Vidalinux(gentoo For Beginners)

[shanenin]

I am a hardened gentoo lover, but know some people do not want to take the time to install it. There is a linux distro called vidalinux, it is heavliy based on gentoo with an anaconda installer. You can have a gentoo like system installed in just a few minutes. It shares gentoos greatest attribute, portage. This makes installing software easy. This leaves more time for playing with your distro. Madpenguin did a very nice review on it. Check it out.

http://madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=3321

[hitest]

I am a hardened gentoo lover, but know some people do not want to take the time to install it. There is a linux distro called vidalinux, it is heavliy based on gentoo with an anaconda installer. You can have a gentoo like system installed in just a few minutes. It shares gentoos greatest attribute, portage. This makes installing software easy. This leaves more time for playing with your distro. Madpenguin did a very nice review on it. Check it out.

http://madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=3321

That looks very interesting shanenin, thanks for the link

Welcome to Besttechie.net; I was hoping you'd log-on one day.

BTW, shanenin is a Linux expert from the old tech tv forum days.

I've used Free BSD before, but, shanenin is very proficient in slackware and gentoo, both are advanced distros.

It's great to see you, man.

[shanenin]

thanks for the welcome :-)

[murtu52]

Good to know that we have at least one more linux expert here, and vidalinux sounds nice.....only problem is that it is commercial....

[shanenin]

they do have a commercial version, but also a free version. They are identical, the only differnece is the free version does not have a couple of programs installed by default. The free version comes with mozilla, not firefox. Firefox is easy to install, one commandl

emerge mozilla-firefox

The paid version comes with the "startbar" by default, with the free version you just need to install it, again one easy command

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge gdesklets-startbar"

then you just need to add what programs you want on it. Below is a link to my desktop using the startbar

http://webpages.charter.net/lindbergfamily/Screenshot.png

[murtu52]

also....how hard would it be to load KDE up instead of Gnome? i'm kinda used to KDE, but the linux distros i've used so far only use KDE so i've had to deal with the problem....so, how would i go about solving this problem?

[shanenin]

you can install kde with one command

emerge kde

this will start the process of compiling about 80 programs from source code. On my athlon xp 2000 system with 512mb of ram this will take about 12 hours. If your system is slower or faster, adjust accordingly.

[iccaros]

do you have ccache installed.. with that my last install of kde took about 4 hours.. most of the kde install is recompiling the same code for diffrent exacutables... ccache sppeds this up by not recompiling the same thing.. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/hand...l?part=2&chap=3

[shanenin]

That is cool, I might have to install that.

[p0ize]

I strongly disagree with Vidalinux. It is a rather horrible Linux distribution. The only good thing about it in my opinion is portage, which is © Gentoo anyway. The main purpose of Gentoo and portage is ‘compiling’ from scratch; it being the major speed daemon of Linux distributions (the closet thing to a BSD system). Portage, being the package manager that compiles everything on demand for high speed optimizations. When you install Gentoo, the install process (depending on the stage chosen) is long and painful for a reason (to some users). It guarantees optimization of your system as you compile the most important part of your system (eg. Kernel).

With VidaLinux, you basically throw all of that away. There are no major customization options (not nearly as many as gentoo; not compiling the whole operating system from scratch, no bootstrapping, etc). What you get, is a pre-compiled binary of the distribution (whether you choose to compile the kernel is up to you, but you wont get the speed of Gentoo). So basically, the only good part of VidaLinux is portage (which they did not code) which compiles everything on demand which wont give you any real speed increments. Why bother? If all you’re going to be doing is using it for compile on demand, than why not get Slackware?

I have used VidaLinux more than once. One of my other gripes is ... what gives, VidaLinux for a price? According to Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman ‘free as in speech, not as in beer’. But that is another story. Slackware would be much better suited if you were to compile from scratch. I personally prefer ArchLinux. It is an i686 optimized distro with, in my opinion, the worlds greatest package manager (pacman).

But everyones entitled to their own opinions.... some people just have the wrong one

Edited March 17, 2005 by p0ize

[shanenin]

With VidaLinux, you basically throw all of that away. There are no major customization options (not nearly as many as gentoo; not compiling the whole operating system from scratch, no bootstrapping, etc). What you get, is a pre-compiled binary of the distribution (whether you choose to compile the kernel is up to you, but you wont get the speed of Gentoo)

If a person chooses to install vidalinux, they can choose bianaries that are compiled directly for their processesor. In my case, my base system, kernel, and gnome are all compiled to run best for an athlon xp type processor; that seams very optimized. In all honesty, I dought those optimizations over a i386 optimized system are a whole lot faster for daya to day use. Slackware is only i368 optimized and it seems to be a very fast distro(no benchmarks to back that up).

