Interview With Lead Yoper Linux Developer
Bongoots writes "Andy Kissner from Linuxforums.org has just posted this: 'In the past few weeks, there has been a lot of hype and controversy surrounding Yoper, ranging from insults to ruthless Gentoo comparisons. I recently sat down with Andreas Girardet, who is a key developer for Yoper, to dispell all the rumors and discuss the direction in which the Yoper project is headed.' Click here to read the rest of the interview."
I was excited about this for my old 350mhz celeron laptop. Unfortunately, on completely default install settings, it crashed and burned on the first boot. Back to gentoo + distcc.
"Right now I am with IBM, and in my spare time I work on Yoper."
Watch out. IBM might own your thoughts. Make sure you don't think about Yoper at work.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is a dupe, the topic is boring, the facts weren't checked. WE GET IT!!
Mod me flamebait or troll if you must but his ego is way out there.
and it is quite nice.. and shows some great promise.. the only thing it lacks is the number of contributers.. comon people.. get in while its hot.. add more brains to this project and make it what it should be.
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Well, at least we know he isn't some PR person faking being a dev.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
The phrase "united front" mean anything to the linux community?
...being valued based on how 1337 they are or what other distribution they have spawned from and how politically correct its roots are re: OS ideology.
Modern distribution should focus on a system for upgrading / installing which handles dependencies well, a base of hand-picked packages covering as many functions with quality software, making the installation process as easy and transparent as possible, building a community and encouraging its members to provide well-written documentation and lobbying with hardware vendors for open drivers (e.g. ATI).
Also, some professional-quality design work for the website and visual presentation wouldn't hurt.
Most everyone is going to use Linux in another 10 years (barring a totalitarian world government which bans it as a tool of terrorism) - so get on with the program, people.
Yoper sounds neat; and to be honest, all the modern Linux distros I've tried (Mandrake, Suse, Knoppix) work out of the box as long as you're content to use whatever is included in the initial installation.
However, as a desktop OS, there are three things every user needs that no distro provides yet:
1. Easy installation of any Linux software. Don't give me RPM-hell, dependency hell, command-line compiling, proprietary click-n-run depositories, or any other excuses. Only the Mac does it right: you drag the icon to your Applications folder. Voilà. The first distro to accomplish this will be king.
2. Simple, centralized, user-friendly control panels for *everything*, with smart defaults. Why does Mandrake, arguably the most desktop-ready distro, still have printer settings in PrinterDrake, printer settings in the KDE control center, and another panel full of printer settings in the KDE menu?
3. Better support for basic peripherals, like printers and scanners. It's tough shopping for printers at Staples when you know that nothing on the shelf is likely to work.
I'm not saying I have the solutions, but these are major problems that all regular computer users have when grappling with Linux.
Wow. The yoper site is already slashdotted. You would think that they would try to beef up their site before putting it on Slashdot. Where do they think they are going to get most of their users?
I don't think that this is leaving a very good impression.
with them ripping off icons and interface cues from Mac OS X. I wonder how much longer their site will be around seeing that they are running a trial version of IPB Portal. Let me pull out my venture capitalist checkbook!
Also you mention email worms/trojans, why do you need to be root to start a program that emails everyone in your evolution/kmail/syphleed address books?
All it needs is the ability to connect outwards on port 25 and read your address book, like your email client running as your user does.
It could even drop a DDOS zombie into your home directory that attacks people with your ping binary (forked off multiple times).
Additionally it it could add itself into your bash_profile/x startup file so it starts when you logon.
Yes, it couldn't affect other users on the local machine, but it would still spread and affect the user that opened it, just like running an email virus on Windows as a restricted user would.
"Red Hat is the future. Well, maybe not Red Hat proper, but Red Hat derived distros such as whatever are it. period. Sorry, the games over now. Everything else will fade and Red Hat and it's derived distros are handle every_single_complaint I've ever had."
Sounds silly now.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Here is my experience.... I started using Libranet (a debian derivative) which had some very good reviews. After some upgrade cycles my system just became more and more debian and less Libranet. .... Yoper is way faster than any other distro ... it gives you all you need to start using your destop for your work ....
... and wow .. it was the fastest Gnome desktop I had ever used....
Debian is good and number of packges are huge... but then I tried Yoper
The packages in Yoper repository are less but all are complied with usual Yoper optimization turned on.. so If I install any package from Yoper repository it wont slow my system down....
Yoper comes with KDE desktop by default... I installed gnome from Yoper repositories (apt-get install Ygnome) just for fun
I think Yoper has great future if the team somehow manages to maintain the quality and increase the number of packages available...
~Aha~
Important points about Installation
1) Text base installer
2) Default boot-loader LILO, with Grub as option
3) Partition type can be ext(2,3) or reiserfs
4) there is no step for chosing the packages (mentioned in the article)
Configuration
1) Detects most of your hardware automatically.
