Yoper Operating System (YOS), or Yoper GNU/Linux if you prefer, was an eye-opener even for someone who has used over fifty GNU/Linux distributions. Everything just seemed to work, and it was as simple as that. Could this be the answer to the Microsoft problem? Read More @ Linuxtimes.net.
Yoper: A next-generation OS?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Yoper was my distro of choice, I loved just about every thing in it, execpt; No project Utopia (HAL, DBus, UDev), and I could not sync my sony Clie with Yoper, abit of a downer. But with the beauty of linux, if I don’t like the distro I am on, I can change…..and I found Ubuntu. The one thing I miss about Yoper is KDE, and the speed.
~Alan
Please don’t start a flame over this, but personally I feel that you just can’t build a ‘simple’ OS using KDE, it has the look and the features, but lacks the simplicity. Too bad you can’t build such an OS with Gnome either, since it has the simplicity, but lacks the features. Although I’d like to see it the other way around, we will be stuck with MS Windows as the sole choice of OS for ‘normal’ PC users for the next few years.
Ok, so FreeBSD and kphone didn’t wanted to bring me some sound, and I had to replace my broken dragonfly install so I tried Solaris 10, Yoper and ProMephis. The anwsers?
Solaris 10: Found my nic during installation, however earlier I didn’t got an IP-address over DHCP in my old installation. Forgot about that so I thought something there wrong and that I wouldn’t like Solaris anyway so I replaced it without even trying at home. Stupid misstake, but I did it.
Yoper: Easy to install? Yes. Everything worked? Yes (almost), Fast? definitely.
_BUT_ “everything seemed to work”? well, I tried apt-get update followed by upgrade, and then it didn’t worked that great longer. Don’t ask me why they choosed RPM crap but they did. It took 1-2 minutes before the procedure even started, and after 1-4 packages the installation always crashed so I had to kill apt. Could I live with that? no.
So I tried ProMEPIS. Probably the best Linux dist there is, debian based but more modern. However my mic didn’t worked there either.
Anyway, if free unixes is what you are asking for go bsd, if a good unix experience is what you are asking for go macos.
Oh, and for x86 people who just want everything to work stay with windows. Sure there are a lot of x86 oses, however there are no good ones.
(The problem with sound and kphone oss/alsa gives dsps, kde artsd uses them and manage them for many programs at once. Kphone doesn’t use that functionallity. I tried to set the suspend timer in kde settings, suspending thru the artsd shell, running thru artsdsp, nothing worked. BSD gave me no sound at all with kphone, linux did without artsdsp but no mic, with artsdsp I had no sound thought. Sure the linux dists and so on are “free” as in beer (speach doesn’t matter that much for my usability), but on the other hand you have to climb mountains and swim over seas to actually get that one free beer… I wish I could afford a mac. Anyway, my machine will never see yoper again.)
I’m sure Yoper is a great distribution and all, but that article read like a damn informecial. “I have only touched on the surface of what Yoper is and can do, but just this makes it by far the best GNU/Linux distribution I have ever used” Awwww shadup.
Yet again the YALD cry goes out. Yet antoher and another and another….Will it ever end?
Not to mention that most of the ‘good’ things he mentioned about Yoper were applications you can install on any linux system!
Sort of like concluding distro x is better than distro y based on a screenshot!
As someone who has tried “over fifty GNU/Linux distributions”, I’m curious why the reviewer was so excited about such trivial things as Flash player and Nvidia drivers. Anyone who’s been around Linux for 4 years and has tried so many distributions would have surely come across a few that were able to take of these on the default install or shortly there after (SUSE 9.x is particularly good at this, in my experience).
It doesn’t help his credibility that on his personal blog site he has pictures of his new bong, either.
-G
cheap SUSE plagiarism.
The repositories are a mess, mirrors are slow, apt4rpm is slow, too much bleeding edge technology (I experienced hardcore system crashes), SUSE and Red Hat are mentioned in various places (looks messy, and doesn’t repsect the trade marks), the support for my native language is lacking (dutch) and I don’t think distributing software against the wishes of the vendor (Flash plug-in must be downloaded from a official mirror) should be a plus. Furthermore: where is this speed increase I should’ve experienced?
I’m afraid the people writing these reviews don’t look beyond the first half hour of use.
It doesn’t help his credibility that on his personal blog site he has pictures of his new bong, either.
-G
Very good point! 19 year stoners evaluation of a linux distro who names his bongs…credibility problem agreed.
I stopped reading this when I read this line
“I’d expect this of a Microsoft OS where they don’t care if the user knows what is going on,”
<sarcasm>I love it when Linux Zealots attempt to make Linux:Windows Comparisons…. It always shows how blatantly unbiased they are…</sarcasm>
Speaking of which, I don’t recall one instance where MSFT hasn’t had a status bar indicating the status of an Install…. DOS even had one! Better yet… most windows installs tell you how much time left in the install…
It could be a good review, but why draw comparisons to Microsoft’s OSs
vaguely remembering my brief experience with Yoper was the installer was not very customizable, i prefer to keep a seperate /boot (hda1) and /usr (hda3) disk partitions and any distro that does not provide the ability of configuring mount options during the install gets the axe from me…
Agree with ghostwalker – how can you try 50 Linux distributions and *not* know that almost all commercial ones – certainly Mandrake and SuSE, and I think the smaller commercial ones too – include the nvidia drivers and other useful proprietary stuff?! Sheesh.
