Yoper Linux V2 was released a few weeks ago (July 13, 2004). After reading the release announcement on Yoper’s website, I decided I had to try it. Yoper claims that version V2 “is the fastest Out-of-the-Box Linux system in the World”.
If anyone can compare distribution speeds, it’s me. I’m a distribution junkie. I launched my career as a Linux user with Slackware (very briefly), then moved on to Redhat 5.2. After a few months of that, I became a Mandrake user. After about two years of wheeling and dealing with Mandrake, a few friends suggested I try Gentoo. I was happy with Gentoo for a little while, but I found I was spending too much time tweaking my system than using it. My latest love affair is with Debian and I believe this time I’ve found a rock-solid Linux that’s easy to maintain. I run Debian on my main system but that doesn’t stop me from trying new distributions. I have a test system to try Yoper on.
System Specs for Test System
CPU: AMD Athlon 2800+ (2.08 GHz)
Memory: 512 MB
Video: Onboard S3 chipset
Audio: Onboard AC97
Hard Drive: 60 GB
Network: Onboard 1394 Net Adapter connected directly to the Internet
Yoper Linux is a distribution release from New Zealand based Yoper Ltd. Unlike a lot of distributions that are built on top of another, Yoper is built from scratch. Version V2 comes with a performance enhanced kernel 2.6.7 and KDE 3.2.3. Yoper seems to be a fairly up-to-date distribution with all software included being the latest stable versions. It comes on a single CD that you can download for free or purchase from a site such as linuxcd.org
Installation
I put the Yoper CD in the drive, and rebooted my system. After being greeted by a strange-looking Welcome screen, the installation threw me into a Linux prompt and informed me that I could start setup by typing in “yoper”. I played around a little bit at the prompt and found out there were commands to mount partitions, chroot into an environment etc. It even had Vim for editing files. This means that the Yoper installation CD can be used as a rescue CD (which is always a good thing). After a while, I decided to launch the setup program.
The Yoper installer is a text-mode affair, something like Slackware’s. After agreeing to the license agreement, the installer let me choose whether I wanted to check the integrity of my installation media. I decided to go ahead and do it even though the installer told me it’s required only if you’re having installation problems.
The next step was partitioning. The installer provided me with a list of my hard drives and told me to pick the one I wanted to install Yoper on. The installer informed me that I had to manually create exactly two partitions, a swap greater than 128 MB and root that was at least 3GB. I thought it was strange that I couldn’t have more than two partitions. Like a lot of other installers such as Debian, Yoper’s uses cfdisk for partitioning purposes. I created a 200 MB swap partition and a 4 GB root partition. The next step involved picking a swap partition and a root partition to use.
Next came package selection. The installer then launched a utility called Ychooser with two choices. The first one was “Ydesktop: APT-able KDE base system” and the second was “Ycore – APT-able core linux”. At this point I noticed the absence of any online help in the installer. I would have liked to have read a more detailed description of what packages I got with both Ycore and Ydesktop. I selected Ydesktop. The installer didn’t let me select individual packages like I had hoped to.
Usually package selection is the last step before installation begins, but the installer asked me which filesystem I wanted. The choices available to me were Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS. I chose ReiserFS (the default). I was dumped back to a prompt asking me to confirm the format which I did.
The installation itself didn’t provide with any progress bars. It simply told me that installation would take between five and fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, I could watch the debug messages on the screen. But not for long, the install was done in about five minutes.
The post install first asked me if I wanted to run networksetup, to which I said yes since I am connected to a broadband connection. It also asked whether I wanted DHCP, to which I said yes again.
Next up was bootloader configuration. I was surprised that such a new distribution used my old friend LILO instead of the more modern GRUB. I could find no option to use GRUB as an alternative. The bootloader configuration screen was very confusing and even though I figured it out I was recommend that the Yoper folks think about changing it. The installer didn’t ask me where I wanted to install LILO, so I’m assuming it was installed in the MBR.
Next on the agenda was selecting a time zone which turned out to be more complicated than it should have been. The last step required me to type 1 to confirm my timezone and 2 for not confirming it. Without reading I typed y for yes (that does make more sense) but the installer kept asking me to confirm my selection. It was only after I read the instructions, I realized I needed to type a 1. I do admit I am at fault for not reading but this step is still not very intuitive. In the next step, I was required to add a user and set the root password.
