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Review of Yoper Linux v2.1
Anonymous Coward writes "An interesting review of Yoper Linux has just been posted posted at linuxforums.org. Yoper Linux really does look like it could be the first serious competition Gentoo has had in a long time."
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Introduction
Ok, this is my first review and the kickoff to Linuxforums.org's Editorial Content Section, so lets get started. Yoper Linux is built around the idea of light, compact and wicked fast distro that is available to the average Linux user. Its 100% GPL compliant and the full ISO is free to anyone with an Internet connection. Yoper's popularity has absolutely skyrocketed with the release of v2.1 and is currently sitting at #18 on the distrowatch.com Page Hit Ranking.
Yoper's claim to fame is the speed at which it runs, out of the box. Yoper is a distro that targets the desktop Linux user from a brand new convert to the legendary guru. The latests release (2.1) improves upon the the installer, making it more user friendly and now includes non-destructive partitioning.
Speed applies to every aspect of the system. The install was completed, start to finish, in under 15 minutes. Once the system booted, the kernel took little time to load. It may seem little slow as compared to a custom kernel (like one created in a Gentoo install), but thats to be expected with a universal build. Once KDE started to load I noticed the speed kick. It was loaded in less than 10 seconds - which is good compared to my lovingly tweaked Gentoo system. Applications opened almost instantly and the overall feel of the system is similar to that of a fine Italian sports car, suave and fast.
The Yoper team accomplished this with the use of several methods that have always been available to those with enough experience, but generally beyond the average user, They include, but are by no means limited too:
Several performance enhancing patches to the kernel
All packages compiled specifically for the i686 against the latest and greatest of the gcc
All the binaries were 'stripped' (ie. all the debug symbols and other nonessential data are removed.) in order to create an even faster base system.
Prelinking
A short description of prelinking:
Due to Yoper's success, the process has been getting a lot of talk recently, and I was intrigued by the mechanics of this intriguing little utility. The results are readily evident: incredible startup times, even for massive applications. Basically whenever you start a program it has to find all the libraries that it will draw upon and link them to the correct location in the program. Prelinking does this when you run the Prelink, so when you start the program, 1/2 of all the startup work is already completed. Now should you be a developer, you will need to re-run the prelink code (a simple command available on their website) more frequently. They recommend it after major upgrades (such as KDE 3.2 to 3.3).
Installation
After downloading the single ISO and burning it, I booted into a BASH prompt. This might sound intimidating to those newer to Linux, but wherever a user is required to type something in there are directions included. In this instance it indicated 'type Yoper to begin setup'. A little fiddling reviled that the prompt had a few basic commands such as mount and access to Vim. Ready to begin the install, I typed Yoper, pressed enter and was greeted by the installer. Overall the feel of the install was similar to that of Slackware and comfortable enough for any user: even a Linux 'newbie'. While some may frown on the lack of a GUI installer, the Yoper team wanted to keep this all on one CD, resulting in a GUIless install. After a few simple steps (the installer holds your hand through the entire process) you arrive at qtparted, a graphical partition tool. The best part of this is that it not only makes the hardest part of the install possible through a simple GUI, but allows for non-destructive partitioning.
After that I hopped through the selection of a few mount points, selected a file system from ext2, ext3, reiserfs, and reiser4 then the install started. No progress bar or indicter of any sort was present, but the installer notified you that it would take 5-15 minutes. The lack of a package selection menu was a little surpr
Does anyone else think it's strange that a story about yoper has no link to their home page, but does have a link to gentoo?
Corel Link
a) It's a copyright violation
b) It's karma whoring
http://apt.yoper.com/torrent/yoper.torrent
Help save their gracious FTP mirrors.
emerge sys-devel/prelink was there for a long time
Does anyone remember the jerk from Yoper who was badmouthing the /. crowd? Yoper wanted $99 for their distro, and they bragged heavily. People started to call BS, and the Yoper jerk went berserk. That was the first time I ever heard of Yoper and the last time I cared. At least they learned what bad PR can do for business (Yoper is free now--ha!).
