Vector Linux is a distribution based on the oldest Linux distribution available today – Slackware. It comes in two flavours – a freely downloadable ISO ‘lite’ version (which I used for this review) and a Deluxe CD edition which can be ordered from www.vectorlinux.com. The deluxe edition includes extras such as Gnome and KDE, as well as a whole pile of extra software.
Installation
The installation of Vector was a relatively simple affair, using a non-graphical, but nevertheless easy-to-use, dialog driven installer. The kernel choice was simple (IDE or SCSI) and the installer even checks the base install file for errors, which is handy. One issue for a new Linux user would be the
partitioning.
The user is given a choice of parted or cfdisk to sort out the partitioning. This could prove difficult for those without a knowledge of partitioning basics, although parted does allow partition resizing, which is a plus for those with one big Windows partition. For me, the process simply involved creating one partition in my unpartitioned space using cfdisk, as I already had a swap partition on the drive for Slackware.
Having selected ext3 for the file system type (the standard options were available : ext2, ext3 or ReiserFS), the installer proceeded to add the base package and then presented me with a simple yes/no dialog to see if I wanted X or not. I did; I clicked yes.
Once X had been installed, it asked if I wanted to perform some basic system configuration and I was amused by the dialog for this one – “select ‘no’ if you think this puppy will run ok without it (hint: it won’t).”
It was at this point that I hit a problem – a Lilo configuration menu popped up (asking if I wanted to do automatic or expert installation of Lilo), but the keyboard stopped working. I tried unplugging and plugging in the USB connector again, but to no avail. Plugging in the PS/2 connector however, did work. I should point out this might not work on all machines – I have known some that need to be restarted to get them to register a PS/2 keyboard that wasn’t there on boot up. Once the keyboard was functioning again, I installed Lilo to the super block of the root partition so that I could boot that from XOSL (a great boot loader).
Following Lilo, there were no other problems in the configuration – it’s all pretty basic stuff, and it detected my sound card, mouse, DVD drive with no troubles. As well as detecting my Realtek NIC, it even detected my onboard LAN which I don’t use as I can’t be bothered to find Windows drivers for it!
The last stage of the install presented me with a simple menu to configure a modem, PPP connection, PCMCIA support, the system timezone, and a quick note to the effect that the system was installed, and all I had to do was reboot, login as root and use ‘passwd’ to set a root password. Job done. To get to this stage it took me a grand total of nineteen minutes!
Starting up…
The first time I booted Vector, it took a little longer to start that I was expecting but this was my own fault – I specified that the network card should use DHCP for configuration (forgetting that I disabled the DHCP server on my router the day before XO)
A quick ‘netconfig’ and a ‘shutdown -r now’ and I was impressed by the boot speed. I tried to ping my router, and it worked fine; tried to ping google and it didn’t work. Then I remembered that I had also disabled the name server on my router, so used Nano (a nice easy to use text editor like Pico) to edit /etc/resolv.conf and put in my ISP’s nameserver inplace of my router.
X (Version 4.3)
I realised at this stage that I should be able to start up X since it asked about some screen resolutions etc. during the installation process. ‘startx’ did the required trick and up popped a nice menu for me to start from. The only problem was the mouse didn’t work. I moved down to quit using the cursor keys and was released back into the land of the console. A quick check of the XFree log revealed that it was attempting to use /dev/input/mice for the mouse device but the X log file said this device didn’t exist. I noted that there was a /dev/mouse link, and tried to use readlink to find out where it pointed to only to find that readlink wasn’t installed. Before I tried anything else I simply changed the mouse device to /dev/mouse in the X config file and it worked. I noticed however that upon rebooting the machine X would fail to open the mouse device again (this time using /dev/mouse) and hence it wouldn’t work. This happened every time I booted vector and I usually spent a while trying different devices until one worked. I have realised since however that after a short period of time X will find the device when it starts and it works fine from then on. I’m not sure what the problem is but my guess is that it’s something to do with USB hotplugging.
