VectorLinux is one of those useful but lesser-known Linux distros. It’s
been around since 1999 and I’ve used it since 2006, off and on, in the
role of a secondary OS. Now, with the disruptive changes
Ubuntu forces on its user base with each new release, I’ve found myself
increasingly attracted to Vector’s stability and convenience. This
article introduces “VL” to those who may not be familiar with it.Vector is one of about two dozen Slackware-based Linux distros. Its
motto is “Keep it simple, keep it
small and let the end user decide what their operating system is going
to be.” The distro is small, fast and light. It challenges the
trend towards OS bloat. It’s a single CD download that
performswellevenon aging equipment. Many find it a
good base distro to build to their own preference. I’ll focus on what
distinguishes Vector from other distros in this review.
Editions
Vector comes in several editions. I’ve listed them all in the chart
below. They boil down to four basic choices–
- Standard — a full
featured Xfce-based desktop environment for multimedia, web browsing,
or home office work - Standard Kde-Classic —
Standard Edition with KDE instead of Xfce - Light — Standard Edition
paired down and optimized for low-end computers - SOHO — Small Office / Home Office, a KDE-based version with
OpenOffice and productivity tools for office professionals
If you want a Live CD, you need to specifically download the “Live”
versions of these editions.
If you want 64-bit VectorLinux, a release candidate is downloadable here.
All VL editions in general release are still 32-bit. Download them here.
If you want to support the VectorLinux project, Deluxe and SOHO Deluxe editions are very
nicely-packaged systems for under $30US. VL does not withhold any tools or goodies
from you if you don’t buy these editions. Everything is available in
the free VL software repositories.
–VectorLinux Editions —
| Edition: |
Description: |
Free: |
| Deluxe |
Standard Edition packaged with extras like KDE, OpenOffice, more |
No |
| Standard, Standard Live |
Full featured Xfce-based desktop environment for multimedia, web browsing, or home work |
Yes |
| Standard Kde-Classic, Kde-Classic Live |
Standard Edition with KDE instead of Xfce |
Yes |
| Light, Light Live |
For low-end hardware. Configurable with JWM, IceWM, Openbox, or LXDE in Version 7. |
Yes |
| SOHO Deluxe |
SOHO Edition packaged with extras | No |
| SOHO, SOHO Live |
Small Office/Home Office, a KDE-based version with OpenOffice and tools for office professionals |
Yes |
| 64-bit Standard |
Similar to Standard Edition but 64-bit. Available as a release candidate here at the time of writing. |
Yes |
| VirtualBox Images |
VirtualBox images for the Standard and Light Editions |
Yes |
Vector’s editions allow you to stay with the distro if you have varied
needs or if your needs change over time. My opinion is that the project
should concentrate its developer resources on
fewer editions, so as to produce more timely upgrades and 64-bit
versions.
System Requirements
VectorLinux requires minimal
hardware, so little that I often use it in evaluating Pentium IV’s for
refurbishing. (Also, Vector is very good at hardware recognition.) The
Standard Edition even ran adequately for me on a P-III with 128M
memory, so I’ve never had cause to try the Light Edition. SOHO Edition
requires at least 512M of memory since it runs KDE with
OpenOffice.
With these low system requirements, you would expect — and you get —
excellent performance from Vector. It really snaps on current machines. And if you have an old XP or
Windows 98 computer lying around, VL is an ideal vehicle for turning it
into a secure, up-to-date system. But I don’t want to give the
impression that Vector is only for older machines, because that’s not
the case. Let’s see what it offers.
Standard Edition 7.0
I’ll review the 32-bit Standard Edition 7.0 and its Live CD. The two
are almost
identical. The Live CD lacks just a couple packages that are stripped
out of the regular Standard Edition (notably the Opera web browser), to
gain space for the Live tools. You can install Vector to disk from
either system. The Live CD additionally allows you to install to a
bootable USB thumb drive.
Standard Edition and its Live CD are currently at version 7.0, released
in November 2011. The Light Edition is also now at version 7.0,
released on March 21, 2012. Other Vector editions are upgrading from
release 6.0 as I write. Version 7.0 uses the 3.0.8 Linux kernel, while
earlier releases use the 2.6 kernel.
