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Vector Linux 4 Reviewed
SilentBob4 writes "On October 7th, the developers at Vector Linux released the latest version of their lightweight Linux distro, version 4. Vector has always been built upon the Slackware Linux framework and this time around it is based on Slack 9.0. The interesting thing here is that there was quite a delay between releases from the Vector camp, so as they were readying version 4, Pat Volkerding was releasing version 9.1 of his Slackware distro.
This past Friday, the first review of Vector Linux was released (Distrowatch.com posted a link to it today). It was a pretty good review for the most part, but the interesting thing about it was that they actually benchmarked it against Slackware 9.1 and posted the results. I'll spoil the ending right now and tell you that Vector Linux won, but you should check out the findings. There are some pretty interesting numbers obtained from the two distros. The reviewer has published three PDF documents detailing the results. Everything was tested from the kernel to filesystem performance. It is interesting to say the least. Even if you don't have to time to read the whole article (it's two pages long), do check out the benchmark results. "
Performace won't matter much, except for self-compile distros, where you can get about 10% better performance. But it is a bit silly, on any distro the kernel is easy to compile and so are any applications you really use (database, webserver). But I don't see the point in making vi run 10% faster...
Quite easily if you use them as they come out of the box.
I'll probably get flamed for saying this, but in the past when I played around with RedHat and Mandrake before going back to Slackware, I noticed a general sluggishness about those distros.
Most of that got fixed when I rebuilt the kernel my own way, but other aspects such as slow init loading never got fixed until I threw those distros out.
I haven't been able to read the article yet, since it is presumably slashdotted, but I would have thought most benchmarks against Slackware 9.1 would be irrelevant, since the majority of Slackware heads compile their own apps and kernels. In other words, it makes more sense to compare it against Slack in a way that the latter might be assumed to be implemented. Yes, I know that's hard, since Slackware fans tend to be an individualistic lot, but that's too bad.
And yes, I know Gentoo does that, but Slackware gives you a system that works so that you can compile stuff at your leisure, rather than having to leave a machine out of action for hours/days while everything gets built.
Well, we all know that most of the distros *can* be configured to run on older machines -- if you change all the defaults to load programs and interfaces running with lower memory requirements. Slack and Debian are probably the best for tis task.
But if you're looking for something designed for older PC's "out of the box" then Deli, Damn Small Linux, or most of the other live CD distributions designed for business card CD's will also work, since they're all designed for small memory footprints, which is probably the main constraint on older systems.
Deli, in particular, makes the interesting choice of using the 2.2.25 kernel, which should be good for older machines.