Finally, the installer was finished. I had to type “exit” and the enter. Then type “reboot” and enter. This could easily have done automatically for me, but it wasn’t. The system restarted and Yoper was launched.
The Desktop
I was a little disappointed by the bootup process. For a distribution that claimed to be very fast, it still took about a minute to bootup. This is quite average on my system. Bootup messages were hidden by a Yoper logo and progress bar. Yoper launched a graphical utility for my X configuration. I selected my settings and I landed up at the login prompt. Yoper uses a slightly modified version of kdm for the desktop manager. I logged in with the normal user I had created during the installation.
I clicked login and then something strange happened. The KDE desktop loaded at a shocking speed. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had a fully loaded desktop in about 3-5 seconds. With most other distributions (yes, even Gentoo) I’m used to seeing KDE take around 10 seconds. Yoper uses a slightly modified version of KDE with the Keramik theme selected by default. KNemo (KDE Network Monitor) is also loaded by default and offers network monitoring that is similar to Windows. Overall, the desktop is very snappy and responsive. I was quite pleased with it.
I discovered to my delight that Yoper had detected both my sound and my network. Both were working flawlessly. So I decided to celebrate and play some music. To my disappointment and surprise, the Linux multimedia favorite XMMS was nowhere to be found. Going through the menus, I noticed most of the application were KDE programs. One that wasn’t was Synaptic. Synaptic as many of you already know is a popular frontend to the APT system used in Debian. Since I am a Debian user, I am familiar with using Synaptic. I launched it and searched for xmms and it produced no results. Then I realized I probably had to update my package sources.
For those unfamiliar with the APT system, there is a file called sources.list which contains a list of sites Synaptic can get packages from. If you install a package, Synaptic will take care of all the package dependencies. So I updated my sources and viola! Now searching for xmms in Synaptic showed me the package I needed. I installed xmms and within a couple of minutes, I was listening to some fun tunes. Overall, Yoper’s package management is pretty good. The packages were downloaded from Yoper’s ftp site and I have no doubt they are optimized for speed just like the Yoper system itself. Their site claims currently their repository has around 500 packages which should satisfy most users. Yoper can also manage to install rpm, deb, and tgz packages. So basically it can handle pretty much every package you can give it. I never got a chance to test this out though.
Besides XMMS, CD burning software K3b was also nowhere to be found. Moreover, another thing that was sorely missing was an office suite. When I noticed OpenOffice wasn’t installed, I figured that surely such a KDE-centric distribution would have KOffice. But it doesn’t. While I could easily have installed them using Synaptic, Yoper should consider having these packages installed by default.
So I went on a bit of an installation spree by installing whatever I needed. All the programs I added to the system did indeed launch noticeably faster than other distributions.
I decided I had to know how Yoper managed to get all these performance boosts. I headed to the Yoper Forums to see if I could find an answer.
I did. According to one post (apparently by a Yoper developer), some of the tactics they use are:
-Performance patches for the kernel
-Compiled with i686 against latest gcc
-Stripping
-Prelinking
-Hdparm on install
A little explanation. Stripping is basically removing the debug symbols and other junk information from binaries to make them smaller and hence faster. I would think that most packages would be stripped by default, but I’m not sure. Prelinking is a way to speed up loading of dynamic libraries because there is some overhead with locating these libraries. Hdparm lets you turn on a few optimization flags for your hard drive access (such as DMA). Hdparm is usually include by default by most distributions. Yoper developers openly claim that yes, all these optimizations can be done manually on other distributions. It would take a lot of time and effort, but it can be done. Doing a simple Google search will find excellent resources for the optimizations above.
Conclusion
Yoper is an interesting little distribution with definite speed benefits as we have noted. However, I do have a few complaints about it.
First of all, the default packages is a little strange. The absence of XMMS, K3b, and an office suite is pretty glaring when you consider that almost all users will want to use an office suite and most distributions do provide one. On the other hand, they provide three different web browsers (Mozilla, Konqueror and Epiphany). The CD contains around 640 MB of data which means the developers could squeeze an office suite onto it by removing a few extraneous packages.
