Yoper Limited, the New Zealand Linux company, is proud to announce Release Candidate 2 of Ydesktop, the first part of ‘Your Operating System that Yoper Limited’ (“Yoper”) is developing. This second public release contains dozens of fixes and updates from over 5000 downloads of Ydesktop-rc1.
Ydesktop Release Candidate 2
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Anyone installed Yoper yet? It looks interesting. I’m ondering about the install process. I looked on the website but didn’t find anything. I’m wondering if it uses Anaconda, Lizard, or if it’s text based like Debian.
Textbased (dialog) and has simple YES-NO questions. If you just go with yes all the time it will still install and work. Instructions are designed to be as simple as it gets and can be found on the download page. Can’t tell you how it is since I am byist (I am one of the developers)
i installed rc1 and the installation was at least butt ugly and not very comfortable, but after you managed to overcome that obstacle you have the fastest linux distro on erath on your pc …. remeber waiting for konqueror/kde apps to start up ? with yoper they are just there if you click on them …. i’m download rc2 right now 😉
I’ve read articles that say recompiling libs and programs specifically for your CPU, and “prebinding” (prelinking?) will greatly improve performance. Well duh, but my question is do any of the distros prebind (or is prelink the right word?) the binaries? And would that have anything to do with KDE apps starting up so fast as chris pointed out?
More apps would be useful for the growth of linux then YADEW. (Yet-another-distro-every-week) Don’t flame me please!
can I use debians .deb files or is it rpm??
http://www.yoper.com/yos/yos11.png wtf is this an screenshot of??
That’s the Big Bang, Bjørn.
What does this mean?
“Your Operating System’s purpose is NOT to compete/replace existing Linux distros, but it will be used to commercially support conversions of offices from the M to Y”
“However YOS is NOT a distribution, but a compact OS that is used to convert offices fast and without risk to the client from M to Y.”
So YOS isn’t a distribution? Is it some sort of addon for Redhat then? Sinc it seems to uses the packages for Redhat 8.0. Also What exactly is M? They keep mentioning its for technicians to install.
Reading their “about” page it seems to be a distro that use the “best of” other distros. But then later on it says it isn’t a distro. So what exactly is it? They really need someone who speaks english natively to rewrite that page.
Questions by none
M is Microsoft. When they say it will be used to commercially support conversions of offices from the M to Y they mean the migration from Microsoft (Windows, Visual Studio, IIS) to Yopers (Linux, KDeveloper, Apache).
Bjørn: You could use either debs or rpms. Not sure what it uses by default, but you can always *install* apt/dpkg or rpm, or simply use alien to convert packages.
I concur, what the hell is this thing? Looks a lot like a distro- at least it better be, or else what does it have? I’m 99.9% sure that it is just another distro- but they don’t want to be thought of another Linux distro. They want people to be fooled into thinking that they’re special, that they provide something all of the “distros” don’t provide. They only seem to be fooling themselves… What is special about yet another distro that runs KDE like everyone else, but think that for some reason that they have the magic bullet to wean people from Windoze? Not likely. Why bother reporting on all of these distros that are all nothing new?
Quoted from their http://www.yoper.com site. Therefore, it is a distro.
It’s the fastest distro so far. Just click “konquerer” and it opens within a sec. (on my athlon 1000 mhz)
One downsite is the user-login. Damn ugly desktop-graphic, but you change that in a second too.
Is that they didn’t fix the fonts for OpenOffice. Look at the title bar and then look at the menus in the OpenOffice. The bottom line is when it comes to fonts, any futures distros that don’t do what Redhat did with 8.0 are starting with a handicap. Redhat 8.0 has set a high water mark for fonts and I pity the distro free or commercial that comes out who doesn’t adopt or copy their font system. Its not like Redhat used some proprietary means to accomplish what they did.
I’m not trying to rag on YOS, I promise you. But really I’m not about to take a step back on hardware detection, app selection, or fonts for ANY distro. In this case one of their major selling point, the free OpenOffice, has horrible fonts. That doesn’t mean I won’t try it and recommend it if its polished and works better than say Redhat 8.0, but these are the types of things companies need to work on if they are going to be a leader.
Hey muis does openoffice launch quickly on it as well? Also a mini-review would be nice
The old same, old same fonts mess in Linux. Take a look at this screenshot –>> http://www.yoper.com/yos/yos3.png
There we see Konqueror and Kgpg with antialiased fonts, they don’t look bad to me. Although I prefer the Microsoft Windows Standard method for antialiasing fonts, only bold/italic fonts, or big fonts (those fonts which are bigger than a certain size, about 14) get antialiased. Now, on the same screenshot, look at the KMyFirewall application, different fonts on menus, they are about the same size, and these ones are not antialiased, hello mess. And the message that says “Here you can configure several general options that your firewall has.” is so small it is almost funny.