BTW, aren’t Real distinctly unhappy with people who distribute their codecs without distributing the player and abiding by the license etc? I doubt Yope want to attract *too* much attention lest it becomes unpleasant, lawyer-shaped attention…
actually, that’s a point – one thing Microsoft’s quite good at is status bars. The Windows XP install countdown timer thing is just spookily accurate. This kind of thing is apparently more difficult than you’d think as an end-user – I’ve read some hacker discussions of how to get installation status bars accurate, and apparently it’s not straightforward.
I tried this ages ago and it seemed rubbish. Maybe they’ve improved it?
actually, that’s a point – one thing Microsoft’s quite good at is status bars. The Windows XP install countdown timer thing is just spookily accurate.
Err… not in my experience. Maybe my computer is just slow.
This kind of thing is apparently more difficult than you’d think as an end-user – I’ve read some hacker discussions of how to get installation status bars accurate, and apparently it’s not straightforward.[/i]
I agree it must be hard to get the countdown to be accurate. You would have to do mini benchmarks on disk block reads/writes, even then with a filesystem you can’t be very accurate.
^^^ Second to last paragraph should be italicised.
Heh heh. That’s funny. Thanks for the laughs. Can we afford to be serious for a minute and say that ALL operating systems have problems?
There’s no need to go into a long tirade of the problems with Windows. We all know what they are, even those of you who are in denial.
I started using Yoper a few weeks ago. Its definately the best Linux distro I have tried to date. Only two problems:
1. My ATI card does not have any 3D functionality. I guess it isnt the fault of Yoper, since ATI doesnt seem to work well with Linux.
2. I am having trouble changing my boot loader to default to Windows.
“There’s no need to go into a long tirade of the problems with Windows. We all know what they are, even those of you who are in denial.”
The same goes for those Linux users in denial as well.
I’ve read several “articles” about Yoper, but every last one of them read like a freshman cheerleading training pamphlet.
I haven’t heard many positives about this distribution from real people. It seems the cheerleaders are the only ones who like it.
I can’t really say anything about Yoper itself since I haven’t tried it (don’t plan to either), but it sure seems to have a nice propaganda machine plowing forward on its behalf.
I can’t really say anything about Yoper itself since I haven’t tried it (don’t plan to either), but it sure seems to have a nice propaganda machine plowing forward on its behalf.
Yeah they need a slogan like “Yoper the prefered Linux Distro of Pot heads worldwide! Installs in less time then it takes to score a dime bag.”
I have tried Yoper two times using two different versions and each time I had nothing but trouble. Not only did things not detect correctly, but applications seemed surprisingly buggie and that includes the xserver…
For me the whole thing was a mess, a mess i wasn’t willing to sit through and try and fix…
To all, who have had good experiences with Yoper? My hat’s off to you…
Didn’t yoper used to use tgz? When and why did they make the switch to rpms?
…article. It is boring when someone writes an article about distros and just ends up (half the time) praising programs you can use with any system and/or which originate from other distros and work best in their ‘native’ enviroment. Well he didnt convince me…a working Flash player and Nvidia driver arent the big enlightment imho.
I tried it a while ago, thought it sounded amazing from all the propaganda I heard.
It was terrible.
No version of any linux distro I ever tried felt so sloppy, bad, and a hassle. It wasn’t fast either. Slower then my slack and gentoo installs. It also felt stripped away of features, they needed to in order to fit all the crap they threw in there. I’m not sure myself.. but isn’t it illegal to install nvidia drivers, real codecs, and flash without the permission of the company? Something I doubt Yoper has.
The mix of slack, yoper, debian, suse, and redhat install tools is pure chaos. It was horrible. I booted it once and never again. I grabbed some old slack disk to just overwrite it( I already had paritions for gentoo, FC2, and slack, I just didn’t want that PoS on my computer)
Its using of YaST and SaX is just upsetting. I wish they would leave SuSe’s features alone, they are great and SuSe deserves credit.
I think I’ll requote this zealot.
“over fifty GNU/Linux distributions” Very unlikely.
“added some of the most popular features from other major distributions” I like the use of the word ‘added’, more like took.(persumambly w/o permission)
“It is a fairly popular distribution.” Since when? Not outside Yoper Fansites.
“Yoper’s video/mouse/keyboard configuration utility, called SaX2, is one of the most advanced I have seen.” Yoper’s tool? why give them credit?
“with the text “Linux. Refined” underneath it. I was already starting to feel that way”
“I was browsing around my usual sites when I saw this sudden explosion of action! Oh my God, what was that!? Oh! Its the Flash intro. I’d never seen it before, even though it was a site I visit regularly, because I’d never installed the Flash plugin before.” 50 linux distros takes how many years? never installed flash?
“Yoper comes with a multimedia program called Kaffeine. Kaffeine is one of the best movie players for GNU/Linux I have ever seen, and though I’m an mplayer fan myself I’m going to consider installing it just for the Real feeds it handles. Oh, am I getting ahead of myself again? Allow me to explain: It handles Real feeds by default. No need for the binary off of Real’s site. Yoper comes with all the codecs for various movies that I have encoded over the years without having to download any additional information. Add a simple GUI and playlist editor on top of that and you have yourself the recipe for an excellent program. ” Again.. misplaced credit.. Again I doubt that they have liceance rights… praise the media player? I would if it was yoper’s tool, its not.
