Vidalinux 1.0 Review

[englishpremier]

***Vida Linux Review*** (56k users beware)

Background
As Mpemba was horrified to find out I've been using Vidalinux for the past month without providing the good members here with a review, I've decided to post one for any of you who are interested or thinking about trying this distro.

About Vidalinux
At the time of writting the Vidalinux website appears to be offline, but information regarding the OS and download mirrors can be found over at distrowatch.

EDIT: Vidalinux Website is now back up and fully operational.

Vidalinux Desktop OS is a powerful, stable and easy-to-use Linux distribution. The OS itself is based on the 'almighty Gentoo' and incorporates portage, gentoo's package management system. The distro is aimed a desktop users and comes complete with Gnome and a GUI installer.

The version I inatalled was v1.0, however I think v1.1 may well have been released by now. Upon booting the CD you will be presented with a typical linux startup screen:

Unlike its cousin Gentoo, Vidalinux comes uses the Anaconda graphical installer (users of fedora will be familiar with this), saving its users the time and the hassle of a typical gentoo intallation. For those who may worry about performance compared to gentoo, Vida provides various iso images which are optimised for particular processors, from AthlonXP, amd64, i686 etc..

Vidalinux uses the druid disk partitioner, and partitions can either be handled automatically or manually.

When partitioning disks manually beware of the fact that version 1.0 has bug in the installer that will only allow you partition disks using ext2, ext3, etc. For some reason reiserfs has not made it onto this menu. I have however been told that this bug has now been fixed with later releases.

After partitioning, the bootloader, networking and users are all conifgured typical fedora style. As such there is that annoying bug that the installer will not allow any passwords under six characters long.

A point of interest here is that you will notice Vida has migrated to xorg (which i prefer) rather than xfree. Also being a Gentoo based system, the vida install process is by no means quick. Where as Yoper may only take 10 minutes to install, Vida using gentoos portage compiles all its basic packages from source during the install process, which does take some time. All in all the install process lasted about 40 mins to an hour on my barton 3200xp.

 

[englishpremier]

Like other distros such as Yoper and Ubuntu, Vida does not allow the user any say over which packages are initially installed. A trend i've noticed that seems to be growning, in order for developers fit the OS onto a single CD.

Once the install process has completed, Vidalinux will reboot. You will notice Vida uses grub as the default bootmanager and is reasonably upto date in line with other distros, using the 2.6.8 kernel.

With no choice of the login manger or desktop, Vida installed gdm and gnome by default. For anyone who is not a fan of Gnome and may be tempeted to unmerge it, be careful as i am told by the Vida developers that unmerging gnome will almost certainly break the installation.

Once installed everything else about the distro is pretty much standard gentoo. Vida does have one last trick up its sleave in the name of "porthole". Despite the dodgey name Porthole is Vida's portage frontend and works in a similar fashion to Synaptic in Yoper or other apt=get based distros.

One of the first things a gentoo user may run on Vidalinux after installation is "#emerge -sync" however you will soon realise that vida's portage is out of date and you will have little choice but to follow the Gentoo guidlines on updating portage.

My conclusions
I've been using Vida for about a month now, and compared to Debian (my previous distro) it seems about as stable as Microsoft Windows. To be fair, the problems I have had have all been with Gnome itself (nautilus not running) and not the OS. Overall the distro is reasonably friendly to use, proberbly about as much so as Ubuntu or Yoper. The fact that it's based on Gentoo makes it nice and easy to install, remove and upgrade packages. Once setup I find Vida as pleasent to use as any of the other Linux distros I have tried. Its uniquie selling point is that Vida is basically Gentoo with a graphical installer (which still needs a lot of work).

I would recommend Vidalinux to anyone looking for a medium difficulty linux distro i.e not mandrake, fedora or suse, or to those who would like to try Gentoo but hasn't the dangly bits to attempt a full Gentoo installation

Tips
Here are a couple of tips that may come in handy for anyone who wishing to try this OS:

1) Do not use the porthole system, it seems it's still riddled with bugs (as of the date I'm writing this review). You will be much better off using the commandline and running emerge manually.

2) I find that gnome breaks regularly and as a result nautilus will not run, leaving me with no desktop or file brower. If this happens try logging in as a different user, entering the broken users home directory and run "rm -r .gnome*" then re-login as normal.

3) Anyone who wants the poor excuse of an OSX bar try running "emerge desklet-starterbar".

 

[deano]

Hi

great review there, been using it for a while and is a easy way for beginners to get gentoo installed shame they don't do an install for the mac.

cheers

deano

 

[dirtydog]

How does it compare to gentoo speedwise? Is it faster - either booting or in operation - than other distros? I've heard for example that Yoper is as fast as gentoo in use, but gentoo is the fastest distro to boot-up.

All the distros I've tried (Mandrake, Suse, Fedora, Ubuntu) take about twice as long as Windows to boot-up and shut down/restart

 

[Mpemba Effect]

Excellent stuff mate! I've corrected some spelling mistakes, added a colour scheme to match the rest of the reviews here (not that theres many at the moment), resized and resampled the images to make them more friendly and will add this to our Linux archive and proberbly the sticky

 

[dirtydog]

Hmm the vida linux website is indeed down, and the single source for the iso at distrowatch is down as well It's good to see there are specific AthlonXP, i686 and Pentium4 versions though I will try again tomorrow unless someone has an alternative source?

 

[englishpremier]

How does it compare to gentoo speedwise? Is it faster - either booting or in operation - than other distros? I've heard for example that Yoper is as fast as gentoo in use, but gentoo is the fastest distro to boot-up.

