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Distros To Try: Slackware 9.0-rc1 And Yoper 1.0

Posted by timothy on from the invited-abuse dept.

FrosGate writes "Slackware 9.0-rc1 is now available for public consumption over at www.slackware.com. From the site: 'Some of the main components included are the 2.4.20 Linux kernel, KDE 3.1, GNOME 2.2, and XFree86 4.3.0, as well as gcc-3.2.2 and the latest development libraries. Enjoy!' Enjoy is right!" And Scorchen writes "YOPER has released Version 1.0 of their increasingly popular distro. This is the their first stable release." Here's the announcment. The website claims "With Yoper it is possible to import packages from all the other major distros including rpm's, deb's, and tgz packages."

22 of 377 comments (clear)

  1. gentoo for me:) by dcstimm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Gentoo is a great distro, but i wouldnt recommend it to any newbies... Slackware is also a fun distro to use, but gentoo has better package management.

    --
    keanmarine.com
    1. Re:gentoo for me:) by Centinel · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Gentoo could seriously widen its appeal if it would start releasing CD-sets that include its ports tree and precompliled binaries the way *BSD does.

      That would alleviate a big hurdle for bandwidth-challenged folks.

      Hopefully, this is something drobbins and crew have on their radar screens.

    2. Re:gentoo for me:) by BrookHarty · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Ok, so.

      Yoper is a binary 686 arch distro, with rpm packages.
      Slackware is a small binary 386 arch distro, with tgz packages.
      Gentoo is a source distro for any architecture.

      Gentoo is pretty fast, but damn you have to compile everything. It is fun to see which optimizations you can throw at the kernel, Xfree, kde and all. But I want an optimized build for AMD processors.

      Maybe if someone had some spare time, do some benchmarks with P3/P4/XP compiled builds with SSE/MMX/3dnow/etc optimizations, could prove if specific builds are worth the hassle.

    3. Re:gentoo for me:) by mvdw · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Gentoo is not for me. I tried it a while ago, and it installed well, and went well, until I did an "emerge kdemultimedia", which then went ahead and upgraded almost the entire system over dialup, breaking the installation in the process. Back to Slack, where I can again have a rock solid box where I know what's in it, and can make my own decisions about what to upgrade (or not).

    4. Re:gentoo for me:) by jericho4.0 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I would love to see some benchmarks on optimizations for different arches, patches and gcc versions/flags etc.

      From the few anecdotal stories I've heard, you might see around %10 or more in some cases. I'd like to know more.

      --
      "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
    5. Re:gentoo for me:) by sabinm · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I must disagree about Gentoo not being for Newbies. I think that Gentoo is the ultimate distro for Newbies. The instructions are direct and concise, with real world examples. Their forums are professionally moderated and updated frequently with users of varying degrees of experience. The difficult part is making sure that your kernel is configured just right, but a person with commodity hardware could install Gentoo on his/her system and be up and running within one day of compiling.

      Red Hat' documentation is erratic at best and not easily navigable. SuSe was useful as soon as I figured out the correct path to download the distro from FTP. Mandrake didn't cut it for me. Believe me, I shopped around. I PURCHASED Red Hat at every new milestone release up to 7.2. I was really liking the way Gnome was looking on 7.2 Red Hat, and then they went and screwed up everything with 8.0. That was the most difficult distro for me, not becuase of the difficulty in understanding linux (although I am an intermediate user at best), but because it was so difficult to get *under the hood* to change anything. I used 8.0 for about two days and started hunting for a new Linux distro. I even went to Yellow Dog to be loyal to Red Hat, but found it to be wanting.