Excluding the funny lilliput message, the only objection I really made to the referred screenshot was the messy mixture of fonts in menus (antialiased and not antialiased in two types), because both fonts were readable and sufficiently neat, there is worse. There is next screen.
Spreadsheet Screenshot –> http://www.yoper.com/yos/yos12.png
This one is not only a mess, this is the past that the worst from Microsoft never had. Check out the non antialiased fonts on those OpenOffice 1.0.1 menus, HORRIBLE!!!, look at the numbers and the uppercase letters, watch that “Sheet1” word in bold fonts at the bottom, it all looks as hanwritten by someone with Parkinsons. Disastrous font rendering. And what about the OpenOffice color, that Windows95 dark grey, please, you have (fortunately) a gradient metallic clear grey on all the KDE3 apps. I say they better show Kword.
Will UI design ever make it into Linux?, certainly, RedHat8 shows signs of life there, but Yopper 3.2.1 Release Candidate 2 lacks badly, a $10 million founded Xandros Linux lacks worse, so next Yopper Release can improve a lot.
Allow it will certainly affect the speed of the apps, at least I can get a look at it.
BTW that US2 mirror gave me 432KB/sec if you looking ot download it.
How does it make apps run/start so much faster?
Font support is indeed antialiased and enhanced and not just like these posts might suggest all written by people who did not try it and since when does quantity of Software shipped make a good OS? An we did fix the fonts in OpenOffice. If you try it our you will se it.
The fonts on the one screenshot look pretty good to me. Whenever I hear complaints about fonts I always wonder if people are viewing the site in IE and have it set to auto resize the image to the window size. This can make fonts look aweful because of the resampling.
Well, I am going to download it and give it a try tonight.
The fact that apps start so fast is due to the fact that they use glibc 2.3 instead of 2.2.x IMHO
Probably prelinking too, prelinking GREATLY reduces the startup time of C++ apps.
If the fonts are fixed, why is it so difficult to update to new screenshots?
Also how will this perform on my 450Mhz machine. You see that is what sucks about..
..wait a minute I was about to blame the window managers, but no, people have got it wrong, it is the programs that are slow and not optimised. Try running the same non-optimised KDE apps under Fluxbox/BlackBox.
Do any other distros use GLIBC?
Do other distros use Glibc 2.3?
I downloaded the Live CD version of Yoper and I could not successfully get it to install on the PCs at work (IBM 6282-74U). I tried it on 4 different machine with 3 dfferent CDroms. Each one got hung on the boot process at “Freeing available memory…” or something like that it has been a week since I have tried it. I am hoping this is fixed when RC2 becomes available. Might Have to go back to the older SuSE Live CDs to get this to work…..
-Socratez
Just had a look at the screenshots, IMHO, once recompiled with hinting and this special apple gliphs thingy, then upgrade from 2.1.2 to 2.1.3, the fonts are awsome. Heck, I am using FreeBSD at home with a tweaked version of freetype 2.1.2 without using truetype fonts, and it still looks awsome. IMHO type1 fonts look just as good as TT/OT.
As for the whinger before about “terrible fonts”, mate, got boil yourself an egg because obviously you’re nothing more than a snivelling little troll who can’t RTFM and get on with life. Don’t like Linux? then bugger off and use Windows XP, and hang around in Activewin with all the other “GPL is communist”, “*nix isn’t ready for the desktop” soap box ranters.
Of course the same font mess is there- there’s nothing different about this distro to set it apart from any of the others!
Again, I’d like to point out that RedHat 8 is the first distro that I’ve ever seen to make me quit being so cranky about the current situation with distros. It’s really quite nice- a lot of nice fonts, antialiasing and the default is the most consistent and coherent Linux desktop I’ve ever used.
But the look is indeed ugly. Take for example the default titlebar font. It has a shadow, makes it look so ugly. This OS may be fast out of the box, but it certainly ugly out of the box. Personally, I wouldn’t buy it but would probably recommend it. Reason: my distro has already been optimized by myself.
WHEN WILL PEOPLE (especially the ones in charge of distos) LEARN THAT THE BIGGEST EYESORE WITH ALL ‘DESKTOP’ LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS IS THE FONTS????
I swear, if there was a Linux distro that rendered fonts as nicely as Windows (95+), I’d be a very happy person. RedHat have tried, but antialiasing small fonts just equals a pile of blur.
Interestinly I installed xpde (www.xpde.com) (linux desktop environment) and the font rendering in it looks fine! At least for the icons.
http://www.unleadedonline.net/images/misc/lin2k.jpg
I can’t do that with any other desktop environment… It either looks distorted, or blurred (with Tahoma especially).
What’s going on ffs?