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."

Comments

different purpose

[updog]

It looks like Yoper has been created primarily for maximum performance on x86 machines. Although Gentoo is indeed fast as well, the main differentiating factor with Gentoo is that you build most of your system from source, which has other benefits (disadvantages) than simply execution speed.

I would not jump to the conclusion that it's competition for Gentoo just because it's also fast.

Re:different purpose

[TeknoHog]

Although Gentoo is indeed fast as well, the main differentiating factor with Gentoo is that you build most of your system from source, which has other benefits (disadvantages) than simply execution speed.

This is very true, and I'd like to clarify the reasons. The main one IMHO is that a lot of software options are compile-time. For example I don't use Gnome or KDE, thus I don't want any of the relevant dependencies/bindings compiled into the software I use. Many desktop oriented distros choose nearly every possible binding like this, 'just in case' it is needed. Even when the relevant code is not really used, bigger code is always slower.

The fact that Yoper is compiled for i686 should not make much difference; there are tons of compiler options that go beyond simple i686 capabilities. In fact many compile-time optimizations are due to compiler-independent options as I mentioned above.

It seems Yoper is fast because of prelinking. Gentoo with prelinking should be even faster. But again Gentoo's main point is not that it's fast; it's the ability to control almost every detail of software installation, while avoiding the complications from manual ./configure; make; make install.

Is is LSB 2.0 compliant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... is it?

Re:Is is LSB 2.0 compliant?

[kundor]

It apparently uses apt, not rpm.

So...no.

Beating Gentoo?

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who runs Gentoo on his home machine, I have to agree with some of the sentiment expressed around here: beat Gentoo at what?

I think Gentoo is a great desktop distribution for someone who has a lot of time on their hands and is capable of doing things manually. However, I wouldn't recommend Gentoo for use on an important sever, nor would I recommend Gentoo to use for someone who doesn't have a lot of time or who is incapable of doing some complex things by hand.

I think Gentoo right now is one of the better hobby/tweaking distributions, but I really don't think that's the usershare Yoper is going after.

How Gentoo won the community

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo was good at their marketing, and that was by winning over Linux users / newbies by packaging games with their product which most distros don't.

Personally, Gentoo is crap in my opinion.. Sure building from source is nice and all, but the speed difference is barely noticeable comparing between other distros. Them redefining the standard UFS is complete crap and doesn't make sense on WHY?

The LPI cert info they offer through IBM is horrible, incorrect in some areas and based mainly around their distro.

The only thing they got going for them is the multiple architecture support.

Re:How Gentoo won the community

[Stevyn]

I don't use Gentoo just because it's a little faster than other distros. It does feel faster than Mandrake 10 and Fedora 2. I use Gentoo because I find portage to be a lot better than URPMI which I tried to use for a while. I had trouble because I wanted a package that was less than 8 months old. Upgrading packages meant compiling from source. That's not a big deal until you have 4 layers of dependencies and you've wasted two hours and you still don't have the package. I'd rather let portage chug and churn for two hours than I having to do the work.

Re:Too many Distros

[mgrassi99]

Care you elaborate? 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? -Mike

Re:if their webserver is any indication.. then no.

[extra the woos]

except its not the yoper web site (which is up and running just fine)... thats like saying debian sucks because a site that posted a review of debian got /.'d...

btw, yes, this is being typed from yoper right now, been using it for a few days, its awesome. Yoper for desktops, debian for servers, thats my story and i'm stickin' to it.

not gpl compliant

[BlueLines]

how can yoper claim to be "100% gpl compliant" when it includes nvidia's drivers?

Google?

[bluewee]

Results 1 - 10 of about 269,000 for yoper. (0.14 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 3,130,000 for gentoo [definition]. (0.11 seconds)

Well there you have it people gentoo is the clear winner...

here are some more for comparison:
Results 1 - 10 of about 11,500,000 for suse [definition]. (0.19 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 26,300,000 for debian [definition]. (0.14 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 122,000,000 for windows [definition]. (0.31 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 3,350,000 for google os. (0.23 seconds) ... o_0

Re:Too many Distros

[mrchaotica]

Maybe what you need is a metadistribution (see first paragraph), then. That way, your firewall, desktop, and cluster can all be managed the same way and and you don't have to go through special effort to change a piece of software to work with all of them.