Also, Yoper needs to decide where they are taking the distribution. I couldn’t decide whether this distribution is meant for novices or expert Linux users. A perfect example of this is the installation. I’m doubtful if a novice would be able to install Yoper. Some of the installation messages are outright weird and even left me scratching my head for a minute. On the other hand, if the distribution is aimed at an expert, then why doesn’t the install let you choose individual packages (or even groups of packages)? Another thing that bothered me was the installation didn’t ask me where I would like my LILO to be installed. I think most Linux experts would prefer to see that option in the installation.
Yoper’s website does not offer any formal documentation whatsoever (besides a FAQ). In fact the website is one giant message board. They need to polish up their site and put some real documentation so new users can easily learn how to use features such as package management.
These are just a few examples of the quirks that need to be eliminated from future releases. However, Yoper is a worthy distribution and assuming that Yoper developers keep the distribution as fast as it is now and iron out some of the bugs, Yoper will be a distribution to contend with.
About the Author:
Tarun Agnani is a senior in Computer Science at university. He has a internship doing software development at the current moment. When he’s not tinkering with computers (and breaking them), he enjoys pursuing the Rich Inner Life through friends, family, and fun. You can find his website here.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
I’m using yoper linux right now!
It’s a great distro, with most popular packages put into their own apt repository, and supports the popular RPM format as well. I am using Opera on it now, with java (which came preinstalled) and flash (which was easy to install), and listening to music on amaroK. The Beta I’m using has KDE 3.3 as well.
“Network: Onboard 1394 Net Adapter connected directly to the Internet” sweet
anyway, thats a funny distro; Using Slackware’s packages tools with RPM packages.
Appreciate the review. My recent experience with Yoper was a bit different.
I’ve installed a bunch of Linux flavors over the years, but tend to spend most of my time with Slackware. Yoper’s installation seemed too half-baked for novices, but too limiting for experienced users. In my case, I want to place my /usr/local and /home partitions on a second drive. I’d prefer to use fdisk to do that. Yoper doesn’t give me that option. (To be fair, other distros share this failing.)
I’ll second your comments about lack of control over lilo, and the lack of information about what is actually installed.
And the bit about being allowed to use “only” two partitions is nonsense, of course.
Simplifying an installation by eliminating choice is appropriate in some cases, but Yoper really should include an option for a “hands-on” install.
In the end, I was unable to coax Yoper to install in usable form. I tired the Yoper forum, but got irritating lectures suggesting I was obligated to start coding fixes myself.
FWIW, I’ve been using MunjoyLinux for a few weeks (www.munjoylinux.org). This is yet another Debian variation via Knoppix, but it has the best display quality of any distribution I’ve ever used, period. Munjoy is also compiled for 686’s, installs in about 10 minutes, and boots fast. (It’s install routine suffers from the same simplicity as Yoper’s, but has the advantage of making sense and working.) Munjoy is a work-in-progress, and annoyances do show up, but I think it is very much worth checking out.
QUOTE:
Prelinking is a way to speed up loading of dynamic libraries because there is some overhead with locating these libraries.
Well, I sure hope he means locating symbols, not the libraries themselves (as prelink pretty much caches symbol lookup results), as per ftp://people.redhat.com/jakub/prelink/prelink.pdf .
Also gentoo supports prelinking:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/prelink-howto.xml
And always strips packages by default unless you use
RESTRICT=nostrip
inside the ebuild, or add it to your FEATURES= in make.conf
As for optimizations, most likely Gentoo would provide more assuming you configured your make.conf correctly.
Not that I’m saying Gentoo is better, just that it shouldn’t sound like this concept is unique…
-B
Why do all reviews focus some much on installation? That has to be the least important part of any OS. Nearly all Linux distros have installation down to a T. Hell even Debian’s new installer is easier than Windows XP. Although many won’t agree I think OpenBSD and NetBSD’s installers are both easier than the WinXP installer.