“Yoper also includes the OpenOffice.org suite, amaroK, xmms, YaST2, and a complete set of KDE tools for general desktop uses such as IM, e-mail and web browsing – but if that isn’t enough for you, don’t worry. Want to install some more packages? Easiest thing in the world: Use Synaptic. Haven’t heard of it? Don’t worry, its easy. A simple GUI with well divided categories of packages to choose from. Select the packages you want installed, upgraded, or uninstalled, and then click “Apply”. Synaptic will automatically download the new programs for you from Yoper’s apt repository, including any dependancies. Do you like it yet? What if I told you it used apt, but handled RPM files? Now do you like it? You get the best of both worlds – apt’s ability to handle packages and support for the ever-popular RPM” Yoper does this! If this was a brand-new homemade OS, I would understand the hype, but its a linux distro! Its expected!. The reassuring of the reader also worries me… He then asks if you like it, and trys to convince you to like it.
“So what do I like about Yoper? Pretty much everything.” I can’t say that about any linux distro, I feel linux is a little easily broken, and can get messy very quickly. Slack, FC, SuSe, Mandrake, gentoo, anything. Yoper takes that and amplifies it 5 times. People here have already posted how a single package can upset the system and hurt it.
” I have only touched on the surface of what Yoper is and can do, but just this makes it by far the best GNU/Linux distribution I have ever used” I don’t even need to say anything..
Sorry about that.. This just pisses me off. All of its positives are just taken features from others, with no credit going to them.
If you want a good desktop solution grab a copy of Mandrake, Fedora Core, Ubuntu, Xandros, SuSe, etc.
(Debain, Slackware, Arch, Gentoo fall more in the workstation crowd for me…)
The above is opinion of my personal expirances and opinions.
Ah, it uses tgz( it includes packagetools, installpkg, removepkg, etc.)
Yet, it also uses apt, rpm, Raidtools from Red Hat, Kudzu Hardware recognition from Red Hat, Startup scripts from Red Hat, Hwsetup from Knoppix, Sax2, Yast2 from SuSE, Apt tools from Debian, Synaptic from Connectiva.
Forgot the mention that last one. its great mix of apt and rpm? Comes from Connectiva linux.
Its speed(which I expiranced none of.. but w/e) comes from Linux From Scratch. Its uhh.. basically a sloppy, unorginized, unstable, and possibly illegal Linux Distro.
(ah.. but it doesn’t wanna be called a linux distro.. Its Yoper Operating System.. who am I kidding by calling it linux?)
I’m afraid the people writing these reviews don’t look beyond the first half hour of use.
Exactly. I don’t mean this review particularly but I’m all fed up with these so called Linux distro reviews where the review is mostly just about installing the distro and then looking around for maybe a day or a week, and then comparing the short experience to MS Windows, and that’s it.
Nowadays most major Linux distros are as easy to install as MS Windows, if not easier, and if they are not, the ones interested in those more difficult distros are likely to handle those installers just ok. The basic distro configuration is a more interesting thing to write about and compare. But even that basic configuration is something you’re not supposed to spend most of your time at, what ever the distro is (if you really use it, not just test it for a few days…). But what about real long time usage? What about stability and security? What about the quality of available packages and repositories? What about support, guides, community etc? Those are things that matter when you really start using and administering a Linux distro.
I also doubt if Yoper is really so much faster than what the hyped Yoper optimizations are supposed to make it be. I’ve tested Yoper long time ago. Ok, some things ran quite fast, but generally it wasn’t much faster than any average distro out there. Yoper is rather ok in itself, though. But IMHO, there’s always been too much hype around it, when in reality many of the Yoper concepts, like mixing various packaging formats etc. seem just potential trouble to me.
“Linux. Refined”
That’s hilarious.
Wow! you all need to calm down. I have used YOper and it has been a good distro for me. The yoper team which is lead by one person(I do not know the name right off) has a good distribution and a good community around it. A lot of changes and improvements have and are being made. The first few versions were a little rough but the last one was pretty solid. I will add it was very fast on my system.I will use it again soon I am sure.I should say I did not read the review but I will.
Everyone needs to calm down, sit back and think about things before they say them. I want to comment here to make a few things clear:
1. I’m well aware that commercial distributions come with drivers already installed and codecs and whatnot. I even mentioned it in my article (I haven’t read the published one myself, so the editors may have chosen to take it out).
2. I didn’t just use it for half an hour and praise it as the best I’ve ever used. I used it for two weeks and found that it met all of my needs in those two weeks. I also did not claim it was the best distribution ever. I said it was the best distribution I’d used so far from the point of view of a general desktop user. This is true.
3. Everyone who is sitting back and taking potshots (pun intended) about my bong and my credibility would be better informed by doing a Google search for my name. Yes, I smoke weed. I choose to not keep it secret. However a quick search will show you I have a lot of experience reviewing distributions.