So basically, the only good part of VidaLinux is portage (which they did not code) which compiles everything on demand which wont give you any real speed increments. Why bother? If all you’re going to be doing is using it for compile on demand, than why not get Slackware?

When I installed gentoo for the first time it was entirely because I wanted portage, I could care less about the optimizations. Portage is wonderful, and vidalinux did a nice job of including it. Easy pachage installation is what most new linux users want. Vidalinux also uses gentoos init tools(and most every other tool). rc-update is a very easy way to change you boot process. I have not used any other distro that makes changing your init scripts so easy.

Why bother? If all you’re going to be doing is using it for compile on demand, than why not get Slackware?

slackware does not gracefully download and compile all of your programs, including patching, with one easy command. It is very satisfying to watch portage build kde from nothing with one easy step.

VidaLinux for a price?

there is a free version of vidalinux that is as good as the paid version. I am not a big GNU person, but I think it specifically says it is ok to sell your software for profit.

[jcl]

In all honesty, I dought those optimizations over a i386 optimized system are a whole lot faster for daya to day use. Slackware is only i368 optimized and it seems to be a very fast distro(no benchmarks to back that up).

You're right, it doesn't make much difference. In most cases it's optimizing the idle loop. You spend hours applying heavy optimizations to programs that aren't CPU-bound in the first place. It may shave a few seconds off of some operations but odds are the time saves will be less than the time spent building the software.

There are of course exceptions, but they're few enough that you can handle them individually. Which you probably want to do anyway. There is no single set of CFLAGS that will produce ideal results for all packages. In fact the effects of the various flags are almost random for arbitrary packages. There is a lot of software that performs better with -O2 than -O3, some that performs better with -O than either -O2 or -O3, and -Os is often competitive with -O2 and may produce better global performance. Heck, I've found a few packages that run a bit faster (~2%) with debugging code for mysterious reasons.

[p0ize]

If a person chooses to install vidalinux, they can choose bianaries that are compiled directly for their processesor. In my case, my base system, kernel, and gnome are all compiled to run best for an athlon xp type processor; that seams very optimized. In all honesty, I dought those optimizations over a i386 optimized system are a whole lot faster for daya to day use. Slackware is only i368 optimized and it seems to be a very fast distro(no benchmarks to back that up).

No. They can choose precompiled binaries, compiled on someone elses computer. The main attractions of gentoo is portage and the CFLAGS/USE allowing the greatest optimization. Vidalinux strips you, pretty much, of the cflag optimization, meaning the binaries you install, are

a) compiled by someone else (not optimized)

missing cflags (but then again vidalinux butchers that great feature gentoo has)

When I installed gentoo for the first time it was entirely because I wanted portage, I could care less about the optimizations. Portage is wonderful, and vidalinux did a nice job of including it. Easy pachage installation is what most new linux users want. Vidalinux also uses gentoos init tools(and most every other tool). rc-update is a very easy way to change you boot process. I have not used any other distro that makes changing your init scripts so easy.

Im sorry but I disagree. The butchering of CLFAGS/USE renders portage useless imo.

slackware does not gracefully download and compile all of your programs, including patching, with one easy command. It is very satisfying to watch portage build kde from nothing with one easy step.

Slackware assumes you know what you're doing, if you need a dependency, you get it. Its package manager is actually prefered by hard-core programmers for ease of use and flexibilty.

there is a free version of vidalinux that is as good as the paid version. I am not a big GNU person, but I think it specifically says it is ok to sell your software for profit

Yes, it does say you can sell your software for any price, so long as the source is made available, but then its free as in beer, not as in speech. If I wanted to buy an OS, it would be SuSE or Mandrake so I could sell it to a friend and turn a profit

[EDIT] the joke of selling free software was meant to invoke irony. Its a joke.

Edited March 23, 2005 by p0ize

[jcl]

This is wonderful. If I'm not mistaken this the first distro war we've had on BT. And what a surprise, Gentoo is involved. Seriously, I didn't see that coming. Really. If I had a camera I'd post a picture of my expresion of wonderment. It looks a bit like this: 8-/

I honestly absolutely never would have expected this.

[p0ize]

http://funroll-loops.org/