OK, I’m confused. Can this distro be installed on a drive that already contains other partitions (i.e., Mandrake, WinXP, swap, and a fat32 data partition)? If so, do I simply have to set up the partitioning myself prior to running the Yoper install? Or does the two partition warning simply mean that the whole distro goes to a single partition of my choosing, with a second partition used for swap?
i got it, i use it on occasion but not often, my only problem is this computer and most likely not Yopers fault, this box has USB ports like crazy, 12 of them 6 are USB-2.0 and other distros kind of choke on em too, so i have to use a boot parameter of yos nousb
I’ve been running it for about 3 weeks or so now. It’s VERY fast (not that Yoper was ever slow, but it’s noticably faster than v1), and it found and correctly set up my Radeon 9600 with dual monitors!! No other distro has done this (Suse 9 came close, but I still had to manually tweak the XF86Config-4 file).
Yoper v2 is very polished, looks great, and comes with probably 80-90% of what the average desktop user will want pre-installed, while providing all the neccesary tools to compile whatever else you may want from scratch.
Codeweaver v3 works perfectly on it (including inserting new menu items, something that’s often failed on other systems, with earlier versions of Codeweavers, so I’m not sure if it’s Yoper-specific, or Codeweaver v3-specific).
Yoper also seems to have cleaned up it’s act as far as customer support and such goes. I was one of their more vocal critics a couple of years ago, but rather than go into past problems, let’s focus on the now: Yoper is a highly polished, desktop ready Linux distro. Try it out & see for yourself!!
The ONLY downside I can find to Yoper isn’t really a downside: A lack of pre-compiled Yoper-specific software. It would be more of a problem if Yoper didn’t provide you with all the tools to compile from source, but they do. If you want something that’s not included as part of the default setup, simply download the source, ./configure, make, and make install. Easy!
I was actually going to write an in depth review for this once I installed it, but instead chose to focus on other projects (I knew it wouldn’t be a secret for too long!).
Seriously… It’s worth your time to check this release out. I’m just surprised that more vendors aren’t tweaking their distro’s as much as Yoper has. It definately has a positive impact on the desktop experience!
There seem to be lots of Linux users who regularly try out different distros. Is this saying something about Linux, i.e. no distro so far has been 100% satisfying or is it that some people actually have a hobby of installing distros?
If it’s the first point, then why don’t they try out something different? No matter what distro you choose, you’re gonna have, more or less, the same software choices and once you’ve got stuff set up, you don’t really need to niggle around in the OS’s underpinnings so all distros are essentially the same.
If it’s the second point, well, aren’t you wasting your time? I mean, installing an OS is hardly the most exciting thing to do, especially now as distros are getting easier and easier to install and are thus less and less involving. If you like to muck about with computers, why not try and learn a new programming language? You’ll actually learn new things and you may get a job out of it
I’m not trolling here, just curious, that’s all.
same reason a man climbs a mountian, “because its there”
i used to be a redhat user until Slackwware got my favour.
its all about choice, what do you get with windows (no choice)..
I used to do this, partly because I wanted to see what each one had to offer (even if I’m happy with one, another might be better), partly for curiosity, and partly for some unidentifiable factor. It’s probably like test driving cars, or something. Even if you find one you like, you might still want to try the others, just, well, because.
I’ve settled down with *mumble*[1] though. I think it’s related to the realization that deep down, all distributions are alike. You can coax them into doing what you want, the only difference is how hard it is.
It’s easy to shape and maintain, even if the initial setup might be more work than just accepting a package from another distro.
[1] Name elided so we won’t go off discussing the OS in question.
Yes, Yoper can be installed next to other distributions. I have it along with Slackware, Conectiva and Xandros. They all use the same swap partition. Yoper, like any other distro, is easiest to install if you prepare a spare partition for it before installation but you may as well use cfdisk during installation.
While you are stuck with two partitions during installation, you can later add more partitions by editing fstab.
It sounds promising, but a minute to boot? My Debian installation that has been pounded on for 2 years and has all sorts of stuff installed boots in 1:14 from Grub to fully loaded KDE.
For a distro that makes such a big deal about speed, a minute plus 2-5 seconds for KDE is decidedly unimpressive.