4. Why does everyone feel the need to tell me “You can just do this to get X program working” or “its easy to configure that with X distribution” or “X distribution does it better I can’t believe you praised this setup”? Is it because you need attention and feel you have to prove you are better than me? How petty. I’m well aware that you can easily install other programs of your choice. I’m well aware that other distributions may be better in certain areas. However, we can’t all know that and most people who wish to use a system don’t want to be using a million different distributions and have to learn about a million different programs. Yoper comes with a nice layout of default programs that handle most of the things the end-users I know need to do. Which other distributions do this better or worse makes no difference, because I am evaluating the product as a whole not in a specific fashion.
Unless you have valid points regarding what was said and wish to discuss them in a mature fashion, I will not respond to them. However, if anyone here actually has a specific problem they wish to discuss with me in a reasonable tone, I will be happy to do my best to correct the problem. Flames and immature posts will be ignored as they ever have been.
“3. Everyone who is sitting back and taking potshots (pun intended) about my bong and my credibility would be better informed by doing a Google search for my name. Yes, I smoke weed. I choose to not keep it secret. However a quick search will show you I have a lot of experience reviewing distributions.”
Quick remark:
What you do in your free time shall be of no ones concern. The point that you managed to have a large quantity of reviews written doesn’t necessarily mean that they are good in quality. They might be, I did not read them. My point is that your reasoning is not conclusive.
“Yes, I smoke weed. I choose to not keep it secret”
Good for you, I do too smoke weed and don’t see a reason why I (or anyone else for that matter) should hide it.
Funny thing isn’t it?, drinking alcohol is socially acceptable, sometimes every encouraged, and people who smoke weed are seen as scumbags and the lowest of society, even though alcohol causes millions of deaths a year, brings out the most violent behavior from people and kills braincells, which are sideeffects weed doesn’t have, when you tell people you feel like having a joint they say DUDE! don’t do that!, let’s go have a beer instead.
It’s just amazing
I’ve settled for Yoper and never looked back.
Seems like there are two people who disagrees with the rest – the reviewer and I.
Masochist I am not – wouldn’t change this distro for nothing. Yes I tried Ubuntu for 1 month.
My only hope Yoper carries on getting better and better – and that responsibility lies with the end-users; everyone willing to help and contribute are always welcome – that is what “Yoper” (Your operating System) stands for.
Despite people’s impression: there is no elitism or “RTFM” attitude there .. or “we are the best other distro sucks” – people respect choice all the same. Yoper is a very fast distro with at least everything I need.
I thought thier treatment of the community at the time of thier initial release was shoddy at best. After using the the linux community for beta testers they didn’t release a free iso saying instead “We didn’t make it for geeks!” No, geeks made it for them.
Very well – how about the points I made, about there being a good reason other distros don’t include Real codecs, and it being a legal one? About your complete failure to produce *any* kind of substance to support your conclusion? It seems the review may have been edited down, but the published version basically says this: “it installs nvidia drivers, OMG I AM TEH AMAZED! it has SuSE’s configuration tools, OMG THIS R0X0RZ! it installs the Flash plugin, OMG I’M GONNA DIE OF AMAZEMENT! it uses Kaffeine as a default media player, I’M EJACULATING AS WE SPEAK! this is the best Linux ever.” There’s precious little substance in there at all, given that I could open a box copy of Mandrake, install it, and have precisely the same experience with the sole difference of Real codecs, which no-one can include safely, AFAIK. (Yes, Kaffeine is the default KDE media player on Mandrake). So *what* makes Yoper so amazing as to justify your conclusion? Because whatever it is, it ain’t apparent from the review.
Yast and Sax2 are GPL, Yoper is free to use them as they see fit. Nvidia has said that as long as distro maintainers don’t edit the binaries or anything, they are free to repackage the Nvidia drivers. It is done for Fedora (nvidia-glx.rpm), Debian (nvidia-glx.deb), Ubuntu, Mepis and numerous others. Does anyone here have proof they don’t have permission to distribute Flash?
So, the only problem I see is the Real codecs, which would be trivial to remove.
I’ve read the whole article and there’s nothing that beats the crap out of Debian, Ubuntu or Slackware. KDE based distribution. Well, just you wait for Kubuntu. 😀
Well, I tried Yoper because it was supposed to be fast and easy and great. However, despite using SAX2 it was unable to configure X, which SuSE 9.1 did automatically right. Not being able to configure X means it’s not a good distribution for me.
Is for people like the “author” of this “article” to take a hike.
The substantive points you didn’t appear to comment on seem to include, but certainly aren’t limited to:
Your remarks about the install process were that there was no progress bar. What about other’s comments that there is too little choice in the install, such as mount points? Is it newbie friendly only, or are we allowed to specify where /home/user goes? Does it repartition well? Dual boot? Can we specify packages at all, or is it only “full install of the cd”
Repositories. Have you tried a full upgrade of the system? Did it break anything? Have you been able to install everything you might conceivably want without issue? According to distrowatch tetex doesn’t even come installed, which seems odd, and would annoy all the linux users I know since they work mainly in the academic sciences.
How about a quick mention that if you use, say, firefox, plugins tend to get handled very well. And, eg libranet does most if not all of the codec stuff that seemed to surprise you so much, as would gentoo, from what I remember, albeit they may require you to download files from official sources.
So, by giving 10/10 to it, you’re saying that, in essence, it can’t get any better, despite you saying it is flawed with problems that you think can and should be fixed. And having to alternate between browsers to get java working….?