Yoper suspicious

[ashpool7]

Does no-one remember back when Yoper went 1.0 and was on Slashdot? Seemed pretty suspicious if you ask me.

Since the site is slashdotted, it's hard to see if anything has changed in a year.

Re:Yoper suspicious

[pnot]

I looked into it when it made its debut a couple of years back. Several things made me uneasy. IIRC:

1. It seemed to launch with huge fanfare and hype, and there was a bit of a backlash when it turned out to be just another "generic distro plus knoppix hardware detection" deal.

2. Source wasn't originally available, so it was infringing on the GPL.

3. They were very reticent about acknowledging the work they'd built on, and responded quite violently to any criticism.

I had a poke about their website recently, the things that now make me uneasy are:

1. Package availability -- according to this declaration, you can only install Yoper-packaged RPMs ("The ones for other distros have to probably be installed with rpm -Uvh --force --nodeps and might break apt.").

2. Lack of decent documentation -- lots of important information seems to be squirreled away in the forums.

3. Amateurish website ("Yoper is one of the most standardised Linuxes that you will find and hardware performancetries to be better better than that of any commercial OS." -- http://www.yoper.com/about.html )

3. Responses to criticism still seem pretty belligerent, not to mention self-contradictory. A forum post from March 2003 says:

We are not a one man distro. Currently we have hundreds of users and several people on the development team and also a new commercial team that does the commercial side here in NZ. ( original post )

Then, in October 2003:

Some of you compile quite a few packages, which is great!!!! The base Yoper is done by ONE person and this person (ME) has a distro which is now fairly well known even though it is only version 1. Just think of this. Yoper is a one man distro and so many have an opinion on it. ( original post )

So, is it a one-man distro or not?

Still, it seems they're no longer trying to flog it for 99 USD, which makes me think a little more kindly of it :-).

Re:Yoper suspicious

[pnot]

A large group of slackware users/fans decided to flame the admin repeatedly on the forums. Those "belligerent" responses were a direct result of that.

I remember it somewhat differently; unfortunately the posts were deleted by the admin. This is why I think that responding to criticism is preferable to deleting it: there's no way to determine in hindsight whether the criticism was valid.

Would you try installing debs on a SUSE system and expect it to always work?

The difference is that I can expect to find most of the software I want as a SuSE-compatible RPM. Yoper is a far less popular distro, so I'm concerned that not much software is available unless you resort to non-Yoper RPMs, which might break the system.

Give the little guy a chance!

Is he a little guy or not? One minute it's a professional-grade distro with x thousand downloads, a large user base, a substantial development team and a "commercial team". As soon as any criticism arises, it's "well, what do you expect from a one-man distro?". You can't have it both ways.

Andreas is the guy behind the distro, english was not his first language (cut the site some slack) and he's a programmer, not a Public Relations Rep

But he claims to have "hundreds of users and several people on the development team and also a new commercial team that does the commercial side here in NZ". Presumably one of these hundreds of minions wouldn't mind proofreading the website. Shouldn't crafting a decent website be the job of the Yoper commercial team?

I have nothing against Yoper or Andreas. I think it's great that free software is good enough that one person can put together a working distro. And I don't believe that a one-man distro has to be flakey -- look at Knoppix, or Mepis. But most of the good stuff I've heard about Knoppix and Mepis is from independent sources; most of the good stuff I've heard about Yoper is from Yoper's website, which states that criticism will be deleted from its forums. Evenhanded evaluation is thus hard to come by.

first gentoo competitor?

[WhitePanther5000]

what about SourceMage? I use Gentoo, but I was considering SourceMage along the way, and it looks like a valid competitor.

Re:Full Text

[lytenyn]

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

So I wonder - I've done all that on my gentoo-box .. then why should yoper be noticeably faster?

.. Besides the fact that I love Gentoo for various other reasons (no need to upgrade the whole system once in a while but rather gradual updates/ fine-grained control/ linux experience) ..

Re:Prelinking in Gentoo?

[Kristoffer Lunden]

When do you want it?