Fast Yoper Torrent from the Linux Mirror Project:6 -2.1.0-4.iso.torrent
http://www.tlm-project.org/torrents/yoper/yos-i68
And on installing use the default Reiserfs(3). Don't use the new Reiser4, it's much slower, there's messages on Yoper.com forum. There is also some info about slow Reiser4 on Lwn:
http://lwn.net/Articles/99408/
It's called prebinding and it isn't a new idea. OS X has (had, this has been fixed in Tiger) a huge penalty for non pre-bound apps. I saw some tests that showed apps like photoshop were over 10 times slower starting up when it was not pre-bound. The difference in tiger is minnimal thanks to (if I recall correctly) a complete re-write of their ld (the linker). Instead of forcing prebinding why don't the Yoper guys put some work into makeing gnu ld more efficient?
I've toyed around with Slackware, Redhat, and Debian (in the form of Xebian and KnoppMyth - a Knoppix re-package) and it seems that if you install the right packages any one could be made to function as well as another (of course my experience may be limited). What distros are better than others at what specific tasks?
Yes, you can take a Debian box and transform it easily into a a firewall/proxy. But if you want some specific functionality, such as single button poweron/poweroff for a headless firewall box, without worryng whether its properly shutdown, or you want to admin it from a web browser, etc, you will have to toy with it until it works the way you want.
Other specific distros will do that right from install. No need to tweak. That's the idea behind so many distros.
Need a quick and dirty web/smtp/pop3 server, there's probably a distro for that. Just pop in the cd and install.
Heck, a lot of these distros are variants from the ones you mentioned. Think of them as pre-configured versions of Redhat, Debia, etc.
No sig
Funny group to settle for. I see you're very PC focused. Of the distros you picked, it's amazing that you selected the three with the _most_ overlap in functionality.
I don't want any of those running on my cell phone or my wireless router. I don't want any of those running on my company's beowulf cluster. I'm not even sure I want any of those running my firewall (though Debian is). I don't think foreign language people particularly care for those either, since they're quite european language focused.
How the hell did you come up with that list?
yap yap yap, try it b4 you critisize.
l m-project.org/yos-i686-2.1.0-4.iso.torrent
so many people here are saying this is NOT that great but have not tried it. so here
http://iso.linuxquestions.org/download/http/www.t
a nice torrent for you to play with
Just to recall that if one is looking for a source based distro, there are very good alternatives to Gentoo like Sourcemage (I'm using it with great pleasure everyday) or Lunar-linux (haven't really tried it).
-- We are Microsoft. Linux is irrelevant. Openness is futile. Prepare to be assimilated. --
Start up times under Windows:
MS Word - 10 sec
OO Writer - 12 sec
Sad? Yes. But specific to OO.org? No.
And you know that RPM is a package manager, and Aptitude is not, right? It's like saying "it uses KDE, not Evolution". Makes no sense whatsoever.
s/apt/deb/ would make your statement look intelligent - assuming it's true, since apt _has_ been ported for RPM.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Stripping the binaries doesn't speed up anything, except possibly disk seek times because the smaller files take up fewer total cylinders.
Last I checked, Windows doesn't play DVDs out of the box. Or Divx's, for that matter. Yet, people somehow manage to do both...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Check out Mandrake 9.1 vs Gentoo 1.4. IMO there's a big speed avantage over some of distros simply because it's quite easy to tune and tweak a Gentoo install not to load drivers or programs it doesn't need. Comparing Suse 9.1 Pro to Gentoo (I backed up my Gentoo box, wiped the drive, installed, tested and by the end of the day had Gentoo back on), Gentoo won the speed contest hands down.
The only thing they got going for them is the multiple architecture support.
I think Portage is pretty cool. It's the only distro that I've use that could install mplayer correctly the first time (emerge mplayer). Gentoo is hardly perfect but it is a very stable distro with unique features. I've been using it for over a year now and have yet to find anything better for my purposes and in my opinion.
No GNU/Linux distro is the best for everyone. Having choices is a good thing. Gentoo isn't for everyone but is pretty damn good.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
As opposed to...?
Yoper is "built from source" targeting i686 machines the same way that Mandrake rebuilds RedHat packages for i585 machines. Yoper is a binary distribution that uses apt-get for package management, a la Debian. It's just more finely tuned.
Yoper isn't competition for Gentoo as far as niche is concerned. Gentoo is a source distro. Yoper is JABD.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
Check this link: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/prelink-howto.xml
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=
That's just MagicLinux Control panel from kde-apps.org.
Yoper didn't "steal" any icons from anyone. You should be having that discussion with the author of the app.
What you may not realize is that Windows will pre-load MS apps like Word when it boots up. That's why it takes so long! You could do the same with OO on your Linux machine if you like. Personally, I can wait a dozen seconds for the word processor to come up because I do not use it often.