2) Launches Sax2 for X configuration (yes, it uses XFree86, not XOrg, yet)
Yoper Desktop
After installation, you'll have a KDE desktop, with (hopefully) all your hardware (network, sound, video etc.) working properly.
First thing that will surprise you, will be the speed. Even an old hardware will become more responsive.
Now you can update the system using apt (Yoper uses RPM packages and apt RPM for easy updates)
If you want gnome, then
Other information
It comes with...
1) kernel 2.6.8.1-3
2) KDE 3.3
3) Gnome 2.6 (installable from repositories)
4) Sax2
5) YoperConf (configuration utility to manage your system)
6) OpenOffice
And yes, it is so fast that I can play quake3 (windows version demo) with wine (not wineX, just simple wine) without any problems.
Some more comments on azeemarif.blogspot.com
~Aha~
I find Yoper to be a great step in the advancement of Linux. Yoper, Linspire, Mandrake, and others I'm sure are marketing Linux distros that are easy for Windows users to install, use, and upgrade. Andreas has done an outstanding job and should be applauded. I have been very pleased that my wife and some friends are now happily using Yoper and are now free of the horrible frustrations that are Windows. Linux is about choice, and having fine choices such as Yoper for average home computer users should be supported and promoted. While I would prefer that my friends an family were all using Macintosh, I would never advocate they use my favorite PC OS, Slackware. With so many more people using Firefox instead of IE, there is a growing need for consumer level Linux distros. So far Yoper seems to me is one of the best.
Either the interviewer or the Andreas guy is a stupid fuckwit.
1. Stripping does not improve runtime performance. Load performance is only marginally affected. Since the debugging data and comment crap is not used unless you are....DEBUGGING.. it doesn't have any effect on runtime performance. Because, Linux is demand paged, usually the pages of debugging crap won't even get into memory. Now, stripping might still be a good idea if a) you don't care about what you are stripping b) you don't want to waste secondary storage space.
2) Prelinking does not preload libraries, or at least that is a very misleading explanation. Prelinking is simply like a form of caching to get around the slowness of the ELF linking rules. ELF linking is "slow" because the lookup for symbols depends on the link order of the libraries and multiple libraries can provide the same symbol, and the hash function mandated by ELF sucks ass. So prelinking does it once using the general algorithm and essentially saves the results and the checksums for all the libraries. The checksums are stored so that if one of the dependencies changes, the normal slow generalized linking is done and everything still works correctly. Prelinking does affect runtime performance at program start, but it has nothing to do with core loading.
Another obligatory post from a Gentoo zealot.
I don't have any particular beef against Gentoo (except that I don't use it because I have too many machines with different architectures), but this kind of message strikes me as clawing for trendy-geek points. If you want to be a true geek, you might consider rolling your own (Linux From Scratch, in other words). Following a series of instructions from a recipe-book doesn't qualify.
As far as the individual points you mention are concerned, most are available with any decent distribution, and the remainder are easily implemented from the command-line.
There is nothing special about being able to play a Windows binary of Quake 3 with Wine on a Linux machine. Most people report that Quake 3 Windows runs faster with Wine on Linux that it does in Windows. Remember that Wine is not a CPU emulator, it is a compatibility API. Most Windows software runs either faster or at the same speed as it does on the beast itself.
Don't like any of the distros out there - roll your own! Then if you want to you can make it available to anybody else who wants it - very nice of him to do this. Don't like his distro - don't use it! Only like certain bits - take the code for those bits and use it in your own distro or submit a patch for whatever your chosen distro is!
Why is this a problem . . . the more the better, good for him!
Slack 9.0 is mostly optimized from i386 to i586 depending on the packages, so expect Yoper to be _much_ faster.
Slackware is already optimized with -mcpu=i686, and has been for a long time (yes, even Slackware 9.0). The fact that it also uses -march=i486 really doesn't slow it down, since very few things make use of the extended opcodes.
Since processor optimizations are often touted as a major advantage, I'd be interested in knowing a few programs where the difference between "-march=i486 -mcpu=i686" and "-march=i686 -mcpu=i686" is measurable. I've been unable to find any so far.
my personal mission in life, which is to unseat the Microsoft monopoly.
So it's not to make a grat Linux distro then?
Shame.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
I was just giving an example.... well, you find my example wrong ...
... I used gnome 2.6 on debian (unstable) and it was so slow on my system (not the latest hardware, a PIII) that I used to wait for mouse movements ... but on Yoper it is fast enough to be usable ....
... and thats my point !!!
Ok.. another example
And as the Yoper lead developer says...there is no magic trick.. any experienced linux person could have made debian as fast as Yoper using techniques mentioned in the article.. but Yoper gives this performance out of the box
~Aha~