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Operating Systems Software Linux

Brief Review Of Vector Linux SOHO 29

Posted by timothy from the pointy-lines dept.
duncan bayne writes "I have just installed Vector Linux SOHO 5.0 RC2 on my old P150 laptop. Overall I was very impressed, and have posted a brief review on my blog. This distro has a lot to offer, especially to schools and other organisations trying to extract more useful life from obsolete hardware."
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Brief Review Of Vector Linux SOHO More

Brief Review Of Vector Linux SOHO

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  • Bah. According to my experience, schools and other organisations only get new OS's with new hardware. Otherwise, looks promising if you have an old comp lieing around, and want to give it new life.
    • Not true, at least not where I work. Since education budgets are tightening, we have to make our existing computers last longer. It's often cheaper to upgrade memory and hard drives to meet Windows specs than to buy a new workstation with XP preinstalled. Of course, if the CPU is too out of date for XP or 2000, then you either 1) buy a new workstation and/or 2) install Linux (which I have on several computers in our library) on existing computers. I, for one, refuse to throw out a perfectly good compute

  • no network install? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2005 @08:16AM (#11743544) Homepage Journal
    my pentium mmx piece of shit laptop i got laying around waiting a linux install doesn't have a cdrom drive... so bootfloppy started network install is just about the only realistical option for installing linux on it(or borrowing a suitable cdrom drive from someone).
    • That's not such a big deal, really.

      A couple of years ago, I put Slackware 8 on an NCR 386SL/25 notebook, for which I had no floppy or CD-ROM.

      All you gotta do is pull the hard drive out and connect it to something more suitable. Adapters for attaching 2.5" notebook drives to desktop machines cost less than $5, and make the job easy.

      Then just install the OS of your choice, and replace the drive into the notebook once you think you've got enough of it configured that it can access the network.

  • VECTOR? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bjb ( 3050 )
    Probably could have chosen a better name for the distro. I mean, Vector sounds cool and all, but the fact is that there are specifically vector processors out there (think Cray, AltiVec and probably the new cell architecture) that require specific coding to take advantage of their vector units. Given that, I'd figure this name should have been reserved for a version of Linux that better took advantage of these architectures.

    My two cents..

    • Well I'll be damned - that I didn't know. I don't know it'll be too much of a problem though, as those familiar with the Cray would be unlikely to confuse the issue :-)

  • Few packages? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by stevey ( 64018 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2005 @09:11AM (#11743926) Homepage

    It seems to me that most Linux distributions stand or fall based on the quality and availability of their packaging system.

    It's disappointing to see this system doesnt have packages for vim, or lyx. So the reviewer had to install from source.

    Sure that's possible, and trivial for small packages without tons of dependencies - but building from source seems to me to be something you'd wish to avoid when installing on a P160 with 64Mb of RAM...

    Unfortunate, I guess if the distro becomes more popular the archive will grow, but if it doesn't then there will be a big downside to using it.

  • Impressed? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jb.hl.com ( 782137 ) <<ten.niwdlab-eoj> <ta> <eoj>> on Tuesday February 22, 2005 @09:17AM (#11743981) Homepage Journal
    RTFA and you find out that he had to compile many things from source, by hand, as the VLAPT system doesn't contain many packages.

    Not "impressive" or "polished" at all.

    There's no mention of what the default KDE is like (beyond "slow") as he uses IceWM. Nothing about hardware detection. No screenshots. Nothing.

    Awful, awful article apparently reviewing an awful, awful distro; but he doesn't tell us enough to say how good it is.

  • Hey Duncan (Score:2, Interesting)

    by zogger ( 617870 )
    You got a laptop with enough ram and a cd drive so you can run some of the mini (50-100 megs or so)live distros like feather, puppy, damnsmall, austrumi, etc. Try some of those out, because after they load into RAM they are *really fast*. I personally like the austrumi distro but that's just taste. Go to a truly non bloatware distro.

  • After reading this article, I would rather just set up a standard Slackware system and put in IceWM myself instead of getting a bunch of defaulted KDE cruft. I can't imagine trying out a distribution meant for slow computers on one of my 486's only to find the stupid distro trying to run KDE.

    The machines that Vector Linux is supposed to be targetted at are precisely the ones that cannot run KDE or Gnome. What makes this distribution worth anyone's time?

    • Depends if you're talking about SOHO or not - the *default* setup for SOHO is aimed at higher-end machines than mine. As I tried to make clear, it's easy enough to trim down to size, and my preference is to trim a large install as opposed to adding to a minimal install.
  • I've added an Update section to the original post [blogspot.com] to address some of the issues you guys have raised. Thanks for the feedback! :-)
  • I don't see any advantage to installing this distro over conventional slackware. Slackware is tried and true, has a long and illustrious history, and is more or less able to run on really old hardware (compare the system requirements). I would also say Debian is a contender in this arena. I have a working Debian install in approximately 1.3GB, complete with office suite and desktop and whatever else you might need (GIMP, etc.) running on a PowerMac G3 (233mhz) with 32MB of RAM.

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