Applications– VL Standard Edition comes withthe full
set of apps you need for typical home or office use. Most are GTK+
based. Xfce is the default GUI, with FluxBox installed as a secondary
desktop option.
For web browsing, VL gives you Firefox (and Opera, too, if you’re not
using the Live CD). You get Pidgin and XChat for instant messaging and
a gFTP client. For office work
there is Abiword work processor, Gnumeric spreadsheet, J-Pilot for
appointments, the Orage calendar, ePDFviewer, a thesaurus, a
calculator, and the Geany and Leafpad text editors. For email, many
download Thunderbird from VL’s free software repositories.
Developers get Perl, Python,
GTK+ and Qt, the GCC GNU compiler collection, the Glade IDE, and a
graphical front-end for CMake. Graphics round itout, with the Dia
Diagram Editor, GIMP the GNU Image Manipulation Program, Inkscape for
drawing, the Geegie image viewer, and Shotwell for managing photos.
VL’s multimedia works right out of the box. This includes
Youtube, Hulu, and DVD and audio playback. The product ships with Java,
Adobe Flash, and all popular codecs, so you don’t have to run around
figuring out and installing things to get multimedia going.
(Distro-hoppers, I’m sure you’ve played that game before.) Vector includes MPlayer, UMPlayer,
Xine, and Exaile for playing
almost all media formats (even libdvdcss for playback of encrypted
DVD’s), and Grip for audio CD ripping. I really like that this light
distro comes with such robust multimedia from the get-go.
Look and feel–If you
haven’t used Xfce before, you’ll find it simple but full-featured. It’s
an easy-to-use menu-driven GUI. Take the Version 7 screenshot
tour to get a look-see or review screenshots at the VL website here.
Vector’s Xfce-4.8 GUI comes with a custom theme and artwork. By default
the screen includes both a top panel bar and the Cairo dock at the bottom,
theMac-like panel that enlarges icons as you sweep your cursor
over them. It’s
odd that nearly all of the icons on these two panel bars are redundant.
But just a couple clicks of the mouse removes either.
That’s
what nice about the interface. You control the theme, the appearance,
windows decorations, and fonts, and it’s
easy to change anything you don’t like. For example, after installing I
always update the
panel’s cute little weather app to reflect my own location and to
report in fahrenheit instead of celsius. A few clicks does the job.
Xfce is quick and practical.
Administration– VL is easy to manage because it
centralizes configuration into a single a GUI tool called Vasm. With
Vasm, newbies can manage Vector more easily than distros that offer
powerful — but disparate — tools. Vasm configures hardware, printers,
services, Samba file and printer sharing, networking (Wi-Fi,
line-connected, and dial-up), the X-Windows GUI, user accounts, and the
filesystem.
Some of theutilities that come with VL include the Ufw firewall
and its GUI, Wicd for Internet connections, Gparted and Red Hat’s Disk
Utility for disk management, the Thunar file manager, the Grsync backup
tool, and the Htop and GKrellM resource monitors. I
like to place GKrellM on the desktop to graphically display resource
use in real time. It fits unobtrusively in the corner of the screen.
Read more about the utilities here.
Repository and Packages– Vector’s
package manager makes it easy to download any apps you want that are
not in the initial install. One
reason many folks like VL is that it’s a slender distro that doesn’t
try to cram everything into the base install. You can tailor it by
adding only the apps you need. This keeps your system lean and mean and
eliminates the bloat common to some operating systems.
Vector’s package manager is called Gslapt. It’s a GUI front-end
to Slapt-get, the backwards-compatible dependency tracking extension to
Slackware’s package tools. Gslapt looks a lot like the Synaptic Package
Manager used by Ubuntu. By default, Gslapt points to Vector’s own free
software repository. Though previously criticized as being rather
small, in version 7.0 the repository claims
one thousand packages. (Check and refresh the repository sources after
installing Vector to see them all.) This should satisfy most users.
