Vidalinux 1.0 Review

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***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.

 

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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".

 

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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.*********

 

[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.