All the distros I've tried (Mandrake, Suse, Fedora, Ubuntu) take about twice as long as Windows to boot-up and shut down/restart

Speedwise i haven't had gentoo on my system for time, so i couldn't really say. Although if i was to work from memory I would say that KDE on my gentoo system was more responsive than Gnome on Vidalinux, but that doesn't really mean anything especially as i have KDE prelinked.

By far the fastest distro I have used is Yoper. Obviously everyone know it is fast out of the box due to its cut down scripts and prelinking, but even against my gentoo system Yoper felt much quicker. It was mainly little things, like konqueror and other KDE apps would take about 1 second to load up on gentoo where as they were instant on Yoper.

As for booting up. Well If you use the standard kernel, then it is neither faster or slower than anything else. You can't really compare it to gentoo here as on gentoo you compile your own kernel. All i can say is that I am running a Mpemba-rised 2.6.9 kernel and boot up times are much faster than Windows XP.


*****Cheers for correcting spellings, and sorry about the images, i didn't realise they were too big untill after posting.*********

 

[dirtydog]

Hmm it's a shame Yoper isn't better supported or I'd probably use it as my distro of choice otherwise. I prefer Gnome and it doesn't work with Yoper

Anyway if the source for Vida comes back up I will give this a whirl

 

[cb_linus]

Originally posted by dirtydog
Hmm the vida linux website is indeed down, and the single source for the iso at distrowatch is down as well It's good to see there are specific AthlonXP, i686 and Pentium4 versions though I will try again tomorrow unless someone has an alternative source?

Try here though I'm not sure how up to date the version is on the links Though it looks like the site might be back up too

Really good review. Informative & well illustrated with appropriate screenshots. Another for me one to try

 

[englishpremier]

Originally posted by dirtydog
Hmm it's a shame Yoper isn't better supported or I'd probably use it as my distro of choice otherwise. I prefer Gnome and it doesn't work with Yoper

Anyway if the source for Vida comes back up I will give this a whirl

do Yoper not do a gnome version? I know when i was still using the distro there was talk by the developers that they would release a gnome version.

 

[dirtydog]

Originally posted by englishpremier
do Yoper not do a gnome version?

Not afaik, but if anyone knows different please tell me

The last time I tried Yoper (a few weeks ago) none of the repositories worked either, so I couldn't even try installing gnome myself. I have read that doing so doesn't work very well anyway, however. It's a shame as I find KDE too cluttered compared to Gnome, plus I find its font rendering inferior to Gnome's also.

 

[dirtydog]

Okay I just installed this (took about half an hour on a P4 2.66).. I downloaded the pentium4 build version but oddly all the filenames during the installation ended in .i386?

First impressions after five minutes: emerge/porthole doesn't seem as friendly as apt-get/Synaptic. In Ubuntu I can do apt-get install nvidia-glx to get the nividia drivers installed.. here if I do emerge nvidia-glx, or try to install it via porthole, I get the following not very helpful error message:-

localhost root # emerge nvidia-glx
Calculating dependencies |
emerge: there are no masked or unmasked ebuilds to satisfy "virtual/linux-sources".

!!! Error calculating dependencies. Please correct.

Now what?

edit - I did 'sync' from porthole, which took ages (on 750k cable), then when it finished downloading whatever it was downloading, went for ages before giving loads of failed messages, so I just closed the terminal window as I'd had enough of it I tried emerge nvidia-glx after that and it's now downloading at a dizzy 30K ish a second..

edit2, it's just finished downloading for ages, then it tried to set up the drivers and gave this error.. (copied & pasted the last bit of it)

>>> md5 src_uri NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6111-pkg1.run
x86
* Determining the location of the kernel source code
* Found kernel source directory:
* /usr/src/linux
* Found sources for kernel version:
* 2.4.26-gentoo-r14

* getfilevar requires 2 variables, with the second a valid file.
* getfilevar <VARIABLE> <CONFIGFILE>
* Could not find a usable .config in the kernel source directory.
* Please ensure that /usr/src/linux points to a configured set of Linux sources.
* If you are using KBUILD_OUTPUT, please set the environment var so that
* it points to the necessary object directory so that it might find .config.

!!! ERROR: media-video/nvidia-kernel-1.0.6111-r3 failed.
!!! Function get_version, Line 326, Exitcode 0
!!! .config not found in /usr/src/linux

localhost root #

Hmm! Should it be this hard? I mean if it needs other stuff (like kernel sources) why doesn't it download and install them automatically?


edit3..

I downloaded the nvidia drivers from nvidia.. ran the installer (outside of X of course) and it came up with an error, saying my kernel has been compiled with rivafb support so installation cannot proceed. I need to recompile my kernel without rivafb support before I can install the nvidia drivers. Hmm

btw iirc Yoper actually comes with the nvidia drivers installed (you get the nvidia logo on starting X) - why don't all distros do this?

 

[F355]

Nice review. Looks like a distro to keep an eye on. A bit too rudimentary for me at the moment though.

Ian

 

[Mpemba Effect]

Your first error looks like a broken portage profile but should be fixed like you with an emerge sync like you've done. The second error regarding the kernel is you need the original .config (kernel config file) that Vidalinux uses for its kernel.

 

[dirtydog]

Originally posted by englishpremier
do Yoper not do a gnome version? I know when i was still using the distro there was talk by the developers that they would release a gnome version.

I've just learned that Yoper 2.2 will have separate KDE and Gnome releases

There is a beta of the Gnome iso available which I'm going to try soon. I don't think I'll be persevering with Vida as it's no faster than Ubuntu and seems less easy to set up and configure, so I can't see the point really

 

[robmiller]

Good guide englishpremier, thanks a lot

First 2005 L&OS post, how cool am I