Of course, you can also download and install any Slackware package, or
you can compile from source code. The downside is that you assume
responsibility for dependency-checking and maintenance can become
complicated.
Being based on Slackware, Vector uses .tgz
packages. (This is as opposed to distros like Red Hat that use .rpm packages and those like Ubuntu
and Debian that use .deb
packages.) Vector also uses .tlz
packages, which are LZMA-compressed, and .tbz
files, which are squished archives made by first using TAR and
then compressing the result with BZIP2. The benefit to compressed
formats like .tlz is that
downloads are faster because files are smaller. Also more files fit on
the distribution CD.
Installation– VL disk
installation is straightforward and easy for anyone familiar with
installing Linux. As with any distro, first-timers may need help. This
product review
leads you through how to install VL with screenshots. (It covers
Standard Edition 6.0; the installer is simplified but
otherwisesimilar in 7.0).
I like some of the thoughtful touches in the VL installer. For example,
Vector makes it easy to mountother partitions.So you don’t
end up trying to figure out how to mount your Windows partition after
you’ve booted Linux for the first time and found it missing. (If you’re
a distro-hopper I know you’ve run into that one.)
The 7.0 installer does not by default let you resize NTFS partitions.
Windows users who have to shrink their sole Windows partition to create
space forinstalling a second OS may want to use another tool for
this task.
In addition to the installer, a handy little tool called vl-QwikPicks
makes it easy to locate and download apps by category. This front-end
humanizes the package names that otherwise confuse many of us.
Annoyances–
As I write this review, I gaze over at two books on my shelf whose
titles are Linux Annoyances for
Geeks and Windows 7 Annoyances. VL has its
share of annoyances, too. The big questions with annoyances are always:
how serious are they, and how many are there?
I’ve never run into an issue with Vector that I couldn’t solve with
either the help materials or through the top-notch online forum.
However, I have run into many minor annoyances and inconsistencies,
often more than I’d like. My sense of it is that VL — like most Linux
distros — could be a little more polished. I feel the project should
focus on eliminating minor defects rather than supporting so many
different editions.
VL lacks the “Update Manager” found in many other Linuxes, such as
Ubuntu or openSUSE. Presently users update individual packages that may
have security
or other issues. The Vector team recommends against
“full system upgrades.” They are working on this feature and intend to
provide a GUI solution.
Two reviews (here
and here) knock
Vector’s GUI for seeming old-fashioned in places. I feel this criticism
is misplaced. VL’s GUIs are functional and easy to use. That’s what
counts. By this measure
VectorLinux is as good as most distros and better than many.
Support
VectorLinux distinguishes itself from many other distros by its strong
support. Right off the bat you’ll notice the VL website
is visually appealing and makes it easy to find help.
Vector offers the help systems you expect: an active forum with 4,600
registered members and 20 to 30 online at any time; IRC support, typically with
someone online; and Twitter broadcasts. There’s also a Knowledge Center,
a Solutions Bank with many How-To’s
for specific tasks, extensive FAQs, and a Cheat Sheet.
You’ll also find some two hundred free videos featuring
VectorLinux in all kinds of Linux How-To’s.
VL offers clear, well-organized release-specific documentation. There
are seven online manuals covering all aspects of Version 6, for example
(Version 7 doc is just coming out.) What I especially like is that
Vector always notes to which version any doc applies. This is critical
because in many mid-size Linux projects there’s lots of documentation,
but it’s disorganized, or worse, it doesn’t specify to which release it
applies. The result is that you diligently follow instructions you’ve
found for some task only to discover that the doc you’re using doesn’t
apply to your version. VL spares you that headache.
VL is one of the few Linux distros that offers a paid support option.
Such professionalism is probably one reason VectorLinux has survived
and thrived for 13 years, even as many competing distros have fallen by
the wayside.
Is VectorLinux for You?
Vector is a good choice for those who want:
- A speedy, easy-to-use distro with a full set of apps
- A slender distro they can build into exactly what they want
- A bloat-free OS
- Stability and reliability across new releases
- Multimedia that runs right out of the box
- Great performance
- A distro for older hardware
- A Slackware-based distro
- A range of editions
- Excellent help and support materials
- Paid support
If you are an end user, you’ll find VectorLinux easy to use and
productive. As with most Linux products, you’ll want an experienced
friend to install and configure it for you first.
