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I have been using Underground desktop based on Arch for about 2 months and have started having wired problems with it. It has gotten to the point where I can't install any new software without getting some kind of error. The system becomes un responsive and unusable. I decided last night to return to vector linux based on slackware. Has anybody had any bad experiances with Vector linux? I had problems in the past where it would not find my onboard nic even though lsmod shows it's loaded. What are your thoughts on this distro VECTOR?

A few months ago I ran Vector on an old 450 MHz AMD K6 machine I have sitting here in my room, it worked pretty well, but Slackware was just too much work for me. One thing I like to do is head over to kde-apps.org and grab something cool that has appeared and try it out, and I want to be able to do so in line 5 mins. I don't want to sit there and manually fulfill dependencies, I like package managers that do that dependency resolution for me.

Personally I use SUSE 10, which uses RPM, a lot of people associate RPM with "RPM hell", but I've never had that problem for a long time, so I really don't have a problem with RPM, works very well, and I can just use apt4rpm, yum or some other wrapper, as people can use apt-get and smart for dpkg.

If you like Slackware, I'm sure that Vector would fit you very well, I'm not that much into Slackware, so it's mostly up to yourself.

My favored free software operating systems (/ distributions) are SUSE Linux, Mandriva Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

dookiesmack wrote:What are your thoughts on this distro VECTOR?

Personally, I've never tried Vector. Mad Penguin loves it. He gave it a great review http://madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=6190 recently.

I have recently tried Slackware. It is hard to beat the combination of Slackware, Slackbook, and the Slackware forum at Linuxquestions.org. I have solved every issue I have faced so far, and only posted one question to the forum at Linuxquestions.org. Most of my questions are already answered by other posts. For me staying current is not important. For me learning command line and configuration files is really interesting to me. For me I don't need to install a lot of extra packages outside of the basic install and a few things from the /extras directory on Disk #2.

If you want more GUI configuration tools then Vector sounds like the way to go, but if you were already running Arch, why not go straight Slackware since you are already used to working in the CLI.

There are also some great Slackware guys who hang out in this forum too.


mowestusa

mowestusa wrote: If you want more GUI configuration tools then Vector sounds like the way to go, but if you were already running Arch, why not go straight Slackware since you are already used to working in the CLI.

There are also some great Slackware guys who hang out in this forum too.

I have to agree... this is where I'm coming from (Arch) and will most likely move to (Slackware). My learning with Arch has certainly made Slackware easy for me to use.

I don't know that I'm planning to distro-hop, but the "bleeding-edgeness" of arch is becoming a major PITA. I don't mind putting work into something to solve a problem, but I really don't like having to re-solve that same problem a week later because something I upgraded broke my work. I'm not particularly interested in bleeding edge - I'm far more into current-edge and stability.

Still, it's hard to imagine liking something else more than I like most of Arch right now.

I have vector 5.0 soho on one of my spare HD's because it was the only disto which was able to handle Unreal Tournament 2k3/4 with the default install (though I had to manually install the nvidia drivers, of course). The installer is fairly straightfoward. It comes with 'vasm' which is a graphical admin tool; its okay for tasks like resetting the password but its far inferior when compared to, say, yast. (Don't take this as an endorsement of suse though ). The 'package management', if you can call it that, is nothing to write home about. overall its a decent distro, but I say go for straight slackware if you have the time to configure it. <mandatory personal OS preference plug>Or freebsd, try that too.</plug>

thetza wrote:It comes with 'vasm' which is a graphical admin tool; its okay for tasks like resetting the password but its far inferior when compared to, say, yast. (Don't take this as an endorsement of suse though ).

[Joke] Hahaha, close call huh dude, almost caught ya with your pants down over there! [/Joke]

thetza wrote:<mandatory personal OS preference plug>Or freebsd, try that too.</plug>

Oh yeah man, FreeBSD is great! Version 6.1 is coming out in about 20 days, some good new stuff should be in here. I heard a little birdie singing about Xen support in FreeBSD for 32-bit x86.

Tsuroerusu wrote:

thetza wrote:<mandatory personal OS preference plug>Or freebsd, try that too.</plug>

Oh yeah man, FreeBSD is great! Version 6.1 is coming out in about 20 days, some good new stuff should be in here. I heard a little birdie singing about Xen support in FreeBSD for 32-bit x86.

I've noticed some excitement over the bsd's. I have to admit that after listening to the well done bsdtalk podcast it sound interesting, but what compeling reason is there to use a bsd over Slackware. It sounds like for the desktop bsd is even further away than Linux as far as making things work, especially multimedia. Are you guys just excited about bsd on the server? Server work seems to be the area where I'm going to be using Linux the most for myself.

mowestusa

mowestusa wrote:I've noticed some excitement over the bsd's. I have to admit that after listening to the well done bsdtalk podcast it sound interesting, but what compeling reason is there to use a bsd over Slackware. It sounds like for the desktop bsd is even further away than Linux as far as making things work, especially multimedia. Are you guys just excited about bsd on the server? Server work seems to be the area where I'm going to be using Linux the most for myself.

You'll not be very happy with BSD if you're expecting it to be a modern desktop.

I put FreeBSD on my server and was impressed at the simplicity and power, but I just don't have the time to learn a new system. If you're looking for a good server OS, I'd definitely try BSD. Take the time to learn it a little and you'll like it.

Gomer_X wrote:You'll not be very happy with BSD if you're expecting it to be a modern desktop.

I put FreeBSD on my server and was impressed at the simplicity and power, but I just don't have the time to learn a new system. If you're looking for a good server OS, I'd definitely try BSD. Take the time to learn it a little and you'll like it.

