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: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

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.

.torrent for latest version

[chickenmonger]

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

Help save their gracious FTP mirrors.

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!!!!

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: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:not gpl compliant

[CoolMoDee]

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

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: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.

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. :)