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. "

Comments

Okay, "stupid question" time

[Illbay]

Being software-illiterate, will someone please explain to me how this really matters?

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?

Re:Okay, "stupid question" time

[Anonymous Coward]

The significance is this: I just installed Vector 4 on a 233MHz machine with 32 meg of RAM that I bought for 1 (One pound sterling) from my employer who was chucking it out. I will use it for word processing and other basic tasks and it will be just fine. It has the speed of Windows 95 (which was previously on board) but it's a modern operating system with all the capabilities that implies. I am well pleased.

Re:Okay, "stupid question" time

[BrokenHalo]

So how is it that you can have significant differences between distros in "performance"?

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.

Don't like the website

[Ianoo]

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?

The 4th kind of lie

[tangent3]

Slashdotters should know by know that there are now 4 kind of lies. Lies, damned lies, statistics and benchmarks.

Great distro

[Beek]

Runs comfortably on my P133 with 48 MB of RAM.

Although I am curious what other modern distros will run on such a machine?

233Mhz is slow?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Good

[d-Orb]

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 am rolling it out in a school

[codepunk]

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.

For those who do not want to build their own

[the_crowbar]

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_crowbar

How very... (what's the word I'm looking for)

[joeslugg]

The interesting thing here is...
...but the interesting thing about it was...
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...