An interesting point to make here is that it did detect my graphics card and set it up with no troubles (GeForce FX 5800) – something that rarely seems to happen with this card.
Anyway, back to the menu – the following options are presented when you start up X:
– Fluxbox (ver. 0.1.14)
– IceWM (ver. 1.2.7)
– XFCE (ver. 3.8.18 – unfortunately not the new and much improved XFCE 4)
– XTerm
– Edit Menu
– Exit Stage Left
– Shutdown the System
Again I was pleased to find some humour involved – it always makes the OS more enjoyable to use (remember some of the classic moments in BeOS?). I was a little dissapointed that neither KDE or Gnome are installed but not surprised either – Vector aims to be a small distribution, and you can’t be small with either of those around. What was more dissapointing for me was that WindowMaker
was nowhere to be seen – by far my favourite of the ‘lite’ window managers.
The menu options are all self explanatory, the only two gripes I have with this menu are the fact that “Edit Menu” simply brings up a text editor to edit an incredibly long file representing the menu, and shutdown will make a beep and make the screen flicker quickly but then nothing appears to happen for several seconds. In this time the system has actually begun the shutdown sequence and after the aforementioned seconds have elapsed then the console will reappear showing the end of the process. You may be wondering why I mention this but the first time it happened I didn’t think that clicking
shutdown had really had any effect, and hence clicked it another 10 times before I realised it was actually doing as requested. Feedback would be nice 🙂
I tested out the window managers available to ensure they were all functioning correctly and soon settled for fluxbox. I noticed during this testing that closing a window manager does not close the programs you were running, something which makes the system appear ‘messy.’ All three of the managers included a bunch of (not bad looking) icons on the desktop for some of the most useful apps
installed. These included links to the CD Drive and Floppy, a file manager (xfe), a word processor (the great abiword), a web browser (firebird) and even a CD burner (X-CD-Roast).
Out of the list of icons (see screenshot above) the two that I was most impressed with and that are a real plus for Vector, are linNetwork, which launches xfsamba – allowing you to browse a windows network, and Software Plaza.
This is one feature Vector can be especially proud of. I opened it up to be greeted with a simple menu for managing packages, allowing you to install and remove packages, as well as retrieve packages via ftp. If you choose this option it will connect to the Vector ftp site in the background then it will present you with a list of extras/updates for your system. You can then simply select a couple (or all) of the packages and leave it to get on with the downloading and installing of them for you.
Basically everything the average user would need is catered for with a great quality specific application. There is no application redundancy – and although some users may prefer more of a choice, I like the fact that there is one great application assigned to a particular task, rather than a whole load of not so good apps. The only areas not covered are games, graphics and video (xv being used to view images, but nothing available to create them).
I noticed when running software plaza that the packages available included MPlayer and also the DVD libs such as libdvdcss. I clicked on these and let it do its thing. Once they were installed I tried to launch MPlayer by typing ‘gmplayer &’ in a console, only to be faced with a black interface. I remembered from using Slackware that for some reason the first time you run mplayer each X session you have to tell it to use a skin (the default one!), so I killed the process and launched it again using ‘gmplayer -skin default &’ and it popped up as expected. If this seems like hassle, just set up a launcher for it!. I opened the preferences, set the DVD drive to /dev/cdrom (Vector doesn’t set up a /dev/dvd symlink) and set the video output to use xv. Then put my Matrix DVD in the drive, hit play and it started up beautifully (I actually got a bit wrapped up in it and left it on while writing up the rest of this review).
Overall Performance
Vector’s speed has been very impressive, the system boots in about 20 seconds, and X starts up in less than 5 (it was slightly faster before installing the nvidia drivers as I haven’t disabled the splash screen) and applications take next to no time to start (abiword takes about a second). The speed reminds me of the responsiveness of BeOS, which is never a bad thing.