I feel like I'm in the same boat. I wouldn't look at the BSD for a desktop, but at the same time they seem different enough that I don't know if I want to take the time to learn another OS. Slackware, seems to be simple, powerful, and the knowledge I gain from administing Slack can be used with other Linux distros. I have enough trouble when I switch between Slack and a System V Debian system. So even in Linux there are enough difference to make things confusing at times. O, to be young, in school, free of family responsiblities, and paying the bills, so that I could spend more time being a geek.

mowestusa

mowestusa wrote:O, to be young, in school, free of family responsiblities, and paying the bills, so that I could spend more time being a geek.

mowestusa

Truer words were never spoken (typed?).

Snarkout wrote:

mowestusa wrote:O, to be young, in school, free of family responsiblities, and paying the bills, so that I could spend more time being a geek.

mowestusa

Truer words were never spoken (typed?).

Amen, brothers!

mowestusa wrote:I've noticed some excitement over the bsd's. I have to admit that after listening to the well done bsdtalk podcast it sound interesting, but what compeling reason is there to use a bsd over Slackware.

Well it's really a personal choice, what I like about FreeBSD is their package management system(s), for example, even if you install binary packages of multimedia stuff, you never get a crippled pacakge, and if it doesn't have a feature you need, you just remove it and go compile it through the ports system. Of course you can do that with Arch Linux as well, I just found FreeBSD much eaisier to get into. Another thing that's great about FreeBSD is the documentation, like Gentoo has great documentation, so does FreeBSD.

mowestusa wrote:It sounds like for the desktop bsd is even further away than Linux as far as making things work, especially multimedia.

Well, it depends, NVIDIA has been kind enough to make 3D drivers for FreeBSD, as they do with Linux, so in that area, we're even. FreeBSD runs the same Xorg system as Linux does, so MPlayer, Xine, VLC, KDE, GNOME etc. etc. all work great. Sound support is not bad, it's ALSA, but OSS (Which I think Linc would applaud), all the modules are included, so say I wanted my Creative Soundblaster 5.1 Live to work, I just do this: kload snd_emu10k
I don't see any drawback in terms of multimedia on FreeBSD, it works very well. The ONLY problem I have, and it's not really FreeBSD's fault, is that Java is such a freaking pain in the ass to deal with, because to get Sun's Java to work, you need to go through their source agreement, patch it and compile it (Which the ports system will do for you), and sometimes it doesn't work that well..... Java in general is a pain in the ass on BSD, if you want Sun's Java that is.

mowestusa wrote:I feel like I'm in the same boat. I wouldn't look at the BSD for a desktop, but at the same time they seem different enough that I don't know if I want to take the time to learn another OS. Slackware, seems to be simple, powerful, and the knowledge I gain from administing Slack can be used with other Linux distros. I have enough trouble when I switch between Slack and a System V Debian system. So even in Linux there are enough difference to make things confusing at times. O, to be young, in school, free of family responsiblities, and paying the bills, so that I could spend more time being a geek.

FreeBSD is really not that difficult to learn, I'm pretty good at Gentoo and FreeBSD really was a breezy to get running, great, simple and straight documentation. If you wanna stick with Linux, because you don't feel comfortable going with the daemon, I wouldn't hesistate in recommending you going to Slack a little bit!

mowestusa wrote:Are you guys just excited about bsd on the server? Server work seems to be the area where I'm going to be using Linux the most for myself.

I like FreeBSD as a desktop OS, but it's, of course, also great for servers, that is actually what it originally was made to do, so it's prime time for servers.

Gomer_X wrote:You'll not be very happy with BSD if you're expecting it to be a modern desktop.

Well, I ran FreeBSD for a little while and except for the Java part and some issues with Macromedia's flash plugin, which I described above, everything I'm used to do in Linux, I could do on FreeBSD. FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility layer so you can run Linux programs on it, such as Skype and such.

Gomer_X wrote:I put FreeBSD on my server and was impressed at the simplicity and power, but I just don't have the time to learn a new system. If you're looking for a good server OS, I'd definitely try BSD. Take the time to learn it a little and you'll like it.

I agree with that, although if you follow the FreeBSD Handbook in the beginning it's actually very easy to learn. For me personally, FreeBSD is eaisier to learn than Slackware.

Snarkout wrote:

mowestusa wrote:O, to be young, in school, free of family responsiblities, and paying the bills, so that I could spend more time being a geek.

mowestusa

Truer words were never spoken (typed?).

I agree with that, luckily for me, I'm pretty much still at that stage.

mowestusa wrote: what compeling reason is there to use a bsd over Slackware.

FreeBSD ports. All 13000+ packages are available as binaries or source through a well managed collection. I have almost forgotten how to install software normally because of it. (thats a good thing I guess). NetBSD's pkgsrc is just as good, but fewer (~5000) ports.

Gomer_X wrote: You'll not be very happy with BSD if you're expecting it to be a modern desktop.

Are you sure? BSD can run any software linux can (excluding obvious linux-only utilities and that sort of thing). I guess someone needs to define what a 'modern desktop' is. If it means a frilly eye-candy filled bloated 9gb distro like suse, I hope BSD never achieves it. (Tsuroerusu: zing!!!)

thetza wrote:FreeBSD ports. All 13000+ packages are available as binaries or source through a well managed collection. I have almost forgotten how to install software normally because of it. (thats a good thing I guess). NetBSD's pkgsrc is just as good, but fewer (~5000) ports.

Interesting, does the ports system do dependency checking? If so, maybe the better question is why would you use a BSD over Debian with apt-get? What about boot speed and system speed once it is running? I guess that is what I have been enjoying on Slack, old hardware runs snappy and quick boots to command prompt.

Final question for thetza, what OS do you run most often and why? This is the million dollar question for those of us who have wives who believe we already spend too much time in front of the computers.

mowestusa