How about addressing people’s concerns about the treatment that yoper dished out to users and developers?
The informerical analogy made me smile. For some one who’s written all these articles, do you think it good practice to say:
my name is … and i’m here to tell you about …
cos I was half expecting you to be Troy Maclure, who we may have seen in such articles as….
I have used yoper for about a month until I got my brain sick because of permanent system hangup and no possibility to recompile the kernel. they simply didn’t offer the according tools for doing so on that cd – what I can’t say from any decent gentoo install.
for Info, I’ve got a amd athlon xp 1700+ processor on an ASUS kt7 board – stuffed with 512 mb of RAM (infineon, mark!) The provided kernel failed to run smoothly on this machine. It has had several issues with file system handling.
Oh, and something you probably don’t want to hear, Preston: I’d prefer a distribution which sticks to one and only one packaging mechanism. attempting to mix’em all together is not likely to give a smooth run, it rather confuses the hell out of the os and of the ppl.
I didn’t enjoy the installation procedure, as it didn’t offer partitioning, preselection of packges and what not – something your average gentoo offers without hassle.
ever looked at those “kernel tainted” messages the kernel spits out? I for one have found them to be very disturbing.
so *shrugs* It remains a nice try, but thats it.
Nothing you summed is making a difference,perhaps YAST.You might as well go directly for SuSE,which includes 2 dvd’s,1 is for the AMD64.Yoper doesn’t include anything the average modern distro doesn’t have,besides flash allready installed.Personally i turn of : java,javascript,referrer-logging,image-animations,block every ad and banner,if i wanted flash though it’s trivial to load the firefox plugin.Debian,especially with the new installer and upcoming Sarge makes a better contestant.For everyone else i would recommend Mandrake,which comes standard with security features Yoper only can dream of,besides Mandrake has a AMD64 version and and better (hardware) support.Hard to believe you actually wrote this review.I thought you could have done better.
I am here to say that I like Yoper . It is one of these distros which I call “One CD Distro” . It does not give you any choice except for the partition where to be installed. Yoper works fine and really fast on my PC . And it has most of the apps I want to see in a distro . Of course it is not ideal and has some weaknesses but this does not mean we all have to blame it for everything bad in the OSS world . And I like the nVidia driver preinstalled . This means one thing less to bother about . The only thing I added to my Yoper installation is Firefox . It would be nice to see qtparted in the next release too.
Vector Linux and Yoper are the best “One CD Distros” for me .
P.S. Despite trying many big distros Slackware is my favourite . It is not so lazy but what an experience !?! Peace!
the reviewer wrote his comments on his initial impressions
he test driver the distro and got enamoured and now gets massacred for oh-how-he-even-dare give a 10/10?
here we have a community of distro-bashers ready to take the “mine is better than thou” flag, dishing out anything that shows a bit of renewed enthusiasm.
is it your distro u r defending (like a football club) or is it the Linux cause you are promoting?
and the Linux is cause is one of varied choice and community dedication, participation and help. team-members of different distros helping each other.
you got a problem with yoper? do you know any better? can you offer your help fixing the issues – no? then just shut up – for as long as there is this very childish disparity the world at large with sneer cynically at the so-called “Linux movement”.
Be you a Mandrake, Fedora, Debian, Slack, Gentoo, Ubuntu or any distro-defending/distro-bashing user.
If Yoper was even the slightest as awful as some flames suggested. Why would I stick it? Why can’t someone have a good experience with it – when you haven’t.
“Oh he should have tried it a few more times until he gets a crash error”.
I’ve installed Fedora on my laptop and for 2 weeks have been having problems with it – what will be my gain flaming any positive reviews on Fedora? Didn’t work for me fine – let’s try something else ArchLinux perhaps? Linare? PLD? Or should I join your utterly intolerant clan?
this is @matt mostly
enjoy your oh-so-righteous attitude to Linux journalism, well done mate. I for one, am ashamed.
Your remarks about the install process were that there was no progress bar. What about other’s comments that there is too little choice in the install, such as mount points? Is it newbie friendly only, or are we allowed to specify where /home/user goes? Does it repartition well? Dual boot? Can we specify packages at all, or is it only “full install of the cd”[/i]
Full install, not much for mount point selection, it doesn’t ask you much during the install. A simplistic install, as it is meant for the standard desktop user. As I mentioned in my review, I rated this distribution 10/10 from the point of view of a standard desktop user. For myself, I prefer and still use Debian.
Repositories. Have you tried a full upgrade of the system? Did it break anything? Have you been able to install everything you might conceivably want without issue? According to distrowatch tetex doesn’t even come installed, which seems odd, and would annoy all the linux users I know since they work mainly in the academic sciences.
I did not try an upgrade. It is the one thing I did not do. I didn’t see the point, actually. I don’t upgrade unless I need to. I did, however, install all the programs I wanted easily enough. The lack of tetex didn’t really bother me – I didn’t even notice it.
How about a quick mention that if you use, say, firefox, plugins tend to get handled very well. And, eg libranet does most if not all of the codec stuff that seemed to surprise you so much, as would gentoo, from what I remember, albeit they may require you to download files from official sources.
