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Vector Linux 4 Reviewed

Posted by Hemos on from the battle-of-the-old-school dept.

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. "

6 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Don't like the website by Ianoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yet another PHP-Nuke-alike that seems to be so obfuscated it's impossible to find anything...

    However: looks like a fairly good distribution with a good set of tools for the space. But I find myself asking why the 450MB number? Too little for a compressed CD-ROM (like Knoppix), and I haven't seen a hard disk in a machine (even consumer devices) that's under 1GB in years.

    It could be the ideal candidate for a 512MB CF card or Microdrive, but then again, it only runs on Intel x86, so ARM-based XScale, StrongARM, OMAP etc devices are out of the picture.

    So my question is this: it looks pretty good and seems to have quite a bit of support, but what's it's niche? Older machines, like 386s?

    1. Re:Don't like the website by Rutulian · · Score: 3, Insightful

      and I haven't seen a hard disk in a machine (even consumer devices) that's under 1GB in years.

      I think that's the point. This distribution is meant for older hardware. When a 1GB hard disk was as large as you could get.

  2. 233Mhz is slow? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    My God, kids these days are spoiled. How about starting the benchmarks on a 386 with 4 megs of RAM and working up to that mighty 233 monster. I'd be most interested in the differences between say a 486DX66 with 128Megs and a P90with 32Megs. Perhaps these specs will make some snicker, but when you're working on making old hardware do something cool these are the specs that are interesting. If you've got a 1GHz plus machine with tons of RAM you don't need stripped down distro.

  3. Re:Okay, "stupid question" time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    self-compile distros, where you can get about 10% better performance

    I call bullshit. Unless you're doing something stupid, like using bog i386 binaries on a PIV or PIV optimised binaries on an Athlon, you'll get nowhere near 10% performance increase just by recompiling from source.

    The only time I can imagine gaining 10% by compiling yourself is if the original builder screwed up the GCC flags[0], but even then 99% of those building from source would never even think to edit the Makefile themselves to change them. No performance gain there, either.

    [0]: Apparently the vast majority of Gentoo users can't work them out either, so bang goes any collective improvment from compiling from source. In fact given some sets of options I've seen people trying to use, they'd likely end up with a slower binary at the end of it.

  4. Re:Okay, "stupid question" time by yarbo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You can pick your own compile settings. Normally people don't pick these intelligently, but that's beside the point. There can be performance differences, but there are people out there who spend a ton of money on cooling for a small overclock, so what's so bad about compiling for a little extra performance? Also, there are USE flags which can set the functionality at compile time. Want to use a program without a front end? set -X, want to use ungif instead of gif? set -gif, etc...

  5. Real Performance Tests Are Subjective by reallocate · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Setting the right compiler options for your hardware can make a small difference. Most people, though, don;t have a clue about setting compiler options.

    Hardware itself makes a much greater difference. Any OS running on a Pentium 4 3 gHz with a large UDMA133 drive and a $500 video card will be faster than the same OS running on a 486SX-25 an ancient drive and a $35 video card. One would think that's obvious.

    Most of these so-called performamce tests are silly. One guy finds Thing A is faster on his hardware than Thing B. Doesn't mean that will happen on my hardware.

    The real test is you, and that's subjective. If its fast enough for you, it's fast enough.

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