      Gentoo was by far the easiest to configure, straightforward to understand and helpful in documentation. The first attempt was a disaster, the second attempt booted right up. The third attempt, on my 700 mhz Ibook was a total sucess with very minor cosmetic glitches. I can't praise Gentoo enough for making a Linux OS for the masses. Don't let anyone fool you: Gentoo is easy and configurable up the wazoo. I've never been more pleased with a linux distro. I'm only dissapointed that I didn't discover Gentoo until a few months ago. I would even be willing to sell gentoo on a prebuilt system-THAT's how much I like it. I've never sold linux on a prebuilt system because I make custom systems. I'd always burn some CD's to let others TRY it, but I"d install gentoo on any system that wanted it, it is so simple to use. I think that a CD with a stage 4 tarball and Unreal on it would sell to more people that would want it. I was even considering writing Gentoo to see if they would be willing to do tarball specifically for Nvidia's Cinema Platform with MythTV or something of the sort. Anyway, this is too long of a ramble. The short, no Gentoo is not for everyone, but its sheer simplicity is mindboggling.

      --
      http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
    6. Re:gentoo for me:) by Ledskof · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I agree. People label gentoo as newbie-unfriendly because you don't just pop in a CD and stare at pretty pictures for 30 minutes, then reboot straight into X and start browsing the web. A lot of people seem to think that a newbie-friendly linux should be a MS Windows desktop replacement.

      Gentoo definitely gives the power user as much control as they need, but it's not as if a newbie has to utilize all of this from the getgo.

      Someone who is truly interested in learning a unix-like os but not exactly ready to start configuring and compiling sources is given a break with gentoo.

      For anyone not familiar with any kind of ports tree... They've developed a software tree based on (i think it's based on it at least) the BSD ports system. They have a set of autobuild scripts that will download, configure, compile, and install the software for you, automatically, just by using the emerge tool. Ex:
      #emerge vi

      When it finishes you'll be able to run vi.

      Anyhow, even if you are a newbie, give Gentoo a shot.
      read more about it here:
      http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml

      --
      This is my sig. The post is over.
    7. Re:gentoo for me:) by 7-Vodka · · Score: 2, Interesting
      you know, the opt's are not the biggest benefit of gentoo. I find that it's building every package with the options you want.

      want to enable kde support. USE='kde' want no cups support USE="-cups". Not only this, but it also ends up that you never have dependency problems because each app/lib etc is BUILT for your system.

      --

      Liberty.

    8. Re:gentoo for me:) by Knuckles · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Correct. You don't get a reasonably working machine if you only do the install stage and leave out setup. I just tried Gentoo for a week. It's interesting, but lots of things aren't there that on Debian I take for granted, like that an app comes with some sensible default cron job if it makes sense. Like, fileutils set up a periodic updatedb run.

      Then, there is the quite incomprehensible runlevel mechanism. Maybe I wasn't with it long enough to judge, but to me the concept looked interesting, but the implementation lacking. I mean, runlevel-related files in /mnt/.forgotthename ?? And not documented in the bootprocess documentation doc either? WTF are they not at least in /etc/runlevels/thename?!?
      And then you're confronted with a crowd on IRC that constantly discusses the merits or not of -fomit-frame-pointer and is it included in -O3 or not. But know nothing about the basic skills to run their distro.

      Well, back to Debian and love it

      --
      "When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
  2. I'm gonna try Slackware 9 by mao+che+minh · · Score: 0, Interesting

    I haven't even touched Slack since the 5.x days. I think that it's time to get back to my roots. I love Redhat and all, but I miss the good old days of building it all up the way I like it from the get go (to a certain extent, anyways). I do enjoy the ability to install Redhat and be on the web, IM'n and coding my bullshit php scripts in 30 minutes, but sometimes when something breaks, I have to jump through hoops finding what directory Redhat decided to put /insert config script that is usually somewhere else in every other distribution here/. And despite what anyone says, I think Bluecurve looks nice. I'll probably still use it in SLackware.

  3. Re:Yoper looks a bit dull? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    It has a bit more flexibility, I think that's all. However I still prefer Ninnle linux. It handles everything yoper does, and more. Been doing it for quite a while now.

    http://www.ninnle.org/

  4. Nothing nonstandard like in RedHat by Ayanami+Rei · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What is with this problem people have with RedHat? The configuration management choices they made may seem unique, but after having managed quite a few systems with it, I really wish they would push harder for wider adoption of those idioms.