I didn’t use Firefox, I used Konqueror and Mozilla. I’m also aware that there are other distributions which handle all the codecs by default. Why do people keep on with the “my distro does this crap better”? I’m well aware of what does things and what doesn’t do things. Alone, any one of the features in Yoper could be matched by the features in any other distro. Together, though, the features make a combination that I deemed worthy of value for a standard desktop user.
by giving 10/10 to it, you’re saying that, in essence, it can’t get any better,
Ridiculous. By rating it 10/10 I am saying that it is currently the best I have found available to the regular user. It doesn’t mean that nothing can ever surpass it. It doesn’t mean there are no problems. It means there are no critical problems and that everything I needed to do went really well and was done easily. Too many people have something against giving a distribution 10/10 – but they don’t seem to mind when someone gives a distro 9.5/10 because thats “fair” in their minds. Well, I’m not afraid to give a distribution 10/10 if it is good.
The informerical analogy made me smile. For some one who’s written all these articles, do you think it good practice to say: my name is … and i’m here to tell you about …
Yes, I do. Or I wouldn’t have put it there. That was a bit of a silly question now wasn’t it?
How about addressing people’s concerns about the treatment that yoper dished out to users and developers?
I don’t see those concerns, to be honest with you. Please point them out. Do you mean the “Yoper used other distro features” crap? If so, then the discussion ends here. The idea of free software is that people can reuse things other people made. No need for a cry of “why do you give them credit for a program someone else made.” I was evaluating the distro as a whole not who made which specific program.
Oh, and something you probably don’t want to hear, Preston: I’d prefer a distribution which sticks to one and only one packaging mechanism. attempting to mix’em all together is not likely to give a smooth run, it rather confuses the hell out of the os and of the ppl.
What makes you think I don’t want to hear it? I also happen to prefer sticking with .deb packages, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are a lot of RPMs around the net and I know a lot of people who could find the RPM for something but couldn’t find the .deb and got discouraged from using Linux. Ergo, I noted it as a good thing because it allowed for use of the more popular RPM format. Yes, I’m aware that alien will allow me to turn RPMs into .debs. I have to add that because people seem to assume somehow that I’ve been living under a rock.
@AdamW: If you want your questions answered, try posting them in a less offensive not so much “I’m better than you and you suck and you can’t do anything right” post. I told you, I will continue to ignore posts like yours.
the reviewer wrote his comments on his initial impressions
he test driver the distro and got enamoured and now gets massacred for oh-how-he-even-dare give a 10/10?
Well i have read his comments here on OSnews,and find it hard to believe the reviewer and the one who’s posting here are one and the same.I mean his 10/10 isn’t exactly what you would call unbiased.His blog would have been better if he had taken more time to gatter more info from extensive testing.
here we have a community of distro-bashers ready to take the “mine is better than thou” flag, dishing out anything that shows a bit of renewed enthusiasm.
On the contrary.Most here are connaiseurs (i hope),and don’t like reviews that aren’t finished yet or targeted at fifth grade highshool audience.
If Yoper was even the slightest as awful as some flames suggested. Why would I stick it? Why can’t someone have a good experience with it – when you haven’t.
No problem with *any* OS.As you might have noticed the points made merely dealt with the reviewer being rather subjectiv and too enthusiastic,not Yoper being an bad OS,which it defenitely isn’t.
enjoy your oh-so-righteous attitude to Linux journalism, well done mate. I for one, am ashamed.
Good you mentioned journalism.Don’t you agree that a good journalist would present authentic facts without reflecting his/her personal opinion(s),especially after a very short encounter with the OS being reviewed?
I’ve installed Fedora on my laptop and for 2 weeks have been having problems with it – what will be my gain flaming any positive reviews on Fedora? Didn’t work for me fine – let’s try something else ArchLinux perhaps? Linare? PLD? Or should I join your utterly intolerant clan?
Whatever OS that suits you well is the best for you.And it would be wrong to bash your opinion with something like:”I would rather compile/install from source”.
If Yoper was even the slightest as awful as some flames suggested. Why would I stick it? Why can’t someone have a good experience with it – when you haven’t.
Good point.It happened to me,the same distro exelled on one box and misbehaved on a second one,that second box could have been not my PC but a different user.
Frankly,10/10 is a absolute barrier,maybe to soon to give such a rate other than being very happy to have witnessed a distro that includes kaffeine,YAST,etc, which isn’t extraordinary,however the 10/10 is.I know the reviewer from his good posts and again find his review a bit below standard.
Well i have read his comments here on OSnews,and find it hard to believe the reviewer and the one who’s posting here are one and the same.I mean his 10/10 isn’t exactly what you would call unbiased.His blog would have been better if he had taken more time to gatter more info from extensive testing.
He is not even a Yoper user how can it not be unbiased?
He is admin of LinuxTImes.net a Linare not only sponsored but owned domain – how can it not be unbiased?
He had a very good initial impression and was decimated for it??
Yeah I guess a distro-bashing review makes the distro-cultists salivate.
On the contrary.Most here are connaiseurs (i hope),and don’t like reviews that aren’t finished yet or targeted at fifth grade highshool audience.
Why is such a subject score of 10/10 so blasphemous to you?
It is subjective, how pedantic can you get?
You going to discuss absolute truths now?