# emerge -s prelink
Searching...
[ Results for search key : prelink ]
[ Applications found : 1 ]

* sys-devel/prelink
Latest version available: 20040707
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of downloaded files: 881 kB
Homepage: ftp://people.redhat.com/jakub/prelink
Description: Modifies executables so runtime libraries load faster
License: GPL-2

I just have to say

[Mr. Cancelled]

The hype is justified!

Yoper really is the next best thing to Gentoo for me, as far as Linux goes.

• It's more optimized than its comptetion (all the other non-enterprise, modern, cutting-edge desktop distros... Ark, JAMD, PCLinuxOS, etc.))
• It's using some of the best packages avail at the moment, in their latest incarnations
• It's setup in such a way that it could immediately be used as an office PC (aka as a Windows replacement), it's equally able to handle more "power-user" type people straight out of the box, with additional software available via a point and click GUI (Synaptic)
• While it's 'dumbed down' to the point that your average PC-based web surfer/emailer/im'er can start out right at home, it's just so fuckin' fast and optimized right out of the box that it'll impress even the most jaded Linux user.
• It's picking up momentum fast, so more and more of the popular packages (and in my opinion some really obscure ones - There's a lotta stuff 'ported for it' that I'd never expect -or use) are being put out. I'm really just talking compile optimizations and such, but they're all setup for the Yoper structure
• The hardware support is very nice. In fact, to me, the biggest "ooh!" about the most recent release is that it's the first Linux distribution that correctly identified and setup my Radeon 9600 card, with dual monitors. EVERY other distribution made me hand-edit the config files to make this work, and in some this cases never worked at all

It really is a slick system, and very deserving of the accolades it's starting to receive. To me, it's the distribution to judge others by (With the obvious exception of Gentoo, and other source-based distros).

If they can continue the momentum and build their software catalog (meaning compiled, optimized packages for Yoper), I can see Yoper easily winning the Desktop Linux race.

Oh, and for the record, if you've heard of any problems with their support, or OSS issues, it appears that this is very much a thing of the past. I was there for the beta testing, and I was one of the those who didn't like what happened after the release of v 1.0, and I can safely say that it appears that Yopers seen the light, and has remedied any problems they may have had. The Yoper community is also very good.

Check it out! You know you've installed dozens of Linux distributions already... What's one more going to hurt? It could change your usage of Linux.

Re:Remembering the Yoper Jerk

[ananke]

Yeah, I've been trying to find the slashdot story on that. I remember reading yoper's own web pages, where the developer/developers were basically trashing their [potential] users. Like you said: thanks, but no thanks.

Quick convert

[HungSquirrel]

I first tried Yoper two months ago and was an immediate and complete convert. You cannot possibly fathom how snappy this OS feels unless you've used Gentoo. I was absolutely blown away. It really breathes new life into my aging P3 500MHz laptop. Unlike Gentoo, you don't have to spend a week on the install to get a fast system.

On top of that, the install is one rather vanilla disc, allowing you to pick and choose other packages you want after installing. Why waste the extra time downloading three or four ISOs mostly filled with packages you don't need when you can download precompiled packages for the software you DO need at your leisure?

Yep, I'm a Yoper fanboy. I liked the distro so much I joined the team and started putting together packages. This is another area Yoper is good for: the entire team from the creator down to the lowly packagers will take time out of their day to help people in the forum. The team also welcomes anyone with useful skills. If you can use vi and run a shellscript, you can contribute to Yoper and the team invites you to do so. No BS distro politcs. Hands-on help for new users.

Re:FP?

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot believe the press this amateurish attempt at an distribution is getting, the guy hasnt developed any technology, he just recycles parts from other distributions. His "optimisation" is basically a process that you can do on any other linux system, and he compiles his packages so that they only run on modern on processors, of course rh/slack cant do this, as people would be screaming if they cant use their systems on that old pentium as a router.
Please people, read the crap he writes on his website, the guy is an idiot. Granted, he seems to have a gift for marketing (I really dont know how he's pulled this off, given the crap he writes and his shoddy amateurish product).

Re:Full Text

[smurf975]

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'.

