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Brief Review Of Vector Linux SOHO

Posted by timothy on from the pointy-lines dept.

duncan bayne writes "I have just installed Vector Linux SOHO 5.0 RC2 on my old P150 laptop. Overall I was very impressed, and have posted a brief review on my blog. This distro has a lot to offer, especially to schools and other organisations trying to extract more useful life from obsolete hardware."

6 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. Schools and other Organisations by Irashtar · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Bah. According to my experience, schools and other organisations only get new OS's with new hardware. Otherwise, looks promising if you have an old comp lieing around, and want to give it new life.

  2. no network install? by gl4ss · · Score: 4, Interesting

    my pentium mmx piece of shit laptop i got laying around waiting a linux install doesn't have a cdrom drive... so bootfloppy started network install is just about the only realistical option for installing linux on it(or borrowing a suitable cdrom drive from someone).

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    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  3. Few packages? by stevey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It seems to me that most Linux distributions stand or fall based on the quality and availability of their packaging system.

    It's disappointing to see this system doesnt have packages for vim, or lyx. So the reviewer had to install from source.

    Sure that's possible, and trivial for small packages without tons of dependencies - but building from source seems to me to be something you'd wish to avoid when installing on a P160 with 64Mb of RAM...

    Unfortunate, I guess if the distro becomes more popular the archive will grow, but if it doesn't then there will be a big downside to using it.

  4. Hey Duncan by zogger · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You got a laptop with enough ram and a cd drive so you can run some of the mini (50-100 megs or so)live distros like feather, puppy, damnsmall, austrumi, etc. Try some of those out, because after they load into RAM they are *really fast*. I personally like the austrumi distro but that's just taste. Go to a truly non bloatware distro.

  5. KDE for a Pentium 150? by plasticsquirrel · · Score: 2, Interesting

    After reading this article, I would rather just set up a standard Slackware system and put in IceWM myself instead of getting a bunch of defaulted KDE cruft. I can't imagine trying out a distribution meant for slow computers on one of my 486's only to find the stupid distro trying to run KDE.

    The machines that Vector Linux is supposed to be targetted at are precisely the ones that cannot run KDE or Gnome. What makes this distribution worth anyone's time?

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    Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
  6. Article updated with replies to comments by duncan+bayne · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've added an Update section to the original post to address some of the issues you guys have raised. Thanks for the feedback! :-)