I decided to install the nvidia drivers (from www.nvidia.com) to see if there would be any problems using hardware acceleration for OpenGL. Downloading and installing them took literally about 2 minutes (thanks to nvidia’s great new installer) and I started X again and ran glxgears to test the hardware acceleration was functioning correctly. 8400 FPS. Faster than I usually get with Slackware (about 7000 FPS) – this would lead me to believe (along with the fact that Vector flies along anyway) that Vector would make a perfect OS for running WineX (see www.transgaming.com for more info).
Another factor of performance is stability, and since Vector is based on Slackware, it has possibly the most stable Linux base available to build on. Vector is rock solid and I have experienced no crashes whilst running it.
In Conclusion
The downloadable version of Vector Linux 4 is a fantastic distribution, especially when you consider the fact that the size of the ISO is only 229MB. It comes with all the software an average user would need but none of the extras.
It gives you a very fast and very stable system and doesn’t require a whole lot of configuration to get running. Aside from the problems with my mouse and the keyboard stopping during installation (see the Installation section above), I had no troubles with Vector, and hence it is an appropriate distribution for those with a least a little experience of Linux. For example, by default Vector boots to the console and a newbie would probably not know that they need to make a simple change in /etc/inittab in order to boot straight to X. Being a Slackware user, I was able to see the similarities between the Vector installer and the Slackware installer. The only thing that seemed to really be missing was the option to mount existing Windows partitions on boot (which is available in Slackware). Instead you must edit /etc/fstab manually to achieve this goal.
Vector has definately become one of the best Linx options out there, and I urge anyone with a mild curiosity to give it a try. The Deluxe edition is still very cheap “Only $22.97usd and INCLUDES PRINTED USER GUIDE ! (plus shipping & handling)” (from the website) and with the extras on top of this solid base I think it would be a much more attractive purchase than any other commercial Linux option.
Scores:
Installation: 7/10
Hardware Support: 9/10 (it got all my stuff)
Ease of use: 8/10 (easier than Slack but maybe not for newbies)
Features: 8/10 (Deluxe would probably score a 10 here)
Stability: 9/10
Speed: 10/10 (fastest distro I’ve used yet)
Overall: 8.5/10
If having Gnome and KDE installed for you is deemed worthy of charging money on top of the basic installation, doesn’t that imply that installing software is difficult or painful enough to have it done for you?
In my opinion, Vector Linux is a good product, and it’s userbase is really happy. They could get away with charging for “vanilla” cds, along with tech support, as a way to promote development.
Even if such a business model doesn’t work for other distributions, I can’t imagine bundling KDE and Gnome working and asking folks to buy cds and providing support wouldn’t. There’s no more incentive in the former case than in the latter.
People need this information. There is a big differrence between fast on a 400 mhz p2 and fast on a 1.2 ghz AMD proccesor.
The previous vector 3.2 was the quickest and most stable I’ve tried
on my 1700xp bar none.If they ever get a good installer they’ll have
a cracker of a distro.
I’ve run this distribution on a PII 266 with 64 MB RAM up to an AMD XP 1500+ with 256 MB RAM. Speed is fine in Fluxbox, IceWM, and XFce. Dropline-gnome was easily installed for the faster machines as well as many other packages using swaret.
It’s a linux.
It’s faster because it doesn’t load all the services
you might want (httpd, mysqld) at startup and the desktop is
quick because it gives you the choice of some lightweight wm
(icewm, fluxbox or xcfe (an older one not 4.0 yet)
kde and gnome are a bit heavier.
My wish for a linux distro is next years debian now 🙂
just apt-get something new and hope that it doesn’t break.
I think there is more to it then just not loading services, I used to have redhat and I installed enlightenment and turned off all of the services(maybe exept for like ssh), and was very slow compared to VL
I have both Fedora and Slackware installed on the same 1.4 Ghz machine. Slackware feels much faster than RHL (and VL is slackware-based) in almost everything. Boots way faster, shuts down faster, apps loading faster (especially the kde ones)… I still like Fedora as it has other advantages (e.g. pref panels for almost everything, more available binaries), however my main linux (when I feel like using linux) continues to be Slackware, as of 2 months ago.