I’m guessing most of the speed improvements are from prelinking KDE. It does make a big difference for KDE apps. The other optimizations are insignificant for most applications.
It is the elusive search for the “Perfect OS” which unfortunately doesn’t exist. Believe me, if there were multiple flavours of Windows I would have tried them too.
Unless you really have a garbage OS/Distro, I’ve basically come to the conclusion that whatever you’re using is probably the best that you’ll get just because you have already configured it for your needs, a feature a new OS will never have.
I was none too impressed with the first release of Yoper, and with the various issues around it at the time. But now I would urge everybody who might still be weary to not let the past prejudice them agains Yoper of today. It is a good distro.
Installation is a snap, performance very good, and Apt makes management of software easy.
I also think Yoper strikes right balance between simplicity and features.
Take the installer for example: yes, it limits you to one partition, but it does allow a selection of filesystems, unlike many ‘easy distros’ which make choice for you (and that choice is usually ext3, to my dismay). It doesn’t allow piece-by-piece choice of software, but it does have two profiles: desktop and minimal. It is text based, but where it really matters it switches to Sax2 to configure the display.
I don’t think Yoper has any specific focus but it is a good all-purpose distro; do with it what you like! As a desktop, its KDE is a lot more developed than Gnome or XFce4, but they are there. If someone doesn’t want KDE for example, I imagine they could start with Yoper minimal install and then apt-get Ygnome. Want a server? Start with minimal install and again, apt-get what you need. Want a desktop for a new user? I think Yoper would be quite a good choice for a beginner, because it is quite simple to use and run, but without resorting to distro-specific ‘command centre’ or ‘wizards’.
All in all, I think I’m going to keep Yoper. Now I’ll need to get another machine for distro-hopping! (yes, I can be quite happy with my system yet still keep looking around – call it curiosity, call it a hobby… It could be that as someone noted the effort could be better spent elsewhere – but that would be missing the point of having a hobby, wouldn’t it?)
-Performance patches for the kernel
-Compiled with i686 against latest gcc
-Stripping
-Prelinking
-Hdparm on install
Tell me what of those things aren’t being used in normal distros.
Also, they FAKE:
http://www.yoper.com/comparison/desktopcomparison.html
Check that. Not only their benchmarks are biased (ie: “Font Rendering Excellent =3 Good =2 Fair=1” “Menu Intelligence Intuitive =3 Functional = 2 Unreasonable=1” – “measure” that?) but they fake the results.
Look at the “Timing Buffer Cache Reads”. For yoper it’s 1279.23. Other distros get, as maximum, 821.
Those are hdparm results. Reasons why that results is faked:
o The kernel actually auto-sets the DMA, etc if the driver is good. Chances are that the driver for that machine is broken, but these days fedora and others ALSO autosets the DMA.
Then, you’ve comparisons of “used user memory”. Some of those distros use KDE, other use gnome. Suprprisingly, yoper uses less memory than debian, despite of the fact that debian doesn’t installs Xfree or any graphical environment (and since they measure “installation time” and default configurations they must measure the _default_ installation not a tweaked one)
and heck, what parameters did they fgollow then they compare “graphical quality”? Damn, IT’S ALL THE SAME LINUX. So you use prelink? Congratulations, every distro on the planet has already released their versions with it.
Worthless.
> Tell me what of those things aren’t being used in normal distros.
well, quite a few distros do not optimise specifically for i686. Also something the reviewer didn’t mention – Yoper’s kernel includes Con Kolivas’ low latency patches. I admit I do not know how much effect they have on a 2.6.7 kernel, but they are there.
Finally it bears repeating Yoper guys do not claim any patents – just that they’ve done some ground work for you.
I’m a recent Windows convert to SuSe 9.1. I’ve experimented with Linux in it’s various guises for years, but find this newest release from SuSe to be the most polished and integrated Linux desktop I’ve ever used, bar none. I have some questions about Yoper 2, maybe some of you could field them for me:
1) Is YOPER’s boot sequence completely graphical? SuSe is either using the graphical boot patch in 9.1, or they do an extremely effective job of hiding the terminal during boot. Heck, even their shutdown sequence is completely graphical, it’s fantastic.
