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

Competion for what?

[I_Love_Pocky!]

The first serious competion for what? The coolest new distro? That statement seems to imply that Gentoo is clearly the best around right now. I really like Gentoo, but I don't think I could dismiss all the other distros that easily.

Re:Competion for what?

[I_Love_Pocky!]

You're clearly stupid then.

Well I admit that freely, but how does that answer my question?

Re:Competion for what?

[St. Arbirix]

I think they were referring to Gentoo's "title" of being the fastest running distribution. Gentoo is a pure and simple pain in the ass to install and requires you to become very well versed in the ways and workings of linux. If Yoper can compare in running speed to Gentoo and also include a quick and easy setup then it would indeed be competition, but I'm sure neither of us are too fuzzy of the rules of this "competition."

If Yoper can run as fast as Gentoo, with a fraction of the setup time, and be just as stable, Yoper will be indeed be the Windows-replacer I suggest for our future Installfests on campus. We've been installing Mandrake or Fedora Core 2 and were toying with the idea of getting a few dozen lab computers setup with distcc to make Gentoo installs feasible. Yoper would definitely save us the effort.

I'll still want to see benchmarks for game performance though. This could be my Doom 3 Linux distro of choice as well.

On a different track of thought, perhaps someone in the Gentoo camp will work on making some of Yoper's features available in one of the install stages. It's won't be blatant rip-off, it'll be the bazaar in action.

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?

[bigredradio]

I am glad you said what you did. It further proves a point I have been trying to make for a long time. Gentoo is for not-so-knowledgable users who want to FEEL like a l33t hacker because they followed some instructions to build a system.

Gentoo is basically the equivelent of a "build your own AM radio" kit from radio shack. Yeah you have a deeper understanding of how it works, but I personally I would rather go and buy a nice Stereo. Does the kit mean you now have a deep knowledge of amplitude modulation and can substitute a degree. No.

Building a Gentoo system gives someone a little bit of knowledge that they can throw around at the IRC cocktail party. IMHO the real l33t hackers are only concerned with consistancy in their environment, the ability to develop with little interuption, and ease of use. If they want a system faster they may decide to use Gentoo. Not because they like tweeking the system, but because it allows them to get more done.

I can forsee Yoper becoming a Distro for those users because it allows them to get more work done. The "kit makers" will continue with Gentoo and I say, more power to them! My issues with Gentoo have only to do with the zealot users who feels that everyone else who uses a different distro are just cattle or newbies. They don't see that they wear their ignorance on their sleeve.

Not as good

[shfted!]

Obviously this is not as good as Gentoo. If they were running Gentoo, they would have spent 14 hours messing with USE tags so the poor server could keep up with a slashdotting ;)

Re:Too many Distros

[Laebshade]

Though I'd prefer seeing ALL distros unite (without SCO) and call it "Final Fantasy Linux".

Do you really want a Final Fantasy Linux 8?

Oooo! Talk about stuff no one cares about

[Ridgelift]

Yoper Linux really does look like it could be the first serious competition Gentoo has had in a long time.

In other obscure news about competition that no one cares about, Bob's Fatburger is launching a new ham & swiss sandwich that may prove to be stiff competition against Arby's in the war of the cold cut sandwich arena.

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.

Re:Too many Distros

[pnatural]

We don't need 100 distros. Damn, we don't even need 10.

Yes, we do need them.

The thing you're missing is (as Agent Smith would say) purpose. Many of these distros exist purely because they meet a specific purpose. For example, there are distros used for desktop computers, distros for firewalls, distros for embedded devices, distros for clustering, distros for servers, etc.

Put another way: choice is good!

Now, had you said "we don't need 100's of desktop distros" I might have agreed.

Link to yoper

[jsprat]

Since the submitter didn't provide a direct link to Yoper Linux, I will.

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?

Re:eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

yo.per - n. One who yopes. See "yope" yope - v. slang term from 1980's era to describe slow communication with poor diction. Warning: mysql_connect(): Too many connections in /usr/local/apache/vhosts/linuxforums.org/www/forum /db/mysql4.php on line 49

Gentoo Competition?

[TheLastUser]

Yoper Linux really does look like it could be the first serious competition Gentoo has had in a long time.

For what? "The worst installer of all time", or "The most time consuming distro ever".

Re:Gentoo Competition?

[Erik Hollensbe]

It's more like what work it's keeping me from being able to do.

Let's say I want to evaluate several large programs.

I can emerge/use ports for all of them, or I can pkg_add -r and play with them now. All the builds in the package repository are well-tested and I can be sure if the program is going to work at all, it's going to work with pkg_add installation.

I can't recall a time where I've been prompted for interaction with pkg_add, but I'm sure it's possible.