Is it to much to ask for a simple bootmenu?
So:

1. Install Yoper
2. Rescue(Bash)
3. Use LiveCD
4. Other

Please press 1-4 to choose your option followed by the enter key. Thank you.

9 seconds remaining.........

Does this person know how to use Gentoo?

[gipsy boy]

"The boot time is a tricky one to measure, but if you clock the time taken to reach a login prompt, Gentoo wins but not buy much, about a 7 second difference in my test. But once you go to starting X, Yoper leaps ahead and can have me browsing the web, editing an office doc, and chatting in the IRC before Gentoo got me into a GUI."

I'm not sure what this person is talking about here. Is he talking about KDE again? Well, I use fluxbox and it takes under 2 seconds to get into my X system after typing "xinit". (most of which goes to driving my nVidia card)

I run Gentoo and I don't see where the 'competition' lies, exactly.. I'm sure you can make Gentoo's KDE as 'fast' as Yope's since it can do all those things Yope does with gcc, when you emerge the KDE package. I feel this article misinformed some people really, this distro looks pretty weak in my opinion.

do they package binary-only drivers, ala Gentoo?

[otis wildflower]

... One of the nicest things about Gentoo compared to other distros is that they're not zealots regarding non-GPL stuff like nvidia-kernel.. It reduces my agita by a mild but discernible amount, and for that I am happy.

Re:Competion for what?

[Derek Pomery]

Speed has never been what attracted me to gentoo.
Configurability, the easy generation of ebuilds (often just copying the ebuild text file to a new version name suffices), not to mention simplicity of tweaking a tar.gz myself or adding a patch file - everything I got out of building myself, but with package management system to keep track of what gets installed.

Then of course there's getting me out of binary dependancy hell for which I'm quite grateful, and there's always revdep-rebuild if some interaction gets lost (due usually to my having done a restricted update, but...).

As for the features, I agree.
Adding the patches to Gentoo will be trivial.
And Gentoo has had things like prelinking for ages - not to mention parallel startup and fancy gcc options.

But I've never seen the linux distro game as that competitive, looks like this one will serve a different market, offering a fully integrated, if less flexible, distro tweaked for speed.
Each distro has its uses. I use Knoppix and Fedora at times, even if every machine at home runs Gentoo.

Re:Competion for what?

[riprjak]

Im sorry if I disagree.

Gentoo does not IMHO require you to be well versed in the ways and workings of linux; if you can read one of the many languages in which the handbook is written, then I would say you merely require to have sufficient computer literacy to understand the consequences of your actions and the ability to type.

Gentoo makes you work hard to install, as it doesnt abstract you from what you are doing with excessive automation and pretty gui widgets, but it gives clear instructions and reasoning to every step. I find most linux newbies (who are already computer literate, not mousewagglers, but not power users) actually do better for going through a gentoo install and have a fairly good understanding of what they have done at the end.

Course, Im a gentoo supporter, so Im bound to like it.

Gentoo isn't aunt tillies OS by any stretch, but for someone who wants to know what they have done and learn about what they are doing, it is bloody hard to beat.

err!
jak.

Re:Competion for what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yessir.

You can also define a list of applications (for gentoo: list of programs/versions/ebuilds) you want to install on computers of the installfest people, hook up some PCs from your lab and have them compile/prepare three/four "kinds" of installations [486, 586, i686, athlon, whatever].

Then, tar everything [read the gentoo's stage4 backup howto in the forums] and whenever a guy wants gentoo all you have to do is boot with a floppy or a knoppix, create partitions boot/root/swap/whatever you need, and untar the stage4 [you can burn the stage4 to DVDs or put it on a LAN FTP drive, or whichever method you choose.

This way, you have a complete gentoo system stage4 [system, applications, settings, blah blah] compiled for many architectures [provided you've edited the make.conf on the test machines on which you've compiled said systems].

It will be NOT hard to have said gentoo systems up and running on the installfest people's PC ;)

and, yes, it will be very cool to have it.

And you can also use the former lan-pcs with distcc in order to have users do, after the installation:

emerge sync [to a local lan repository, maybe]
qpkg -I -nc | xargs emerge -u

this way everyone will have a good system, and updated ;)

nice, innit? ;)