Who is Vector not for? If you want the greatest
number of applications in your distro’s base install, you should choose
a DVD-sized distro instead of Vector — like Mint,
openSUSE, or Fedora. If you want the flashiest GUI with “wow-me” visual
effects, some other distro may be a better choice. And if you like to
live on the edge and continually change your system to conform to the
latest features — and fads — look elsewhere.
I’ve found VectorLinux flexible, functional, and fun for six years. If
its strengths match your needs, I highly recommend you try it.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Howard Fosdick (President, FCI) is an independent consultant who
supports databases and operating systems. Also see his OS News reviews of Puppy
Linux, Lubuntu,
Damn
Small Linux, and The Sins
of Ubuntu.
I can live with a distro not being a rolling one like arch, gentoo or SUSE tumbleweed, but FOSS changes a a dramatic pace, I need to stay some what current with developments.
So, what’s the average time between releases?
How drastic of a change in software do they have?
How good are they at keeping up with security updates?
What is special about the non free versions, what justifies the cost?
Slackware is traditionally a KDE distribution. It would seem that a good KDE distribution is increasingly being sought after by users:
http://www.muktware.com/articles/3518/kde-voted-most-popular-deskto…
If you want the latest KDE desktop within a distro based on Slackware:
http://www.slackel.gr/slackelmulti/xoops20171/htdocs/modules/pico4/…
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=07200
This features the newly-released Calligra Suite 2.4.
It seems to have better tools for package management, as a bonus:
The graphical Salix system tools are present too, making administrative tasks easy for everyone. Package management, as always, is done using slapt-get and its graphical frontend Gslapt. Sourcery (from salix), a new graphical tool for managing and installing packages from SlackBuilds is included. This is a graphical frontend to slapt-src and complements gslapt, the default graphical package manager.
Edited 2012-04-13 08:55 UTC
I was using it for some time in the past, but it seemed like a stalled project at times, so I eventually dumped it.
I used to run Vector around 4 years ago, but sometime around then (may 3 yrs ago, iirc), they tried to introduce a paid version of sorts and start a paying-members club/forum or something. The devs/team took a bit of stick from their users and things were in limbo for a while. No idea what’s going on now, though.
Somewhere within that timeframe, I recall their project website getting hacked a couple of times as well.
Edited 2012-04-13 13:30 UTC
Oh yes, the VL club was hot on the heels of the Mandriva Club. Both didn’t take off. I think it was around 2006/7 or so.
Not too bad, but then I went to SalixOS x64, as I wanted a x64 Slackware based.
Glad to see VectorLinux is still alive and kicking. It did wonders for me 7-8 years ago on really modest hardware; actually enabled me to use the only computer I could afford at the time.
If you need something really light on your hardware but still a full fledged OS, forget the so called “light” Ubuntu and Fedora remixes – VectorLinux is the one for it (that or slackware :> ).
The article (and the review it points to) are really interesting. Turning “waste PCs” into productive parts of the society again. However, I’m interested in how good the language support is. German language is mandatory for cases where I would use this Linux distro. The article does not mention anything about foreign (non-english) languages, and the review mentions English, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish in a picture. Is there a way to make this Linux installable and usable by german users?
The second thing I’m a bit sceptical is the multimedia support. “Multimedia that runs right out of the box” sounds nice, but does this cover things like all the strange “Windows” formats, stuff like MP3 and OGG/Vorbis, non-mainstream formats like Matroska, up to “Flash”? I know a full-featured {k|g|s}mplayer can play them all (because mplayer can play everything), but has this been selected for the packages part of the distro? I assume there could be licensing problems because it’s illegal to listen to MP3 in the US. The review is a bit more elaborate (mentioning VLC), but of course it doesn’t cover all cases “typical users” would encounter today. And in case this Linux is run on hardware with lower power (e. g. P4, ~1.2 GHz with 16 MB GPU, because that’s what the article’s “A distro for older hardware” could be supposed to mean), how well does “Flash” or fullscreen video perform?