How come I can’t setup my partitions like this root, swap and home ? I installed it but for some reason it uses only hda1 for everything and hda5 for swap. Anyone know how to get this working the way I want it ?
For sure there are speed differences between Linux distros. Important things are optimization (Slack uses -march=i486 -mcpu=i686), choices of compilation parameters, e.g. for KDE and glibc and last but not least architectural differences (eg non-PAM vs PAM, BSD-style initialization vs SysV, etc.). Slackware feels much faster than most distros, Pat seems to make the right choices.
It’s pretty damned fast. I am running 500 mhz, 256 meg ram, and 7200 rpm drive. Fairly old hardware that is sluggish with SuSE/RH. Vector is one of the quickest *nix I’ve tried outside of FreeBSD. Admittedly I’m using IceWM and I’m more used to Windowmaker and KDE. The boot time is certainly quick and I added the 2.6 test 9 kernel and everything runs better than ever. Some apps like firebird are still a bit sluggish to load, I think that’s a program / compiler issue rather than anything a distro can cure. I’m currently d/l’ing KDE and if that runs good, I will certainly buy the CD with the extra apps.
I’ve tried lunar, crux, and some others which are also speedy. The downside of lunar and friends is that you really need broadband. Crux gives a good base but is a general pain. Overall seems Vector is a good perfomance distro and I can recompile everything gradually for O3 and i686. Closest to my idea of a perfect distro, only lacking an intelligent system like bsd ports/Arch/moonbase/etc.
You don’t have to pay for KDE or Gnome. This is a misconception that I also had before joining.
The SOHO version, which includes KDE, is a larger compilation of software for use in small offices and home offices. The standard VL does not include this and is much smaller.
You can download SOHO, just like the standard VL if you want. However, if you would like to help the project or have a dialup modem, you can order a CD.
SOHO 4.0, the companion to the VL 4.0 reviewed here, is still in the works.
The current “For Sale” CD, VL 4.0 Deluxe, is standard VL with the addition of many packages you would normally have to download after install. This makes sense for people with dialup connections and gives a small bonus to people who buy the CD’s.
We really aren’t trying to put one over on anyone.
Mutiny
With the current installer, I am afraid you can’t have separate partitions for /boot, /root and /home without tricking it. It is meant to be easily installable for the average user. Most users have problems simply dealing with a separate swap partition, IMHO.
You can, however, leave empty partition for your future /home (for example). Then after install you can format it, copy everything over to the new partition and update /etc/fstab.
In the next version, possibly the SOHO 4.0 release, you will have an advanced install option for features such as this.
Mutiny
Does anyone know what it means for Slackware 9.1 to be Linux 2.6 compatible? I downloaded and compiled a test kernel from a 9.0 distribution and booted fine (as far as I can tell).
Slightly back on topic, I think what makes slackware really nice is the way it’s nicely stripped down on install, but is easy to add functionality. Development-wise, however, I won’t be giving up RedHat anytime soon. HW vendors use those distribution releases as a standard to support development of their drivers.
Hi guys,
That was my first ever review and it was only when I went to my gf’s for the weekend after submitting the article that I realised I’d forgotten to tag my specs on at the end. Anyway – here they are :
Asus A7V8X mobo
Athlon XP 2400+ (running at 2.2GHz)
512 MB PC2700
GeForce FX 5800
ATA66 (!) primary IDE master, with an ATA133 primary slave (this doesn’t help speed at all)
Those are all the stats that should matter but I should point out that when I say Vector is fast – it is FAST. It’s considerably faster to boot and load apps than Slackware 9.1 which is also on my machine.