OTOH, with a minimal freebsd install I can configure the machine with a base system already installed and pre-configured while I'm adding any other software.

Another good example:

Shit has hit the fan/boss is hanging over my neck/whatever. I need to install program X to get my work done, money is being lost, customers are frustrated, whatever.

Do I want my program 2 hours from now? No. I want it yesterday. pkg_add/apt/yast/any other binary package installer that resolves dependencies gives me that power, and it's guaranteed to work.

And like I said, twiddling every bit to get your whopping 5% performance increase or less really means jack squat when you're doing a server build. Heck, for all the time your boss spent paying you to tweak gentoo to get that performance boost, he could have spent a 1/4 of that on more ram, faster drives/processor, whatever. Besides, real performance comes from properly architecting your farm, if you're relying on that 5% boost to serve more pages/process more mail/whatever, you're going to be surprised when it really hits the fan.

A binary/source based distro (I know of no package format these days that is binary-only, unless slackware still uses pkgtool and tar.gz packages) has more benefits than just quick installation, as well.

Need to roll out a custom version of package X? Compile once/package/distribute.

So tell me again how this causes YOU anymore work? It doesn't it simply takes advantage of your (probably) mostly idle system, and does a little more than copying files from a CD/ftp mirror to your hard disk.

I apologize for my laughter.

You do know that compiles take processor time, right? Generally they peg the processor for a good deal of time and in many cases, use a good deal of memory. Hope you're not doing anything important when that's going on.

Really though, if gentoo is good for you, great. Enjoy playing with use flags with experimental compilers on your overpriced workstation while I get real work done. :)

competition

[nocomment]

Yoper Linux really does look like it could be the first serious competition Gentoo has had in a long time.


uhhhh have you heard of Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, Debian, Turbo, etc...? First real competition...phht! Gimme a break.

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.

.torrent for latest version

[chickenmonger]

http://apt.yoper.com/torrent/yoper.torrent

Help save their gracious FTP mirrors.

Re:Too many Distros

[Bungopolis]

There's nothing wrong with variety here. The more diversity there is, the more likely natural consumer selection is to result in the dominance of truly better software for everybody.

not gpl compliant

[BlueLines]

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

Re:not gpl compliant

[CoolMoDee]

that is gpl compliant. It just dosn't contain 100% "free software"

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.

Not too intimidating...

[mod_parent_down]

After downloading the single ISO and burning it, I booted into a BASH prompt. This might sound intimidating to those newer to Linux... A little fiddling reviled that the prompt had a few basic commands such as mount and access to Vim.

Oh yeah. If you're intimidated by a Bash prompt, you're gonna LOVE vim.

Ok, Lemme just type--

BEEP!

What the...

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

Ah! I just want to edit the--

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!!!

AHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Re:That's great

[Spyro VII]

Oh, you mean this one? Of course, mandrake is not the only "desktop distro" out there right now, but it's the best windows replacement distro that I've found so far. I have set up a number of PCs for friends and family running mandrake and they haven't had any problems yet. Of course, some things can give you trouble (certain hardware combinations), but the fact of the matter is that people like you need to get out of their shells and realize that there are distros out there that are bridging the desktop gap. And you need to either support them or atleast acknowledge their existence.

Remembering the Yoper Jerk

[Anonymous Coward]

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!).

Re:Remembering the Yoper Jerk

[Anonymous Coward]

He's quoted here in an old /. article from when the flamewar was going on in the Yoper forums.

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.

Re:That's great

[el-spectre]

I'm wondering myself why you'd edit yum.conf ... I'd just get the updated one from the Fedora Faq.

We're still getting there. Right now, linux DOES compete with windows, in the 'good with computers' or better class of folks. 5 years ago you had to be much more advanced. Over time, the OS is getting better, but folks (especially linux savvy folks such as yourself) don't help things any by standing around and whining that it's not perfect RIGHT NOW.

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) ..

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:Office Speed

[EvanED]

Start up times under Windows:

MS Word - 10 sec
OO Writer - 12 sec

Sad? Yes. But specific to OO.org? No.

Re:That's great

[be-fan]

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...

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.

Re:How Gentoo won the community

[hotspotbloc]

but the speed difference is barely noticeable comparing between other distros.

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.

Sir,

[warrax_666]

I think you've misunderstood what Gentoo is really about(*) : USE flags. Just try implementing something like that in a binary distro -- it would cause exponential growth of the number of packages. This is the #1 reason I use Gentoo.

(*) Forget the speed difference some people try to claim, it's a red herring -- like you said, nobody really notices the difference either way.

Re:That's great

[Scaba]

I tried following the directions and wound up with jack.

Ahhh, you must have followed the wrong directions. Jack is a low-latency audio server, designed for professional audio work. Maybe you should consider KPlayer, the wonderful KDE frontend to mplayer?