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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. "
A Linux "distribution" is (or so I have always thought) the kernel, plus system support files, plus all the tools (typical "GNU") that go into making a working OS. So how is it that you can have significant differences between distros in "performance"? And how does that matter if you build the system on your own hardware (a la Gentoo)?
Is this just another example of irrelevant Geek pissing contests, or is there some actual significance here?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
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?
every time you slashdot a server, god kills a kitten.
please, think of the kittens.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Slashdotters should know by know that there are now 4 kind of lies. Lies, damned lies, statistics and benchmarks.
Runs comfortably on my P133 with 48 MB of RAM.
Although I am curious what other modern distros will run on such a machine?
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.
Vector Linux is good because there are still loads of P2-2xx/3xx around. While you can always run XFCE on them, dillo and so on, they do have hardware limitations which might be difficult to overcome in order to have something normal people can use. If you get a distro that runs a modern desktop (KDE, GNOME) with some response (this is what the reviewer says; what he means is anyone's guess), then you can effectively extend the life of these older machines, save money, and so on. While many gamers may not be aware of this, people in small/family-run companies could definitely use something like vector for these purposes.
Unfortunately, I think that most of the people who would benefit most from things like Vector will never hear of it, and if they do, they will probably be overwhelmed by difficult installers and so on. If the VL people could come up with their distro packaged so that it effectively is a domestic distro (put CD in, wait, enjoy), then they would have a great product that many SMEs would use. They might also want to get some other software (accounting and that sort of stuff), but there is definitely a niche there for them to occupy. I wish them well :-)
I was approached by a private grade school that had a bunch of old gear and no money to upgrade software much less the hardware to run the latest windoze. I had them buy a single poweredge server and loaded up mandrake. Turned on XDMCP and are currently loading the clients with Vector Linux. It works really nice on old hardware and boots quickly. So for the cost of a single server they get to use the old gear plus all of the open source software they could ever want. Kudo's to the vector linux developers they saved this schools 50 workstations.
Got Code?
Every time you make that f*@!(%# joke, God kills a Domo-kun.
Please, think of the Domo-kuns.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
Reviews highlighting a distro built for speed are useful for those who are unable/unwilling to build their own Linux system.
Recently I bought a mini-itx system to put in my car. At that point, I wanted something lighweight (runs on VIA C3 Proc) and fast. I ended up building a Linux From Scratch system, but if I did not have the skill or inclination for something like that a distro optimized for slower hardware would be a great choice.
Even though I built a LFS system, I could have saved a bit of time by installing a binary distro. LFS took me several days of steady compiling to complete. (I did most of the build work on my desktop and simply copied the files over, but still.)
the_crowbarHave you read the Moderator Guidelines
Itd be a joke if it wasnt true.
"#apt-get install flame-armor increased-karma"
There are some pretty interesting numbers...
It is interesting to say the least.
I'm searching for an adjective to describe this article. Somebody help me here...
Is vector compatibile with packages designed for slackware 9.0?
Maybe Morphix Linux is what you are looking for. It has a "base" system and then you could add "modules". there are some modules ready for download or you could download an ISO with some modules installed.
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
Somewhat OT, but the idea of a toned down but still functional Linux appeals to me. I had a similar idea of doing this to a distro not well known for being slim -- RedHat 9. For partially philosophical reasons, and partly because I was not getting any work done with all the gizmos cluttering my desktop, I decided to remove the clutter but not lose any functionality. (In my defense, I'm comfortable with Debian and some embedded, minimal distros and have built a Linux from the kernel sources to X).
./configure options carefully to minimize memory usage.
The hardware for this ongoing project is a 333MhZ PII laptop, 192M. I started by getting rid of the Gnome and KDE environments (well, most of it -- I kept the libraries and some select applications around). In their place I put in Fluxbox, choosing
Next, because I spend the majority of my time in the shell, I looked at some of the different xterms around. I was surprised that the native xterm, though much smaller than konsole or gnome-terminal, was still somewhat bloated in comparison with others such as aterm or rxvt. They didn't support transparent terminals but that's no biggie. The important thing was that they could do green-on-black terminals; also no biggie, but I was thinking about this because I made an assumption that a black background would use less battery than a white one. Of course, you could also ditch X entirely and run from a console but browsing the web in elinks or links, though great for documentation, kinda sucks for looking at Dolphin cheerleaders.
Next, I exchanged the stock RedHat kernel with a 2.6.0-test kernel (test9 at this writing). It does seem a lot faster, but I am still working out some module loading issues so there is some functional loss until I get these working. This is important because the goal is not to lose functionality for performance.
I've been testing different journaling modes for the ext3 filesystem. No benchmarks yet, but I understand that there's a decent performance boost to be had from using a different writeback mode.
These are all in addition to the standard tweaks such as using a lower bit depth on the X session, replacing apps with slimmer alternatives (Firebird for Mozilla, etc.). There are also dubious claims of speedups by just recompiling but in my case these gains weren't perceptible.
I'm about to replace syslog with one that batches writes. This will allow the drives to spin down. Since power management is otherwise functional it might gain some performance.
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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