As for KDE and Gnome, I think KDE is available as a series of packages (if not from vector then the slackware ones should work fine) and I believe that you can use dropline Gnome with it – I installed this on Slackware 9.1 and it’s not really not hard – you download the installer, run it and leave over night. voila!
Does anyone know what it means for Slackware 9.1 to be Linux 2.6 compatible?
It has the alsa utilities + libraries, up-to-date coreutils and other software that supports the 2.6 kernel.
Speed is a combination of several factors. Some can be controlled immediately others can not. Generally, if you want speed, you must be willing to give up the convenience of binaries and binary based distributions. Yeap, I said it. I don’t care what binary based distribution you use, as long as your binaries a compiled for a general and most often old (i386, i486, i586), they will always be slower (dog slow) and usually larger than most sourced based distributions and sometimes even unstable. Period.
Very good source based distributions provide you with the flexibility to tune your binaries to you system’s specific architecture, and also the options to enable certain flags. If you know what you are doing you could gain significant improvements memory and processor wise by manipulating these flags correctly.
For example, ever since I started using the -Os flag (man gcc for more info) I’ve noticed memory usage has reduced drastically by more than half. Something that had never before happened in my usage of Linux. At first, I thought it was my monitors and sensors acting up. I later observed that the -O2/3 options used by many binary, even some, source distros drastically enlarges the size of binary. The benefits of that are, they claim, good runtime optimizations. But the drawback is that larger binaries are slower to load and also Runtime optimizations aren’t visible to desktop users, most of us. Not to mention that most binary based distros don’t strip debugging sysmbols from their binaries again, increasing it size and slowness.
To cut the long story short, it will be a while before binary based distros match the speed and flexibility given by source based distro. Binary based distros provide convenience and quick installation. True source based distros are horrible to set up, and very large packages (openoffice) are time consuming to install. But the benefit is a streamlined package compiled and built for your system, and more often than not it’s much stable than the one built for a general arch, with debugging symbols enabled, and generally large bins.
Of course, there are other tricks to speed up your system. But I’m in no mood to discuss those. Do a google. If you have the time, more often than not, it’s better to compile packages from the source using the appropriate flags for your system. If not for anything for stability. A few months ago there was a package compiled with a general arch that was very on stable on the Athlons or Athlon-XP. I can’t seem to remember the package. I remember pulling several strands of my hair of before the bug was made known to me. Of course most people don’t have the time for all this. Convenience and ease is tempting but don’t come complaining that your system is slow. 😛
I don’t want to start a flamewar, but I think source distributions are overrated. Using too much optimizations can break things. The problem is that if you use your own optimizations binaries don’t get the amount of testing to which most binary distributions are exposed. I would rather choose to use a binary distribution which is fast and stable.
Good job! I am enjoying the reader participation here at OS News.
I would like to see a review on the current state of the Hurd, anyone up for that task?
Does VL provide sources or one still has to look for
them elsewhere?
IIRC the sources weren’t on the CD but I think they are available. The reason they weren’t there is to save space.
I know this is a little OT, but I would be very interested in an overview of how far the Hurd has progressed too.
The sourceforge page shows around zero activity…
http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/index.php?report=months&group_…
With no CVS commits since march 2003. So is the Hurd dead, or is the activity elsewhere?
RE: Speed: Source based vs Binary based
I’ve never found that software compiled for an older arch is less stable. Slackware is a good example of this. What problems have you found?
The really big speed gains from recompiling for more recent chips come from apps like mplayer which will make full use of mmx, sse, 3dnow, sse2 etc. Most other progs run a little faster but it’s no big deal imho.
I downloaded the VL 4.0 ISO (yes, the MD5 checksum matched OK) and booted from the CD. After going through a few (colourful) text screens, I got to the bit where it goes to verify the distro and it printed “SEARCHING….”. 30 seconds later, it gave up and claimed it couldn’t find the distro !
