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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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I would not jump to the conclusion that it's competition for Gentoo just because it's also fast.
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.
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
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.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
how can yoper claim to be "100% gpl compliant" when it includes nvidia's drivers?
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
what about SourceMage? I use Gentoo, but I was considering SourceMage along the way, and it looks like a valid competitor.
So...no.
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?
Spine World
Yoper really is the next best thing to Gentoo for me, as far as Linux goes.
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.
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.
--- d'oh
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.
$ whatis themeaningoflife
themeaningoflife: not found
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.........
-- I don't buy it, I grow it.
"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.
... 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.
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.
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.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
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.