Good you mentioned journalism.Don’t you agree that a good journalist would present authentic facts without reflecting his/her personal opinion(s),especially after a very short encounter with the OS being reviewed
happens all the time.
http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/wlg/5211
also there was another yoper review that went unnoticed.
they gave it hardly an hour for the test drive.
at the servers were being migrated, the shipment was taking ages to arrive (New Zealand), the ISP pulled off – result: long outage. No repository.
And Yoper gets slammed left/right with a review as the worse distro on earth (scoring last place).
Did anyone even bother to flame the journalist? No.
Whatever other flaws he spurted out, people took note in an effort to improve it further.
Frankly,10/10 is a absolute barrier,maybe to soon to give such a rate other than being very happy to have witnessed a distro that includes kaffeine,YAST,etc, which isn’t extraordinary,however the 10/10 is.I know the reviewer from his good posts and again find his review a bit below standard.
That is a better response – than the collective public hysteria wanting to lynch the guy lol
– the reviewer liked what he saw and wrote enthusiastically about it.
He couldn’t find a flaw in the given time, he has his own scoring system so 10/10. Hardly a reason for people wanting to eat his liver ..
Beauty is only skin-deep, i have tried it about 3 months ago, gave it up for Gentoo,
Yoper is good it did detect most of my hardware, the most important piece it had trouble is reliably working with my cisco-350 mini pci wireless, i was able to make it work once but on reboot it stopped working. Same thing happened to my sound (snd-intel8x0)
if any one has 3/4 hours go for gentoo, solid as a rock, and you have full control of the system.
one more very important issue is i tried for days to configure mythtv on Yoper, could not get it to work after spending about a week on it, on my gentoo box i was able to get it working in one sat afternoon.
Conclusion: Yoper is way toooooooo buggy still. May be some day it will get more stable.
Yeah this thread does start to look like another holy war, guess that’s why I usually don’t participate in discussions on public forums or newsgroups (been reading osnews prolly for couple of years and this is my first post.. well, perhaps I’m just lazy), anyways..
Thought I’d try yoper this afternoon since I got pretty tired of just cygwin and colinux on this new machine at work that came with pre-installed windows xp home
, but just didn’t feel like spending even couple of hours setting up yet another debian or gentoo installation (been a linux user for nearly a decade, but just now didn’t have anything usable around to even tarpipe over), also didn’t have any cd-rw’s which I always use to burn installation images on, not wanting to waste the few cd-r’s on something used only once. So, instead I spent the couple of hours fooling around with bootloaders and loopmounting iso-images. And since everything went pretty nicely and I had it setup and tweaked to my liking the same evening, thought I’d share something productive to this thread.
Started by downloading and setting up http://www.geocities.com/lode_leroy/grubinstall/ in boot.ini for booting ntldr, then extracted vmlinuz and initrd.img from http://omnibus.uni-freiburg.de/~giannone/rescue/current/rescue.zip and added an entry for them in grub.conf for testing. Booted and voilá, a virtual rescue disk
. Then off for a coffee while yos-i686-2.1.0-4.iso was downloading, an hour later opened the downloaded iso in winimage and found the conveniently placed syslinux-directory just waiting to be utilized. Extracted the kernel (yos), initrd.gz and the kernel config file. Checked that ntfs was compiled in, yep, fired colinux, smbclient the initrd.gz over, gunzip, mount -o loop, vim linuxrc.. it looked pretty straight-forward, needed to add
mount -n -o ro -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /host
YOS_CDROM_DEVICE=”-o loop /host/linux/yos-*.iso”
before cd gets mounted, look for row that starts #3.. then do
mkdir host
cd dev; /dev/MAKEDEV loop hda hdb
after booting it I noticed it didn’t quite work, it failed to chroot /mnt after pivoting the cd in /, so back to windows and colinux.. I don’t quite recall my reasoning anymore, but changing pivot_root . mnt to pivot_root . floppy, and subsequent references from mnt to floppy also got it booting (it was probably related to ntfs being mounted in /host and the umount failing).
Still, once the linuxrc actually goes through, it still spews a lot of tar errors about read-only filesystem and whatnot. Looking around the installation system I found that init 5 runs /etc/rc.d/init.d/create_ramdisk which tries to make a filesystem in ramdisk by /sbin/mke2fs, problem is that there is no mke2fs (I’m quite amazed if this actually works for someone?), but mkfs.ext2 is there, so I just type out the four or so commands manually and run yoper.. yep, works.
From there on the installation went probably just as it would from a cd. You could ntfsresize using qtparted here, but I actually did it earlier using bg-rescue. Selected reiser4 and got the warning about grub not supporting it yet, so installed lilo and booted. Got the nice bootsplash, tried booting windows, works (still got to grub from there >:), then booted yoper.
/etc/init.d/functions complained about missing /proc/splash
and fstab contained stuff like..
/dev/
Error: Expected at least 7 tokens for –radiolist, have 6.
Use –help to list options. swap swap defaults 0 0
Perhaps my unorthodox installation method actually did mess something up, comments?
Well fixed it, but then noticed that anything trying to access /mnt was unbearably slow, umounting the supermount-thing they worked well, so removed it from fstab also.
But after that it ran like a dream. Got printers and everything setup real easy.. it hasn’t even been that long that I didn’t use to like desktop environments at all, but kde really fits into the kind of thinking that yoper represents, ease and productivity. I’m not absolutely sure that this’ll stay on the machine for long. but it looks promising.