I exited to the shell, typed “mount /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom” and
sure enough, the CD was there (complete with the .bz2 file it specifically said it couldn’t find). Looks like it couldn’t locate the CD device to me (it wasn’t mounted when I escaped to the shell). Note that I have managed to successfully install Slackware 9.1, Red Hat 8.0 and 9 and Fedora Core Test 3 on the same machine, so I think they’ve got a problem with their installer…
I’m interested in trying this distro out – I’ve been using Mandrake, but am finding that it’s getting a bit “old”, and the comments about Vectors speed are quite appealling.
I want Gnome installed, but as I only have a dialup connection, I would have to buy the deluxe CD. That’s okay and no problem at all, but I read somewhere that the Gnome requires a bit of extra downloading. Can someone confirm whether or not this is true, and if so, how much is needed?
Thanks.
So far I think vector is a good distro, I just had 2 small problems.
1) It seems to me that I can’t login as root using the graphical login. I’ll try again since I re-installed to try and clear up some changes I made.
2) Despite the great hardware detection it insists on loading X in 800×600 instead of 1024×768.
Both are problems that I can probably fix with a little editing. I’ve since dled Slack also, really just trying to find a distro I want to use.
Isn’t the Hurd using GNU’s savannah? ( http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/hurd/ )
But it really looks a bit dead when one examines the ChangeLogs on their website ( http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/ ).
Anonymous wrote: “I downloaded the VL 4.0 ISO (yes, the MD5 checksum matched OK) and booted from the CD. After going through a few (colourful) text screens, I got to the bit where it goes to verify the distro and it printed “SEARCHING….”. 30 seconds later, it gave up and claimed it couldn’t find the distro !”
I had a similar problem when I installed VL3.2 SOHO. When I tried to install again, I chose not to verify (confident – perhaps foolishly – that the ISO was fine), and the installation went smoothly.
I later mucked up my system to the extent that a reinstall was necessary, so I took the opportunity to switch to Libranet 2.7. However, VL 3.2 SOHO was the fastest distribution I had ever loaded on my aging laptop (Celeron 400), and when VL 4.0 SOHO comes out, I suspect I will be switching back.
if i get a mandrake… shut off all non-necessary services … (only cupsd required) … use a light wm like xfce … will i have a system as fast as Vector?
considering mandrake is for i586?
or have vector done something else too?
t
The Vector Linux development team should strive to make this distro as bug-free as possible. I’ve understood that Vector is targeted to non-expert users, since more experienced users are likely to go for Slackware. Absolute beginners will abandon Vector as soon as something refuses to work as expected – they are not likely to be as resourceful as the reviewer when encountering similar problems.
I like light-weight distros, but at the moment I rather use Morphix Light-GUI because it offers easy software installation via apt-get/Synaptic. However, if I needed to install Linux to a PC with slow dial-up connection, I might opt for Vector Linux. Keep up the good work and make Vector a distro that even clueless beginners like me can enjoy!
“But it really looks a bit dead when one examines the ChangeLogs on their website (http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/ ).”
Perhaps it _looks_ like he’s dead. But it actually isn’t. Though a stable release won’t come Anytime Soon (TM). There’s still development on the Hurd. I know one developer who’s busy with it. But he had to quit about 9 months ago and started again a while ago. Actually, one can ”beta test” it by dloading an ISO
For Vector 4.0 I just had to add module-init-tools package from linuxpackages site.
On HURD: thought linux really shifted the emphasis away from this one, with GNU going with Debian.
On Installer: I had the same CD prob. Rather than using mount command, I just made boot floppies and installed that way. It found the CDrom fine. My CDrom is so old that Slack 9 iso, for instance, won’t even boot on it.
On optimizations: the bsd style *nix and debian seem quick even though they don’t use heavy optimizations like source-based. I will have to try the gcc -Os, didn’t know it could be better than speed optimizations.
On VASM: I was able to change to GUI login screen with no probs. However, the WM select screen still appears even though I told VASM to use IceWM. This is a minor issue though, since tweaking .x files isn’t too painful.