dawn of the commercial internet. Linux was my daily bread as an admin since early on, and I am still contracted by companies for work with Linux. Right now I am with IBM, and in my spare time I work on Yoper. Though I have started taking extended holidays more frequently to dedicate myself to work with Yoper."

If this guy is 14 years old, he is some kind of genius.

bittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

http://apt.yoper.com/torrent/yoper.torrent

Re:This guy is an idiot

[GreyPoopon]

Weeks and months? has he ever tried prelinking..was pretty quick and painless for me. thanks to the nice guide [gentoo.org]

Not only has he tried prelinking, but he has tried (among other things) applying performance-related patches, stripping the binaries and ignoring what ./configure finds and instead only including objects upon which each package is truly dependant. I think that pretty much justifies the weeks to months timeframe listed.

Re:Debian is the future

[AhaIndia]

Here is my experience.... I started using Libranet (a debian derivative) which had some very good reviews. After some upgrade cycles my system just became more and more debian and less Libranet.
Debian is good and number of packges are huge... but then I tried Yoper .... Yoper is way faster than any other distro ... it gives you all you need to start using your destop for your work ....
The packages in Yoper repository are less but all are complied with usual Yoper optimization turned on.. so If I install any package from Yoper repository it wont slow my system down....
Yoper comes with KDE desktop by default... I installed gnome from Yoper repositories (apt-get install Ygnome) just for fun ... and wow .. it was the fastest Gnome desktop I had ever used....
I think Yoper has great future if the team somehow manages to maintain the quality and increase the number of packages available...

Re:Thought Police.

[lakeland]

If you ever do any of your idea on company time, e.g. chat about it to colleagues in lunch time, then the company owns a share of it. My limited experience is they own a fairly big share of it.

As an employee of a sub-contractor, I _believe_ the contract you're currently working on would be irrelevant, i.e. did you develop it while working on the sub-contractor's time.

If you are actually working as a contractor then you're not an employee and so contracts can be more severe -- unless your work is treated as an employee (in which case you are treated as an employee by the court).

Re:One Question

[AhaIndia]

I am a Yoper user. I downloaded Yoper 2.1 iso and installed Yoper on my notebook.
Important points about Installation
1) Text base installer
2) Default boot-loader LILO, with Grub as option
3) Partition type can be ext(2,3) or reiserfs
4) there is no step for chosing the packages (mentioned in the article)
Configuration
1) Detects most of your hardware automatically.
2) Launches Sax2 for X configuration (yes, it uses XFree86, not XOrg, yet)
Yoper Desktop
After installation, you'll have a KDE desktop, with (hopefully) all your hardware (network, sound, video etc.) working properly.
First thing that will surprise you, will be the speed. Even an old hardware will become more responsive.
Now you can update the system using apt (Yoper uses RPM packages and apt RPM for easy updates)

#apt-get update
#apt-get upgrade

If you want gnome, then

#apt-get install Ygnome

Other information
It comes with...
1) kernel 2.6.8.1-3
2) KDE 3.3
3) Gnome 2.6 (installable from repositories)
4) Sax2
5) YoperConf (configuration utility to manage your system)
6) OpenOffice
...
And yes, it is so fast that I can play quake3 (windows version demo) with wine (not wineX, just simple wine) without any problems.


Some more comments on azeemarif.blogspot.com [blogspot.com]

Fuckwit

[Anonymous Coward]

Either the interviewer or the Andreas guy is a stupid fuckwit.

1. Stripping does not improve runtime performance. Load performance is only marginally affected. Since the debugging data and comment crap is not used unless you are....DEBUGGING.. it doesn't have any effect on runtime performance. Because, Linux is demand paged, usually the pages of debugging crap won't even get into memory. Now, stripping might still be a good idea if a) you don't care about what you are stripping b) you don't want to waste secondary storage space.

2) Prelinking does not preload libraries, or at least that is a very misleading explanation. Prelinking is simply like a form of caching to get around the slowness of the ELF linking rules. ELF linking is "slow" because the lookup for symbols depends on the link order of the libraries and multiple libraries can provide the same symbol, and the hash function mandated by ELF sucks ass. So prelinking does it once using the general algorithm and essentially saves the results and the checksums for all the libraries. The checksums are stored so that if one of the dependencies changes, the normal slow generalized linking is done and everything still works correctly. Prelinking does affect runtime performance at program start, but it has nothing to do with core loading.

Re:One Question

[Bungopolis]

There is nothing special about being able to play a Windows binary of Quake 3 with Wine on a Linux machine. Most people report that Quake 3 Windows runs faster with Wine on Linux that it does in Windows. Remember that Wine is not a CPU emulator, it is a compatibility API. Most Windows software runs either faster or at the same speed as it does on the beast itself.

Re:This guy is an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

Is gentoo easy for first time Linux users? Nope!
Is Yoper? Of course along with SuSe and Mandrake, but they're bloated and so sloooww!

Ding ding We have a winner! Yoper!

Re:One Question

[AhaIndia]

I was just giving an example.... well, you find my example wrong ...
Ok.. another example ... I used gnome 2.6 on debian (unstable) and it was so slow on my system (not the latest hardware, a PIII) that I used to wait for mouse movements ... but on Yoper it is fast enough to be usable ....
And as the Yoper lead developer says...there is no magic trick.. any experienced linux person could have made debian as fast as Yoper using techniques mentioned in the article.. but Yoper gives this performance out of the box ... and thats my point !!!

Re:Got benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

GCC itself seems to be noticably faster with -march=athlon-xp than simply -mcpu=athlon-xp.

I dont know about other archs.