2) Does YOPER support suspend to disk out of the box? SuSe sort of does — it’ll work, if you change a single setting in a config file from ‘no’ to ‘yes’. No other distro makes it that easy, and it’d be nice to know whether YOPER is similar.
3) What is the multimedia situation like in YOPER 2? This is an area where SuSe falls-down. Loyal SuSe users might find that statement incredulous but, the truth is, other distros like Fedora Core are much better at providing multimedia file support. I am constantly running into file types that I can’t get to play in SuSe (Windows Media files, many MPEG 4-encoded avi’s (certain DiVX and XvID revisions), even certain MPEG 1 or 2 files) and, no matter what RPMs I install to try and get those files playing, nothing works or I get, at best, audio working. In contrast, in Fedora Core 2, media type support was much more comprehensive and far easier to get working — just download a few RPMs and *BAM*, any file I threw at it worked w/o a hitch (all Windows Media, Quicktime, Real Media and MPEG variants worked flawlessly).
Thanks for any responses, I’m really intrigued by Y2! 🙂
xVariable did You actually read the review?
Because some of your questions are pointless…
For SuSe…try Mplayer…
The easiest way to gte some of those “extras” like dvd playing and win32-codecs is here:
http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/xine/
yes, multimedia works great.
I can watch avi mpeg and wmv files, and listen to mp3 ogg and wma files.
just poke around xine’s website. xine. mplayer crashes.
If you mean the question about the graphical boot, I don’t think you understand the nature of the question. The question was *how graphical* is Y2’s boot sequence. IOW, is the terminal sown at all during the boot, or is it concealed at all times.
Regarding your recommendation for MPlayer: Personally I use Xine and Kaffeine. In any case, however, the choice of “middleware” (meaning Xine or MPlayer, sitting between the front-end (Kaffeine/Gxine/Totem/et al) and the supporting codecs (xvid, ffmpeg, lame, libquicktime/openquicktime, Real Player)) is irrelevant. What matters is whether there are RPMs available for the above codecs, and whether they are setup to intelligently support whatever file formats they are supposed to support.
Thanks for your wholly negative and useless response, though, it was really “appreciated”…
Yoper uses the same bootspash system as SuSE
xine and kaffeine and MPlayer are available in Yoper’s apt-repository. Codecs should all be there!
Awesome! I sort of wondered if YOPER was using the same thing as SuSe (which *is* the bootsplash kernel patch?).
Let me commend you on your use of Synaptic as the package manager (here’s hoping a qt version is made), and what sounds like a very complete repository of packages. I was seriously considering giving my money to SuSe, but it may turn-out YOPER will get it. I can’t wait to try your distro out. 🙂
I was able to select each package i wanted from a nice list.
i honestly don’t remember the “option” as it were, but it was there, and presented me with a tree-list of packages and groups they fall under, “development, system tools, multimedia..” etc. but i do believe you’re right, xmms was not there, and neither was an office suite, but a few editors that it provides will work for basic users of word and such. Since this distribution was based around speed and efficiency, that sort of explains the lack of office suite, and is easily apt-get-able for people who require it. I recently installed ut2k4 on the distro just to see performance, and well, basically out of the box, gets same frame rates (+/- 10.. depending..) as direct3d, although some graphics didnt display as they do in d3d.
over all i am pleased, and for now it will remain on my system. im happy with a bleeding kernel, full package support, and general packages i use every day. (xmms, mplayer, firefox, etc..) perhaps boot times can be tweaked, i havent tried yet. i’ve installed fluxbox with no problems, and have a nice/responsive system up in not much time, and.. it seems stable. (?!)
I decided to give Yoper a whirl the other day, skeptical of the speed bragging. Yoper is fast, the bragging is deserved. It’s noticably quicker than any distribution I’ve ever tried with the exception of Gentoo built from Stage 1…they’re about even. Gentoo takes much longer to build and tweak though. I was annoyed with just about everything the author was annoyed with, except for the difficulty of the install. I thought it was quite simple (*cough* two partitions?). A little too simple, but coherent.