    I'll admit it, I like RedHat's /etc/rc.d system. It ties in with pcmcia, networking and wlan-ng quite nicely. I almost wish their SysV style scripts and tools (chkconfig, svc, /etc/init.d/functions, ifcfg-[dev], etc.) were used by more distros. I guess I've been tainted by working with Solaris, but I enjoy that method. It makes adding and removing services easy and clean (no editing files for most stuff). And when I miss slackware (I used to run it) I can always add stuff to the /etc/rc.local and friends if necessary.

    I used to hate RPM, but I've come to appreciate it since most everything comes packaged as such, and the tool is rather powerful once you figure out how the hell to use it. Plus, those loonies at PLD give us i686 optimized software in RPM form of all the latest stuff that RedHat hasn't battle tested. This I cannot ignore!
    I agree RPM tends to break on the kernel, but then I always install the latest kernel right after an install so I don't think about it. And a new stable kernel version later, a make oldconfig isn't too hard... I've never installed a kernel any other way, what's hard about doing it "manually"?

    Don't know much about Debian, except that it has definitely moved on to 2.4 and Xfree 4.x

    --
    THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
  5. Mandrake partition resizing by Norman+Lorrain · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Just tried out the latest release candidate. I was able to take a Toshiba laptop with Windows XP, shrink the NTFS partition, and auto-allocate Mandrakes partitions. Point-and-click, almost a no-brainer. I can't imagine making this any easier.

    Hardware autodetect works great too, first time I see a distro that detects both my touchpad and USB mouse.

    Usually a dual-boot setup gives me headaches, but this time I was delighted.

    Nice!

  6. Who are the retards behind Yoper? by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Excuse the language, but I want people to notice this. On the "About" page, this is just two things I noticed on their "features" list:

    Mozilla from Netscape Ltd.
    OpenOffice from SUN.

    I have sent them an email demanding that they change these -- Netscape is based on Mozilla and SUN has something called StarOffice, based on OpenOffice. My reason given for the demand was that slashdotters would obviously notice this and make the same demand, flooding their email.

    So, come on, Slashdotters, start the email! At the very least we want:

    Mozilla from Mozilla.org
    OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org

    or

    Netscape from Netscape Ltd.
    StarOffice from SUN.

    Of course, considering the level of intelligence here, this appears to be a bunch of clever hackers without the cleverness.

    --
    Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
  7. My experience... by Goonie · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I've just been trying to squeeze some extra performance out of a 3D modelling library I've been playing with. This was on a PIII, and the library is written in C++.

    Compared to -O2, I got about 10% overall improvement with -O3 -funroll-loops -march=pentium3 -ffast-math. The last one isn't one you should use generally, though.

    The code used a great deal of double-precision floating point, so you could probably get an even greater speedup on a P4 by enabling SSE2.

    --

    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
    --Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
    1. Re:My experience... by fusiongyro · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I have actually turned my optimizations down to -march=athlon -O2 -pipe. -O3 turns on -finline-functions and -frename-registers. There is a school of thought that says that smaller binaries will execute faster because more of the code will be in the CPU cache at any given time. Of course, I guess if I really meant it, I'd also turn on -Os instead of -O2 to optimize for size.

      In any case, the optimization that's most noticable for my computer is not a gcc option at all, but rather using prelink to make all of my programs start up faster. I read about it on the Gentoo page, it makes KDE start up in about 3 seconds instead of 8 or 10.

      --
      Daniel

  8. Re:Slackware is always quick to pick up the latest by SteelX · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I use Slackware on a daily basis. I love it, but one trend that I observe (which could be improved) is this:

    1. Official Slackware release.
    2. Stable branch gets updated at warp speed.. once new software comes out or security fixes become available, the stable branch has it first.
    3. After a while, current branch starts. Now current branch gets updated at warp speed.
    4. Stable branch looks like it's forgotten. Doesn't get updates for months (except for very critical security fixes).