Anyway, I’m giving this Linux a try, because it sounds promising. Thanks for the article, it’s an inspiration to try something new.
Doc,
I would imagine Norwegian (or whatever) support is as good as XFCE/KDE/IceWM/etc provides.
I’m primarily interested in German support, especially in regards of KDE. In older KDE versions, I was disappointed because of the sloppy and only partial translation of program environments and error messages. At that time, Gnome had much better support for the german language; KDE looked so inferior. Maybe since 4.0 it has been improved – but the article and the review are short on that information.
That’s understandable, I admit: The main target audience will have no problem with using English. Being a German myself, I prefer having OS and applications in English (with OpenOffice being the only intended exception). Those who are “smart enough” that they want to use Linux typically can deal with english messages and errors. “Newbies” however are scared by the first “Error” they encounter, and run back to their “good ‘Windows'” quickly, leaving the chance of moving to a better OS behind. Sadly, the “first impression effect” has an enormous impact, and it’s not just about the colorful icons, the many programs available, the nice background image, the multimedia formats and the printer support; it’s also about using the native language from the beginning and throughout the whole “OS experience”. It’s often hard to tell people that Linux is a multi-language OS that can be in any language you want, but if you want German and you don’t get it…
Being able to select German at the beginning of the installation (should be the very first step) and then having all the programs (and errors) in that language would be great.
I agree with you! The big problem with Vector linux is not support international language.
Vector is a great linux distro really fast. I use this for last 3 years as a third system.
The only thing why Linux Vector n is not my first system is that we cannot translation completly the system.
There is just a partial translation. Ex: Vector KDE version you can just translate your KDE interface but all other software will still be in English.
In summary: if you are not a native English speaker you can not use it. Unless you are perfectly comfortable in English.
I think, this fact is for all systems based on Slackware. International language support at 100% doesn’t exist.
The only Linux I will ever consider as a viable desktop is if it came with an option to have Trinity Desktop as a desktop environment. So many editions of Vector and yet not one with TDE and this applies to other distributions too!
Edited 2012-04-13 11:03 UTC
Out of date. Trinity Desktop has been well and truly overtaken by KDE4, and desktop applications written for KDE4.
http://dot.kde.org/2012/04/11/first-version-calligra-released
http://www.calligra.org/tour/calligra-suite/office-applications/
http://www.calligra.org/tour/calligra-suite/graphics-applications/
This is where all the current development effort is going. Wake up and smell the coffee.
Edited 2012-04-14 05:25 UTC
I agree with and find many of your posts informative, but while you’re stating the facts here, I have to say that I don’t fully agree with them. I still like KDE3. The Trinity Desktop is not only familiar, but is fast and runs well with much less memory than KDE4.
Sure, KDE4 is now more familiar since it really has started competing well feature-wise with KDE3, but… it’s a massive pig. As impressed as I have been lately with KDE4 (I have accidentally ran it in a virtual machine with 256MB RAM and, amazingly, not only did it run without any crashing, but I was able to open Dolphin and Konsole at the same time), it still eats up too much memory.
I only have 1GB of memory in this piece of shit. I don’t know, maybe I should be running a 32-bit operating system (it would use less memory), but at the same time… I have a 64-bit processor, why not make use of it and the extra registers available? Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find much information on how much more memory 64-bit requires compared to 32-bit, other than the Windows Vista/Windows 7 system requirements–but I don’t trust Microsoft’s recommendations anyway, and I don’t know how much memory use differs in 32-bit vs. 64-bit Linux distributions. [Note: Sure, I could look at various 32/64-bit Linux distribution system requirements, but they only give a decent estimate for standard usage, which I do not fall under. They don’t say the approximate amount of memory increase per typical program.]
Then again, I have been unable to open as many tabs in Firefox without swapping to hell and back even in Openbox, so maybe my distribution (openSUSE 12.1 64-bit) or, more likely, the included version of Firefox (10.0.2) is to blame. I was running Mozilla’s official Linux binary of Firefox in Debian previously with GNOME or Openbox, and the swapping didn’t seem quite as bad.