Ok, off to grab a beer or somethn’ ->
-stt
And since everything went pretty nicely and I had it setup and tweaked to my liking the same evening, thought I’d share something productive to this thread.
You really did.thank you 🙂
and say if you were to give 10/10
on the first impressions
you would be grilled by community :/
seriously some people .. lol
you seem to know a lot – if there is any extra input you want to share or suggest please let the Yoper team know.
we are constantly striving to improve the distro – that is all –
We have no “our distro are better than thou” attitude ever; on the contrary we appreciate all that is best out there.
Hopefully Yoper matures into just that – a fully functional distro (containing the best of all worlds)
a distro that can be rapidly installed from just one CD (with possibly all you need: including plugins, drivers, etc)
and say if you were to give 10/10
on the first impressions
you would be grilled by community :/
You still don’t seem to quite understand.I hope you aren’t a developer,for yopers sake.Let’s say i’m pleased with my new 56k6 modem and i would express that here as 155 Mbit,wouldn’t i make a fool out of myself?Similar to that x/x is a exact expression which a lot of good review sites use.Allthough everyone is absolutely free to write what he pleases,you could ask yourself what that quick review actually contributes.Nothing in that review explains why it’s 10/10 and not 6/10. I know my knowledge of the english language isn’t optimal to say the least.But all those irc crap talk screws exact communications untill nobody really knows what’s meant.
Everyone keeps complaining and saying they don’t know why I gave it 10/10. I thought I explained that fairly clearly, but I’m going to do it once more here:
I did not give it 10/10 because I deemed it to be perfect. After all, no OS could ever get 10/10 if I were to make the top mark perfect. Instead, the denominator is rated by how well the distribution meets the needs of the target audience with the usual semi-friendliness of GNU/Linux distributions factored into the equation. This distribution was the best I’ve yet seen for its intended audience. I used Debian, because I am not the target audience. All of you use what you prefer. That is the lovely part about choice. Were a regular end-user to try Yoper and get the results I did, though, I think they would be very pleased.
Well, like I already wrote above, I think Yoper may be rather ok, it’s not the worst distro out there and they have implemetned some nice ideas in that distro. But I’ve never been too impressed with it.
The problem with Yoper, IMHO, has always been the big gap between the rough reality and the way Yoper promises to be the best thing since sliced salami. In other words: all too much hype, not so impressive technology.
There seem to be quite a lot of people around who indeed have first been impressed by the Yoper hype, tried the distro, but were not that impressed or had some serious trouble eventually – maybe because of stability problems (mixing all possible package managers and formats together..?? please…) etc.
Thus it is important to look much deeper than some first impressions of installation and configuration if seriously reviewing distros. This review was not so bad in that sense, though, but after reading it, I must say that I still don’t get it at all why Yoper would be that much better, to anyone, than, say, Mandrake, SUSE, Libranet, Ubuntu, MEPIS, Xandros, Vector, Conectiva etc. Most of the distros mentioned above have bigger communities too, and the distros may be more refined technically too, IMHO (i.e., no problematic mixing of various packagaging formats but refining one particular package system etc.), and have got good reviews for years too.
It is always, of course, a matter of taste too, though. Maybe some find Yoper to be 10/10, not me, however.
However, the distro has a few interesting features, especially their speed optimization goals. Now, if only they could refine the distro a bit more (less hype, better and well tested technology) maybe it could then compete with the bigger and more refined Linux distros better too…
@beangrinder
yes i am.
@Metic
the hype is never ever created by the Yoper team.
in fact one member was upset at the article saying it created more backslash than welcome.
i personally welcomed the article after we received such an untimely review at LinuxFormat.
we had an outage – servers were down for months – and bang: an editor gives 1 hour test drive to the distro with the worse review ever (because he couldn’t get an apt-upgrade). Ah well, poops happens
but now having an article which praised yoper extensively, at least for us restored much morale.
it is not bias, but i still disagree that the reviewer should be so nastily flamed by Linux users.
there are diplomatic ways of addressing his over-enthusiasm.
the community, at least I adhere to the principle – is not of disparate distros – but integrating parts that makes up a greater whole: Linux.
you will never ever see me flaming a reviewer because he gave top-marks to whatever distro it was (even if i thought it was unfair).
man, people visit that linuxtimes site (or this) – looking for Linux; and what distro people choose i seriously can’t care less. but then u will find it peppered with negative comments that just shows the childish nature of some.
if not adds fear and confusion in approaching *any* distro.
as to any hype spreading – the damage is mostly by newcomers, the initial sense of perfection perhaps makes them gloat? (I don’t know) – but ironically these are the same that when Yoper fails to deliver on a point or two; defects and trolls the distro publicly all the same.
last thing please understand the article is not entirely accurate: there is no Yast, there are no mixed managers – only synaptic:
what there is a floating emerge package (non-operating) which should go away completely on the next version – it was merely an experiment but noone got it to work
yoper is just another distro – one that aims to be i686 optimized, very fast, (almost) complete with the latest cutting edge software, plugins and codecs – all that rapidly installed with just one CD.
if that suits some – excellent.
if conversely you feel it falls short and there is much more to be done – fine, tell us, help us, join the team – hence the name Yoper = “YOur OPERating system”.