It’s nice to have a distribution you can just toss on a spare partition that sets everything up automatically, almost perfectly. The fonts were nice, Konqueror loaded INSTANTLY when before I thought 2 seconds was fast before, it has apt-get and installs everything I throw at it correctly. It detected my nVIDIA card with the SuSE SaX tool perfectly and inserted the module. This is a surprisingly polished Linux/GNU for a beta. Probably one of the best niche distros I’ve tried next to PCLinuxOS 2k4, and GoboLinux, which I also throughly enjoyed.
Yoper booted plain console for me, no bootsplash, but I guess you could set it up to do it. I downloaded an early beta, so maybe it was just broken, and I didn’t do much to see why it wasn’t working.
If you do some poking around on SUSE’s site, you’ll find a link to rpms that’ll install all the codecs you could ever want.
http://packman.links2linux.org/
Yoper totally smokes SUSE speed-wise. I don’t understand why it takes so long to boot for everyone else either…it boots relatively quickly–under 30 seconds on this AMD Duron 650mhz.
anyone got it to boot on a hard drive connected to an adaptec scsi controler?
it asks me to specify a root= before a kernel panic?
thanks
You can’t be too clever if your gentoo/debian-setup takes 10 seconds to start kde. My ancient k6-2 350mhz uses half the time. Not to mention my p4 which is half that time again. Please don’t blame debian and gentoo when the problem is clueless users.
I installed Yoper last night, and will agree with many things the reviewer noted, but will add this. This installation was simple, but it lacked the information needed to make the correct decisions.
What newbies want is information about each stage and the choices that they have to make.Without this information, either on screen or in a separate installation guide. The other thing I discovered was there was no “back” option on many screens. This wasn’t a big issue as the installation was so fast, I could start over again, which I did 4 times, and still had the Yoper up and running quicker than I had Mandrake, Lidranet or Fedora C2.
The first thing I noticed about Yoper was that it was not slow, in-fact it was the fastest I have seen, both Linux and Windows.
As for the application selection, It seems Yoper has taken the Microsoft appoarch of providing an operating system, and then you go an select applications you require. It would be nice to be able to select and have installed at installation application, but this will not stop me using Yoper.
All in all, Yoper seems to be a fast solid system, what more could you ask for.
KiwiPhil – Living in pommieland
I do it because I’m trying to find a disto that works, and that I like.
I’m presently using debian/sid. Works well in many respects but I can’t get xine or mplayer to work correctly. mplayer plays only in slow-motion, and xine only works with the “xshm” parameter – which makes my 1400mhz/384mb linux system play videos worse than a 75mhz/32mb win95 box. Supposedly the problem relates to my older trident driver. But I can’t upgrade, and other distros work just fine with xine.
Other distros have other problems, I guess I’ll just with this for a while.
Is here anyone who have tried Yoper V2 and configuring any PSMCIA Wlan card?
I do it because I’m trying to find a disto that works, and that I like.
I’m presently using debian/sid………
Try Mepis – it’s really very very good!
I just spent a couple of hours grabbing the ISO and installing Yoper, again. Contrary to my experience cited in an earlier post, it did boot successfully this time.
However, it will not stay on my machine.
To emphasize the original review’s criticism of the installation routine, it is both too simplistic for a knowledgable user and too cryptic for a novice. In particular, Yoper frequently eliminates install options, yet compels the user to run through less-than-obvious dialogues to select the only available option. If there is only one option, there is no reason to ask the user to make a choice.
First, the first screen that appears after booting the CD is a Yoper logo and a “boot:” prompt. This screen should tell the user — novice or expert — what to do next. It does not. If only one action can be taken, then this screen should not appear and the action should be taken automatically.
This also applies to the screen that appears if you enter “Return” at the previous screen. You are told to enter “yoper” to start the install. No other options are mentioned. This is bad design. If other options are available, this screen should say so, otherwise it should never appear.
Dumping the user into cfdisk to partion a drive is clearly inappropriate for a novice, and not ideal for an expert who is frustrated by cfdisk’s limitations. Since Yoper limits itself to a large root partition and a swap partition, this partitioning step should be handled automatically.
If the default reiserfs file system is selected, the raw filesystem construction dialogue is displayed and waits for the user to enter “yes”. This kind of cryptic request should never be displayed to a novice. It is also unnecessary to show it to an expert, since the filesystem type has already been selected.