    I tend to update my stuff using the stable branch and it's disappointing to see it being "forgotten." Of course I understand that stable is supposed to mean what it is - stable - but it would still be good to see updates on a more frequent basis.

    Sure, there are unofficial packages on places like www.linuxpackages.net but I trust the official ones a lot more. And being a typical Slackware user, I compile heaps of stuff and create home-made Slackware packages all the time.. but there are certain things like glibc that I'd rather leave alone.

    I used to update from the current branch but this particular current branch from 8.1->9.0 is a huge leap (the gcc change) so it couldn't be done this time.

  9. Re:Nothing different by On+Lawn · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I agree 100%. I put the distros on a scale this way...

    RYO --- Gentoo --- Debian --- Redhat

    Thats from the most "have it your way" on the left to the most "I don't know what my way is" to "my boss wants it his way" on the right. Slackware fits somewhere on there, but its used in so many different ways I couldn't place it in one specific point.

    The value added is being able to have it your way, or being able to rest on the rock solid attempts of others. That Linux interoperates so well yet has distros that cater to each crowd is more then commendable.

    They are interoperable enough in principle. We do have a Redhat box here at work running a Gentoo kernel for the NFS/TCP patches. I have rpm's running on my Gentoo box. But niether of those were easy.

    --------------
    OnRoad: It gets you there and back again

  10. Yoper not just dull, but actually fishy... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    (Sorry, I'm about to flame a Linux distro... Posting anonymously to dodge Karma burns ;) )

    Ok everyone seems to agree that Yoper doesn't really have anything special. It's just slackware + alien... Also I guess I'm not the only one here finding the catchphrase "Your Operating System!" just super cheesy... Also, what's with their product page? A huge PNG image? Doesn't even look good...

    I have no problem with people trying to make money selling Linux. But do they have to insist so much on the Yoper(TM) all over the place. The domain is of course a dot-com, the first link on their navigation menu is "Store"... Sorry but half of my BS alarm have already been tripped...

    But I get specially annoyed when due credit isn't given. Where is the page that says that their YDesktop is just KDE with the nice "K" replaced by an ugly "Y"? But I'm sure you will easily find the page where you can order "YDesktop Pack 1.0 for only $98"... I mean, their pages hardly mention it's a linux distro. Let's play a game: try to count how many times the word "Linux" appears on their site...

    We could go on about how their site should be nominated for www.webpagesthatsuck.com (check the "About" link at the top... that actually takes you to the FAQ... Hello? HTML formatting anyone?), how their "user community" seems to have a count of 3 (oh but wait, these 3 are actully just flaming the distro on its own boards...)...

    Ok, so if we agree Yoper kinda sucks...

    so the question is, how in h*ll did they make it to #1 on Distrowatch?

    *cough*cheaters*cough*faking*chough*hits*cough*. ..

    1. Re:Yoper not just dull, but actually fishy... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      They seem to have a lot of good words about themselves anyway.

      "We have run Yoper without crashes and freezes for the past 9 months and consider it more stable than anything we have tried in the last 20 years."

      Those are pretty strong words. The buisness I work at had a SCO box that ran for about 6 years and never crashed once, and only went down during power outages. Had a running uptime of 2.5 years at one point, and I'm sure most people know of stuff up a lot longer than that. Thus I wonder how they can say they've been running it for a mere 9 months and say it's more stable than anything they've used in 20 YEARS. Maybe they've just been using windows all this time.

  11. If I can interupt this distro war... by lilricky · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Where can I download Yoper 1.0? It says I can download RC4, but if I want 1.0 I have to order it from their store. WTF??? http://www.yoper.com/download.html

  12. Re:The problem with multiple package bases by pete-classic · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I use non-free packages, so it isn't GNU/Linux


    It isn't the absence of non-free packages that makes a "Linux" system GNU/Linux, it is the fundamental dependence on GNU software.

    How hard would it be to rip Glibc out of your Debian system then rebuild it without Gcc? (Not to mention everything from Autoconf or Bash to Time or Wget.)

    -Peter