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

[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.

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.