The package selection menu offer two choices, one is numbered as “0001” and the other as “0003”. This kind of sloppiness does not build confidence in that distribution’s attention to detail.
I use an Nvidia-based card and a basic 3-button ps/2 mouse which are succcessfully configured via Sax2 in SUSE 9.1. Yoper’s install detected the Nvidia, but not the mouse. In fact, it detected no mouse. It did not boot to X. When I ran Sax2 manually, no mouse was detected, the mouse cursor did not move, and I had to use the cumbersome tab key to attempt to configure a mouse. This was unsuccessful.
I resorted to using xf86config to build a working, vesa-based, xf86config file. Both X and Sax2 would run after that, but it failed to detect the nvidia (I had to look up the card’s PCI device ID to install it correctly), did not detect my LCD monitor, and never correctly configured the mouse wheel.
And, finally, the timezone dialogue during the install did not give me an option to tell it my machine uses GMT time, and, as a result, insisted upon misconfiguring itself.
Once launched, my intial impression is that the display quality is acceptable, but not outstanding. Windows do not move smoothly on the screen. Initial attempts to run Mozilla (which is not listed in the menu system) are confounded by an unnecessary profile dialogue that indicates a default profile is available and then claims it cannot find it.
In comparison to the distribution it replaced — MunjoyLinux — Yoper’s install is broken; it’s display is second rate, and it’s speed is noticeably slower. Other folks have apparently had different experiences, but I have to conclude that this particular pie needs to go back into the oven.
I’m gonna make a new distro called Yig Mac. Oh, and 500 packages is pretty lame compared to FreeBSD’s 10000+ but whatever.
Hotplug enabled at startup or not? Makes a difference…
Yoper is not designed to attract people wanting 10.000 packages, but then Yoper can have 10.000 packages by using packages from other distros.
Since when does size matter anyhow. Soon Yoper might have 10.000 packages (our buildserver will handle this soon), will that make a real difference? I doubt it, since my targer market does not reallu use more than 500-1000 packages.
complete wlan integration is currently being worked on for release 2.0.1.
The installer is being reworked also for release 2.0.1. This will include more explanations on each step, more choices for powerusers and the ability to add a home partition. A completely new GUI based installer will be available by the end of the year.
some mice are tricky, but 2.0.1 has new routines to fix that.
Yoper is not a replacement for other Linux distro’s. Yoper does not target 5% of the computer market (linux users). Yoper does not compete with any other linux.
I love all Linuxes, that is why I created Yoper. To integrate the best of bread distro features. I also don’t like M$ (90% of the computer users) and as such I will try my best to include the excellent suggestions from the review and the comments into the distro. They will make it even easier to install Yoper (a poll on our site suggests that 90% of people say Yoper was easy to install). Yoper is not designed for the Linux power user, there are plenty of alternatives out there for such a user. The power user might enjoy however that it allows him to get a base system going in no time.
I am glad that so many comments are positive and the positive critizism will be heard and followed. Thanks very much everyone!
Boots to KDE in about 45 seconds for me. Noticed windows and setup lilo accordingly. The KDE desktop install is fairly free of bloat. And you can then choose to add thngs like K3b, xmms, kaffiene, openoffice, etc….
I got on the gentoo trip when they released 1.4 and I have to say that Yoper is right up with gentoo in speed, yet only takes a few minutes to install. The installer is really simple, and lacks choices to avoid confusing new users. And I’m pretty sure its M$ converts Yoper is hoping to get for the majority of its user base. Installing things is easy enough with synaptic, and while the package list is small now, it’s growing. But even advanced users can appreciate the quick installer, and snappiness of the system.
There are a couple of rough spots- the SMP kernel did not work for me so I had to compile my own from yoper-smp source. Some media players are broken by the i686 optimization for some reason. ATI does not have xfree 4.4 drivers, and Sax2 is sometimes not friendly to LCD monitors.
I like Yoper so much, I’m working on turning it into a live CD as well as building Yoper rpm’s. This distro has defintely caught my interest.
-Arkaine
Overclockix developer