That said, I do always have a shitload of tabs open. I used to have 70-80 or more open at a time before the system became completely responsive; now that number seems to be 55-60. Yeah, I know–in the end, I need more memory. But I have to work with what I have, and KDE4 doesn’t allow me to do that. Hell, with openSUSE, even Openbox doesn’t allow me to do that.
Edited 2012-04-14 09:00 UTC
That is more than enough memory. Heaps. Oodles.
As I type this in Firefox 11 running under KDE 4.8.2 (with desktop effects, strigi and nepomuk all running, and nepomuk given twice the normal memory allocation to improve performance), the system monitor is showing only 513 MB memory used. Less than half of your memory.
KDE4 should run faster for you than KDE3 if your system has a GPU. If it doesn’t, there still shouldn’t be much in it.
KDE4 absolutely spanks KDE3 feature-wise, as well as in supported applications.
Edited 2012-04-14 10:35 UTC
That, and KDE3 doesn’t have any major pieces of functionality with names that sound like embarrassing medical conditions.
“Sorry, can’t go on that bike trip this weekend – my damn plasmoids are flaring up again.”
Thanks for the link, but I was only writing about the VASM (main control centre) utility when saying it felt outdated, and it hardly serves any purpose these days other than changing passwords or adding users. I seem to recall it once had more options.
@DocPain: I believe Matroska is supported, and Flash defintely is already in there. VL is one of the most complete distributions I have come across for media codecs ootb. They can probbaly do it because they are located in Canada, not the US.
I don’t understand why there are so many distributions. In the end, the user experience is usually very similar between them. I took that screen shot tour of Vector Linux, and honestly, it is basically how I have my ubuntu system configured.
You don’t use a computer for the OS, you use it to run your Applications. In the Linux world, there are only a handful of good actively supported options for each application category, so all distributions ultimately ship with the same ones. Same Applications == same user experience.
Well, let’s just say that when one distribution decides to include some new beta-quality technology that breaks your computer, it’s good to have the others. And sadly, the Linux desktop has always had this unstable and experimental side to it which makes such events relatively frequent…
But beyond the biggest Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE…), which are indeed much alike, there are a lot of differences in the way smaller distros are managed. As an example, some distributions will stick with the traditional “new releases that will break everything” model of Windows and Mac OS X, while others opt for the rolling release model of incremental changes to a constantly updated OS. Some distributions will provide an extremely extensive set of packages on their installation media (Debian, Ultimate, Sabayon…), while others will prefer extreme frugality (Arch, Gentoo, DSL…). Some will include multimedia codecs and Flash Player out of the box (Mint, Pardus…), others won’t even include a comfortable set of wireless drivers in their quest for being “pure” free software (Debian, gNewSense…). And so on.
Depending on your needs, one distribution will often be more suitable than others. Which means less time setting things up, a better-tested OS configuration, and overall a better user experience when it comes to using the computer instead of struggling with it.
Edited 2012-04-14 11:25 UTC
Vector looks really good in the screenshot gallery. But one thing: can someone tell me what the OS is in this screenshot? I particularly like the sidebar dock and minimalist menu bar. Any help in finding these things?
http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/VectorLinux-7-0-Sc…
It is Ubuntu.
I’ve used Vector on an extra Pentium 4 we still have around. It run fast enough but don’t count on a repository the size of Ubuntu’s. Also not all the programs in the Vector repository are compatible with every release. You can download a program only to find it doesn’t run with your version of Vector. Useful yes, but could be better.
I used vector for a while a few years ago and I was impressed with it. It was quite snappy on my system, actually one of the fastest distros I have tested behind arch and gentoo. Considering it’s decent feature set, it was actually quite light weight as well. As I recall media codecs were pretty much all there as well, I believe it played pretty much any video format I threw at it.
Hmm.. Used Vector years ago.
Downloaded this latest & installed on spare old PC.
Very nice indeed. Good interface.
Really quick even on a P4.
Shall explore further
Mac